“The major’s dead”: Richard Tregaskis and Major Don B. Dunham

Throughout his time covering combat in World War II for the International News Service, correspondent Richard Tregaskis discovered many captivating individuals to write about. While on the aircraft carrier USS Hornet on its way to confront the Japanese at the Battle of Midway, he latched onto the confident commander of the ship’s Torpedo Squadron 8, John C. Waldron. 

During the tense struggle by U.S. Marines to hold Guadalcanal, Tregaskis tagged along with the men of the First Raider Battalion on a raid deep into enemy territory and became close to Lieutenant Colonel Merritt “Red Mike” Edson, whom he later described as the “bravest, the most effective killing machine” he had ever encountered in his career covering combat with troops of twelve nationalities.

The courage of one fighting man Tregaskis wrote about, however, Major Don B. Dunham of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, has not received the attention it deserves. The powerful dispatch Tregaskis produced about Dunham’s courage on a hill overlooking the village of Altavilla in Italy—an action that led to the major’s death on September 17, 1943—was delayed in publication due to Tregaskis’s subsequent near-fatal wounding on another Italian mountainside in November. The article finally reached readers in the United States in early December, and the correspondent included the incident in his 1944 book Invasion Diary.

Preparing for the invasion of Italy while resting in Algiers in late August 1943, Tregaskis had spent time making the necessary mental preparations for the coming ordeal. While scrounging for needed supplies—bedding roll, knapsack, mess kit, map case, and an air mattress, the “golden prize of every field soldier’s possessions”—at the public relations office, he found a quiet room where he could sit and look down on the streets of Algiers and think about what was to come. “Always before a mission I try to calculate the odds,” he recalled. “This is a dangerous job, no denying that. . . . I figured my chances of getting killed or wounded would be three of four out of ten. I had the customary confidence that the worst could not happen to me; that chance would stay on the side.”

Tregaskis and Seymour Korman of the Chicago Tribune had been assigned to accompany the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment for the invasion. Before landing with the paratroops on September 15, Tregaskis met the regiment’s officers, including its commander, Colonel Reuben H. Tucker of Ansonia, Connecticut, and Dunham of Lemon Cove, California. 

While discussing details of the upcoming mission, the conversation, Tregaskis recalled, turned to discussing “the disposal of personal effects” in the event of an officers’ death. “If I get killed, turn my personal effect over to the vultures [his fellow officers],” Tucker joked. Dunham told the reporter: “I want you to be damn sure that I’m killed first.”

On the evening of September 16 Tregaskis received his first taste of action in Italy, joining Tucker and about 150 men in seizing two objectives, including its main goal, the hill commanding Altavilla. “We walked carefully through the narrow path in the moonlight, and reached the last knoll, which was almost bare on top, though edged with thick trees,” Tregaskis reported. “Here some of us lay down for a minute, exhausted.” 

Because the Americans had to divide their forces between the two objectives, he noted that there were only no more than seventy men available to defend the position he was in, Hill 424, against a possible German attack. Dunham sent a two-man patrol down into the valley, trying to get through to the frontlines for reinforcements. “We never heard from them,” noted Tregaskis. Dunham left to hunt for snipers, moving, the correspondent remembered, “like a practiced hunter. I watched his feet, and the one knee bending and unbending like the rocker arm of an old side-wheeler, disappear over the crown of the slope.”

Throughout the night Tregaskis could hear heavy fire, including the “Brrdddt-t-t-t, brrdddt-t-t-t, brrdddt-t-t-t” from German Schmeisser machine-pistols firing in short bursts and the screeching of artillery shells against the hill they had left behind. “The German batteries were giving us hell,” he said. In spite of the clamor, Tregaskis managed to get some sleep on the rough, stony ground before being awakened at about 3:00 a.m. by Dunham’s return. “I couldn’t get the sniper,” the major told the reporter. “Things are not so good. No support has come up. Somebody’s got to get through and ask for help.”

Accompanied by a sergeant, Dunham decided to take the risk. He gave his map case and pistol to Korman for safekeeping, grabbed a Thompson submachine gun and two clips of ammunition, and shed his unneeded equipment. Dunham shook hands with Tregaskis and said good-bye in a way that caused the correspondent to believe that the major did not expect to return. “I am going to try to get back,” Dunham said before he and the sergeant slipped off into the night and into the dangerous valley below. 

“A few minutes later we heard bursts of machine-pistol fire, saw the sharp darting lights of tracer bullets amongst the black of the trees down there,” Tregaskis reported. “Answering fires came from our weapons. We wondered if Don Dunham had got through.”

The major had not made it. While Tregaskis busied himself with digging a foxhole, the sergeant returned, and the correspondent could see that his eyes had “the haunted, hunted look of a man who has been in mortal danger.” The sergeant reported that he believed Dunham was dead, as he had heard “death rattlin’” coming from the major’s throat. That left only one officer, Tucker, still available for action. Later, as Tregaskis continued to toil on his foxhole, a medic and the sergeant came by to confirm Dunham’s death. “The major’s dead,” the sergeant noted. “We went out and found him, and he’s hit in the head, the neck and the chest.”

Unlike Dunham, Tregaskis survived. While safe behind the lines the correspondent learned that Dunham had been posthumously awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for his action on the hill. Tregaskis wrote an article outlining the major’s bravery—a piece published a month before Ernie Pyle’s famous column from Italy about the death of another officer, Captain Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas, on an Italian hill, a piece that appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the country. In Tregaskis’s article, he recounted Dunham’s death, writing:

“After that, I may say frankly, I forgot about Don Dunham: the shock of knowing he had died, faded in the strong and urgent light of the need that faced us: the fact that we were still cut off and almost helpless; that the Germans beginning at dawn would throw a tornado of artillery fire at us; and those men in camouflage suits that looked like awkward shapes of foliage would try to charge up the slopes leading to our hilltop; that tanks would be brought in to add to our torment; and that our colonel [Tucker], the only remaining officer who had not been killed or wounded but a man who lived for fighting, would hold us there till hell or relief came. These thoughts filled my mind then, and during the dawning, when the shells, tanks and charging Germans came as expected; during the day, when the shells came closer and closer; when there were bloody-bubbling wounds carved into layers of tissue by the score; when a nasty little tank came as expected and blasted away point blank; when, finally, through the squeak of sniper’s bullets and the crash of shells some few of us got back to bring the word of need for reinforcements for those on the hill. Such experiences would stop the most confirmed philosopher from thinking.

 “But after that ugly experience became a memory, we who had seen him go out to die thought of Don Dunham; and the steady, calm look of his eyes when he said ‘I’m going to try to get back.’ The mission he undertook had been a failure; but in his death he had been a success and a hero; no man who has that look in his eyes of knowing death and facing it willingly—can be other.”