Richard Tregaskis Biography Available for Preorder

Now available for preorder from the University of New Mexico Press, Richard Tregaskis: Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam highlights what Tregaskis experienced as he reported on U.S. soldiers in harm’s way on distant battlefields. One of only two reporters to land with U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal, Tregaskis, despite suffering from diabetes, set down in his notebook the daily and nightly terrors faced by the men on the island in an action that became one of the most renowned of World War II.

As Tregaskis later recalled, “Guadalcanal had a code name, Cactus, but the servicemen preferred to call it ‘the Canal.’ The nickname had an affectionate sound about it. Men cursed and hated Guadalcanal, a pest-hole that reeked of death, struggle, and disease, but the Canal was like a good-for-nothing cousin or brother. When you make tremendous sacrifices for someone or something, when you give your blood or your last drop of muscular effort or sweat, you feel something like affection for that object or person.”

Tregaskis shared his adventures on Guadalcanal, including the fear of being shelled and feeling as if he “were at the mercy of a great vindictive giant whose voice was the voice of thunder,” with Americans on the home front in his book Guadalcanal Diary. The book proved to be a critical and popular success when published by Random House in 1943. By the late 1960s, more than three million copies of the book had been sold and it had been translated into twelve languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Danish. Tregaskis’s book remains in print today as a Modern Library edition and his dispatches from Guadalcanal are included in volume 1 of the Library of America’s Reporting World War II.

The tall, gangly reporter (marines dubbed his size-fourteen boots his PTs, for “Patrol Tregaskis”) eventually left the Pacific to report on the fighting in Europe. Although he had been lucky to escape Guadalcanal with nary a scratch except for a nasty bout of gastroenteritis and a bout with malaria, Tregaskis’s luck ran out on a hill named Mount Corno near Cassino in Italy. Shrapnel from a German shell pierced the reporter’s helmet, through his brain, and out through his helmet. Surviving his horrific wounding, Tregaskis, sporting a metal plate in his head covering a hole in his skull, spent the next several months re-learning how to speak by reciting poetry and regained the use of a paralyzed right hand well enough to produce another book, Invasion Diary.

Tregaskis recovered in time to cover the intense street fighting as American soldiers advanced into Germany and returned to the Pacific with the crew of a B-29 bomber, Number 688, following them into battle in a series of articles for the Saturday Evening Post and joining American troops in Japan for the occupation following the Japanese surrender. In accepting his assignment with the B-29 crew, Tregaskis, when asked by his editor if he really wanted to go, responded, “I don’t want to, but I think I ought to go.” According to the Post, “ought to go” had been Tregaskis’s first commandment “ever since he began chasing the war, three months after Pearl Harbor.”

Richard Tregaskis: Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam will be released by the University of New Mexico Press on November 1, 2021. The 368-page, hardback book costs $34.95 and is also available in an e-book version.