A Shooting War: Margaret Bourke-White & Richard Tregaskis

Life magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White had undergone a nerve-racking day near the front lines dodging enemy shells that whooshed into the surrounding hillsides and whistled over the roads in the Italian countryside about two hours outside of Naples in November 1943.

That evening Bourke-White returned to the Thirty-Eighth Evacuation Field Hospital, set up near the hills bordering Cassino Valley, to continue her work photographing the heroic doctors and nurses who cared for the badly wounded American soldiers.

One of the hospital staff expressed surprise at seeing her on her feet and walking, saying, “We expected to see you about now, but we thought they would be bringing you on a stretcher.” Asking what he meant, Bourke-White learned that a well-known war correspondent had been brought in wounded to the field hospital just a few hours ago.

Curious who the journalist might be, Bourke-White went over to the new patient’s bedside and discovered that it was her colleague, Richard Tregaskis, the author of the best-selling book Guadalcanal Diary. Tregaskis had been brought in with a serious skull wound nearly identical to one she had previously witnessed and photographed, and the reporter had been operated on by the same doctor, Major William R. Pitts of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Pitts had carefully removed approximately twelve bone fragments from Tregaskis’s brain, driven in there by shrapnel that had penetrated the front of his helmet. Visiting Tregaskis, Bourke-White remembered that she had joked to the lanky International News Service reporter: “I suppose you don’t have to be six foot six to reach up and stop a shell, but probably it helps.”

Hearing Bourke-White's remark, Pitts had chimed in to claim that the one thing that had helped Tregaskis most was the fact that he had “a scalp like a bulldog—all corrugated. It made a sweet closing, sort of fell together.”

As for Tregaskis, robbed for a time of his speech and suffering from partial paralysis along the right side of his body, he could only remember that Bourke-White snapped some photographs of him lying in his cot, his head swaddled in white bandages. 

“She wanted me to smile and I tried several times, but the right side of my mouth resisted,” he said. “Something like a grin resulted, but it felt lopsided, and the eyes were out of control.”

Just two months later, the journalists met again. They ran into each other at a North Africa airport awaiting a plane that would carry them to the United States. Tregaskis had made a remarkable recovery from the wound he received on the afternoon of November 22 while observing U.S. Rangers battling German forces for control of the high ground on Mount Corno in the Venafro sector.

Bourke-White noticed that instead of Tregaskis’s head being covered in layers of white cloth, he now sported only a small bandage, about two inches across, protecting his head wound. She called Tregaskis “the bravest” among the group of battle-hardy correspondents she had known during the war. “Newspapermen are not compelled to go storming mountaintops with Rangers,” Bourke-White said. “With Tregaskis, that inner desire to do truly firsthand reporting burned deep and clear.”

Feeling relieved at being alive, Tregaskis told the photographer that doctors had told him that once home he would have to have another operation to insert a metal plate in his head. “Maybe you’ll autograph it for me,” he said to Bourke-White. 

“What would be the use?” she joked. “Who is tall enough to read anything written on the top of your head?”