Richard Tregaskis

Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam

Ray E. Boomhower

• Editorial: High Road Books
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780826362896
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Military Biographies

In the late summer of 1942, more than ten thousand members of the First Marine Division held a tenuous toehold on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal. As American marines battled Japanese forces for control of the island, they were joined by war correspondent Richard Tregaskis. Tregaskis was one of only two civilian reporters to land and stay with the marines, and in his notebook he captured the daily and nightly terrors faced by American forces in one of World War II's most legendary battles—and it served as the premise for his bestselling book, Guadalcanal Diary. One of the most distinguished combat reporters to cover World War II, Tregaskis later reported on Cold War conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. In 1964 the Overseas Press Club recognized his first-person reporting under hazardous circumstances by awarding him its George Polk Award for his book Vietnam Diary. Boomhower's riveting book is the first to tell Tregaskis's gripping life story, concentrating on his intrepid reporting experiences during World War II and his fascination with war and its effect on the men who fought it.

1

A CRUSADE FOR IDEALS AND SURVIVAL

The manuscript came into the offices of the International News Service, 235 East Forty-Fifth Street, New York, without fanfare in early November 1942. It had made quite a journey. The pages had been transported from Fleet Headquarters in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, via airmail from a young INS reporter, Richard Tregaskis. For the previous two months, Tregaskis had been in the Southwest Pacific on a little-known island in the Solomons named Guadalcanal, accompanying the approximately eleven thousand men of the First Marine Division who stormed the beaches there on August 7, 1942. The landing marked America’s first use of ground troops in a major offensive against the Japanese Empire. Tregaskis’s dedication to his job during his time on Guadalcanal, however, had impressed the marines’ commander, Gen. Alexander Vandegrift. The general recalled that Tregaskis seemed to be everywhere, and the information he acquired was “factual and not a canned hand-out.” Vandegrift especially remembered that during the height of the fighting for what came to be known as Edson’s Ridge, he could hear through the darkness the sound of a typewriter clacking away. “I asked who could be writing at this time when he could not possibly see the paper,” noted Vandegrift. “Dick spoke up, ‘It’s me, General, I want to get this down while I am still able. Don’t worry about my seeing, I am using the touch system.’”¹

On November 6, Barry Faris, INS editor-in-chief, wrote Tregaskis that his manuscript—with information so secret that military censors in the U.S. Navy offices at Pearl Harbor had locked away the reporter’s notebooks and big, black diary in a safe every night after he had finished working on his story during the day—had arrived that morning. Faris turned the pages over to Ward Greene, executive editor of King Features, owned and operated, as was INS, by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Faris wrote that Greene would make every attempt to get Tregaskis’s manuscript accepted by a book publisher and subsequently serialized in magazines. “I did not have a chance to read it thoroughly as I would have liked,” Faris informed Tregaskis, who would be splitting the revenue from the book fifty-fifty with his employer, “but from what I did see I think you did a magnificent job on it.”²

One person who did take the time to read Tregaskis’s writing from beginning to end was Bennett Cerf, cofounder with his friend Donald Klopfer of the New York publishing firm Random House. Greene had distributed copies of the manuscript to nine publishers and asked them to bid for the opportunity to publish the book, a method “that had never been done before,” Cerf noted. Just the day before he received Tregaskis’s text, Cerf had been talking with his colleagues that the first book that came out about Guadalcanal would “be a knockout because Guadalcanal marked the turning of the tide” in the war in the Pacific, which had been going badly for the Allies since the Japanese had bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, 1941. As the publisher noted, “the dictators were ready and the liberty-loving people were caught unprepared.”³

Cerf received the manuscript from King Features on November 11, took it home with him, read it that night, called Greene at nine the next morning, and told him, “I’ve got to have this book.” A pleased Cerf related years later that Random House had signed up to publish the young reporter’s work before “any of the other eight publishers had even started reading it.” His premonition that the American public would be interested in learning more about the marines and their pitched battles with the enemy on a remote island thousands of miles away turned out to be accurate. Rushed into print on January 18, 1943, Guadalcanal Diary became a bestseller and the first Random House book to sell more than a hundred thousand copies. Critic John Chamberlain of the New York Times wrote that Tregaskis’s book served as “a tonic for the war-weary on the homefront,” showing to the Japanese and those who doubted America’s resolve that a country “doesn’t necessarily have to love war in order to fight it.”⁴

Although an unknown in the publishing world, Tregaskis had already made a name for himself with his employers at INS and the other correspondents who had followed American forces into battle during the early desperate days of the fighting in the Pacific. Before he landed with the marines on Guadalcanal, Tregaskis had been on the scene and had written dispatches for INS member newspapers about some of the main turning points for the American navy, including witnessing from a nearby cruiser Lt. Col. James Doolittle leading his force of army B-25 bombers off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) to bomb Tokyo on April 18, 1942. Confronted by reporters three days later about sketchy information they had received about the U.S. mission, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had blithely said that it had originated from a secret airplane base in the Himalayas at Shangri-La, the fictional Tibetan utopia of James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Asked to confirm Japanese reports that enemy aircraft had bombed Tokyo, Roosevelt, pleased with the results of the raid, refused to elaborate, saying only that he was “depending on Japanese reports very largely.” Because of wartime censorship, Tregaskis’s dispatches about the daring mission—called by a navy admiral “one of the most courageous deeds in all military history”—were not published in American newspapers until a year later.⁵

After the Doolittle Raid, Tregaskis had boarded the Hornet and remained with the carrier’s officers and enlisted men as they attempted but missed out on joining the other American carriers at the Battle of the Coral Sea in early May 1942. He remained on the Hornet for its next foray into the Pacific and saw the carrier’s pilots (airedales in naval parlance) take off from its wooden flight deck to seek further revenge for Pearl Harbor against Japanese carriers at the Battle of Midway, a smashing victory for the U.S. Pacific Fleet. While on the Hornet before the crucial battle, Tregaskis shared with an engineering officer “an ironic ditty” he had written celebrating that during action, an engineer would be “more or less imprisoned deep within the intestines of a ship,” because all hatches had to be securely shut to ensure watertight integrity. Tregaskis’s creation read, “The engineer need have no fear / He has no cause for frowning; / He’s locked in a well, / Far from bomber and shell, / And his only worry, is drowning.” The engineer read the verse, looked at the correspondent seriously, and added, “Or being burned to death by steam.” Tregaskis noted that the crewman had offered the extra verse in “such a matter of fact way that it brought home a striking point: that to him such hazards as being drowned or burned to death were simple matters of course.”⁶

In his daily interactions with the ship’s crew during routine operations and under fire, Tregaskis came to learn more about their attitudes about war and death, which he discovered were “very sane” and matter of fact, as each man might have his life ended any day at sea, either by the enemy’s doing or by routine accidents. “I had seen some of our fliers virtually drunk with excitement immediately after their first experience in the maelstrom of actual combat,” Tregaskis recalled. “But I was to find that such oft-repeated matters as being locked below decks while there was action above, or sailing through waters thick with submarines, or witnessing accidents, or losing one’s best friend in battle, can become routine when repeated often enough.” After Midway, in which a number of Hornet pilots had been killed, including every member of Torpedo Squadron 8 (VT-8) except for one man, Ens. George Gay, Tregaskis had been startled when gathered for dinner that nobody mentioned the empty chairs at the table. Instead, the conversation “revolved around the usual unimportant matters. But when I reflected on the matter, I could see that silence was the sensible approach.”⁷

Covering the Doolittle Raid and Midway represented an impressive achievement for an inexperienced war correspondent hired by the INS shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Tregaskis had also just learned from his doctor that he suffered from diabetes (a family illness) and had been turned down for service in the war for being nearsighted and a hair too tall for the military’s height limit of six feet five inches. Working on the late shift on the rewrite desk at INS’s New York office, Tregaskis had grown so despondent about his failed contribution to the war effort that he even contemplated taking his own life. He rallied, however, and excitedly took to his assignment as an INS war correspondent covering Pacific Fleet operations. After all, Tregaskis reflected, the closer he came to “getting killed in this career, the better my story would be, if I survived.”⁸

From the Pacific to Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, and back to the Pacific, Tregaskis followed the troops, paying the penalty many others paid in the war. “I gave that effort a lot of my own blood and I didn’t hold back when it came to risking my neck to do what I was supposed to do,” he recalled. In doing so, Tregaskis discovered that he possessed an innate affinity for covering combat, writing his sister Madeline shortly after he had finished his Guadalcanal book that it was funny the way “this war business hits you, after you’ve been meddling around with it for a while. Action, and particularly some new variety of action, gets to be like a drug. You feel let down without it and with it you feel a sort of unhealthy excitement. And frightening—shooting at people and that sort of thing—comes to have a compelling interest, although you’re fully aware of the unpleasantness of it.” He even began to look forward to the next assignment, hating to miss any upcoming big battle, even if he had an opportunity to return to his wife, Marian, and his family.⁹

Journalism and adventure had been a big part of Tregaskis’s life growing up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Born on November 28, 1916, he was the second child and first son of Archibald and Maude M. Osterman Tregaskis. Maude, whose family came from Germany and included a long line of scholars and teachers, said that her children were both “excellent students and stood at the head of their classes each month with very few exceptions. They were invited to all the important social functions in our town, and were popular with their classmates and friends.” Tregaskis’s father had been born in Falmouth in the county of Cornwall in England but had numerous relatives in and around New York City and became a U.S. citizen on September 13, 1906; he married Maude on November 24, 1910. He made his living as head of the editorial department for the Singer Manufacturing Company, which produced Singer sewing machines in a factory on Elizabeth’s outskirts. The senior Tregaskis earned a salary high enough to join the local country club. After just one visit, however, the gregarious Archibald resigned because of “what he considered excessive formality,” Maude remembered. “I imagine it was from him that Dick inherited his dislike for the overly-formal.” She, however, retained her membership so that her children could use the club’s tennis courts, “which were excellent,” and she enrolled them in the club’s dancing class taught by a Miss Florence. While Madeline loved attending the classes, Richard, perhaps put off by the formality of wearing white gloves and bowing to his teacher before each class began, balked at attending and refused to return after just six sessions. Maude took advantage of being so close to New York City, just twenty miles away, and took her children on trips to the city’s many cultural institutions, including the Bronx Zoo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Natural History. “They became quite well oriented in the latter building, and finally I would wait for them to explore at will whatever they wished to see, while I sat comfortable and waited,” Maude recounted. “By that time I am sure I knew every exhibit in the place, starting with the tremendous war canoe on the main floor. It was really a wonderful education for children.”¹⁰

As a boy, the young Tregaskis had been a keen reader, drawn, he remembered, to “many warlike sagas of the past,” including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table; Spain’s legendary El Cid; the Chevalier de Bayard, who came to be known as “the knight without fear and beyond reproach”; and the Scandinavian hero Beowulf and his battle against the monster Grendel. All these characters, Tregaskis noted, were “brave men at war for ideals in the past. As a schoolboy, always bigger than the others of my age, I had resented and done battle with the bullies who picked on smaller boys.” As he grew older, Tregaskis turned his attention to stories from what was then known as the Great War, including a book that might have influenced his future work using the diary format for his war writings. He read War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator, the day-to-day journal of a then unnamed American fighter pilot serving with the Royal Air Force (Tregaskis later learned the pilot’s name, John MacGavock Grider). Another favorite of his was Count Luckner the Sea Devil, published in 1927 and written by famed world traveler Lowell Thomas. The book examined the escapades of Count Felix von Luckner, who prowled the Pacific during the war in an armed sailing ship, the Seeadler (“Sea Eagle”), surprising and capturing Allied merchant craft. Tregaskis’s literary tastes matured, and he perused such classics as the Greek epic poems of Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey), Herodotus’s Histories, and Arrian’s work on the campaigns of Alexander the Great. He also found time for a few hobbies, including hunting, fishing, and rock collecting. Maude noted that her son’s bedroom “abounded with samples of rocks, some donated by friends, and others obtained the hard way—by scouting and searching.” While these pursuits may have faded from his interest over the years, one remained a lifelong passion: swimming. “We bought a small cottage at the shore when he was about seven,” Maude recalled, “and every summer he and his sister practically lived in the water, and both became excellent swimmers.”¹¹

Tregaskis’s interest in journalism started at the age of fifteen. He attended two private preparatory institutions in the area, the Peddie and Pingry schools. Tregaskis helped his parents, strapped for cash due to the Great Depression and Archibald’s poor health due to his diabetes, by paying for his education through winning academic scholarships, working as a student waiter, and writing short articles about sports and other school events for newspapers in New York City; Newark and Trenton, New Jersey; and Philadelphia. He got more of his articles into print, and made extra money, by using aliases, including “Coppy Wright.” Receiving scholarships from such groups as the Harvard Club of New Jersey, in 1934 Tregaskis was able to accept admission to the freshman class at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Recommending Tregaskis for the club’s $300 scholarship, a former neighbor and friend of his father’s, John Heine, described the young man as possessing “a high order of intelligence and exceptional qualifications. He is thoroughly reliable and honorable, industrious, perseverant and physically sound. He has a likable, clean-cut and pleasant personality, is well balanced and possessed of a driving force to get ahead.”¹²

Tregaskis needed that “driving force” during his years at Harvard. It was a time in America, reflected another member of the class of 1938, historian and political insider Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., when if students wanted a sandwich, they had to use a knife to cut a slice of bread from a loaf, as presliced bread had not yet appeared; men wore hats, “gray felt in winter, soft panama in summer”; and those wishing to write a letter had to fill their fountain pens from inkwells, as ballpoint pens were not yet widely available. Haircuts cost fifty cents, newspapers were two cents, attending an afternoon movie set a student back a quarter, and five-and-ten-cent stores, Schlesinger pointed out, “sold things for five and ten cents.” Socks were held up by garters, and suits came with a jacket, vest, and two pairs of trousers. The pants were equipped with buttons, not zippers, recalled Schlesinger. Zippers did not become standard issue until the late 1930s and did not always function as they should, said Schlesinger, “thereby sometimes causing acute embarrassment on dates.”¹³

The class of 1938 included names familiar to anyone interested in twentieth-century American history: Roosevelt (John and Kermit), Kennedy (Joseph Jr.), and Rockefeller (David) among them. Theodore H. White, who later achieved fame as a political journalist and author of The Making of the President series, entered Harvard the same year as Tregaskis as a scholarship student from Boston. White remembered squatting on the floor of the Freshman Union with the rest of his classmates to hear James B. Conant, the relatively new university president, tell them, “If you call everyone to the right of you a Bourbon [a reactionary] and everyone to the left of you a Communist, you’ll get nothing out of Harvard.” White also noted that while he attended Harvard, students organized “a neat system of classification,” which broke down into three groups. He belonged to the “meatballs,” day or scholarship students, usually Irish, Jewish, and Italian young men from Greater Boston, attending Harvard “not to enjoy the games, the girls, the burlesque shows of the Old Howard,” but to get the vaunted badge of a Harvard degree that would lead to a job “in some bureaucracy, in some institution, in some school, laboratory, university or law firm.” Those in the “white m...

Índice

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction. “A Living Nightmare”
• 1. A Crusade for Ideals and Survival
• 2. Wartime in Paradise
• 3. Reporting from Shangri-La
• 4. The Correspondent and the “Fighting Lady”
• 5. “The Danger of Sudden Death”
• 6. “The Most Intense Excitement in the World”
• 7. Operation Shoestring
• 8. The Canal
• 9. The Reporter and the Raiders
• 10. Guadalcanal Diary
• 11. Operation Cleanslate
• 12. Sicily: Gateway to a Continent
• 13. “A Grotesque Apparition”
• 14. Charlemagne’s City
• 15. Superfortress Number 688
• 16. “the glories of peace”
• 17. “Something Dangerous and New, and Strange”
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index