Book on WWII Correspondent Robert L. Sherrod Now Available

According to the Washington Post, Robert L. Sherrod’s stories of the Pacific theater of World War II were “some of the most vivid accounts of men at war ever produced by an American journalist.” Now, for the first time, award-winning author Ray E. Boomhower tells the story of the journalist in Dispatches from the Pacific:The World War II Reporting of Robert L. Sherrod, an intimate account of the war and the journalists who risked their lives to cover it, recently published by Indiana University Press.

In the fall of 1943, armed with only his notebooks and pencils, Time and Life correspondent Robert L. Sherrod leapt from the safety of a landing craft and waded through neck-deep water and a hail of bullets to reach the shores of the Tarawa Atoll with the US Marine Corps. Living shoulder to shoulder with the marines, Sherrod chronicled combat and the marines’ day-to-day struggles as they leapfrogged across the Central Pacific, battling the Japanese on Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. While the marines courageously and doggedly confronted an enemy that at times seemed invincible, those left behind on the American home front desperately scanned Sherrod’s columns for news of their loved ones.

“Sherrod’s dispatches to Time and Life magazines brought America’s bloodiest war to a sometimes unknowing and complacent home front,” explains James H. Madison, author of Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys,“Ray Boomhower’s deeply researched and superbly written book makes clear why Sherrod was one of American’s greatest reporters and why his work rings true today.

“Boomhower explores World War II through the light of an extraordinary individual with fresh, sobering insights. Boomhower succeeds again with the saga of Time correspondent Robert Sherrod,” writes Dan Carpenter, freelance writer and former columnist at the Indianapolis Star.