Richard Tregaskis at War

Sprawled alone in the broken shell of what once had been a house in Aachen, Germany, in the fall of 1944, Richard Tregaskis, an accredited war correspondent for the International News Service, could hear from his temporary sanctuary the “ripping sounds” of an enemy machine gun firing at advancing American troops in a nearby rubble-filled street.

Tregaskis was no stranger to combat at this point in his career and had always been eager to be close to where American forces were fighting, becoming an embedded reporter long before the term came into use. “The lure of the front is like an opiate,” he had once mused while stuck behind the lines at headquarters and forced to write about politics instead of battle. “After abstinence and the tedium of workaday life, its attraction becomes more and more insistent.”

For nearly seven weeks in the summer of 1942, Tregaskis also had a front-row seat to one of the turning points of the war in the Pacific—the Battle of Guadalcanal. Tregaskis was one of two civilian reporters (the other was Bob Miller of United Press) who landed with the marines and stayed with them to cover their attempt to capture and hold the island, codenamed Cactus but simply called the Canal by those who fought there, against fierce attacks from the land, air, and sea by the Japanese.

In his dispatches to INS clients, newspapers owned by the William Randolph Hearst chain, Tregaskis captured what it was like to live and fight on a “pesthole that reeked of death, struggle, and disease.” He later turned the jottings from his battered notebooks into the best-selling book Guadalcanal Diary (Random House, 1943)—a work that awakened those on the home front to the long struggle ahead to achieve victory. Tregaskis related his sometimes-terrifying experiences to his readers simply and poignantly, using a day-by-day diary format to report what he had witnessed and the often-matter-of-fact stories of combat told to him by enlisted men and their officers.

The Harvard-educated reporter from Elizabeth, New Jersey, had accomplished all of this while dealing with what once had been a fatal illness—diabetes—a condition he kept secret from everyone but his doctor and family. For his first combat assignment in the Pacific, Tregaskis carried with him a case (100 tins) of sardines because he could not handle the high-carbohydrate fare served by navy cooks on his ship, as well as a handbook (Diabetic Manual—for the Doctor and Patient) about the disease from an early pioneer in the field. Afraid at being found out, Tregaskis even forged an inscription in camouflaged handwriting in the handbook reading, “To my friend Richard Tregaskis, best wishes from Doctor Elliott P. Joslin.” If the item were questioned by anyone, Tregaskis believed he could “demonstrate that Dr. Joslin was a friend and I carried his book only for sentimental reasons.”

Standing approximately six-feet, five-inches tall, Tregaskis had been warned by many friends before going into action that the Japanese, if they did not kill him, would capture him and use him as an observation post, but he left Guadalcanal relatively unscathed physically except for bouts with gastroenteritis and malaria. Even he considered himself to be an unlikely type to be a war correspondent, due to his height, thin frame, and glasses. 

After his adventures in the Pacific, Tregaskis moved to the European theater, accompanying American and British forces during the invasion of Sicily, staying on the Mediterranean island until it was secured. His willingness to go where the action was impressed one soldier, who told the correspondent, “How you guys go ahead and stick out your necks when you don’t have to—well, it just beats hell out of me!” Tregaskis had a simple response: “But we certainly do have to—that’s our job.”

Tregaskis’s luck ran out during his next assignment, accompanying Allied forces for the invasion of Italy. On November 22, 1943, after observing U.S. Rangers battling Germans on Mount Corno near Cassino, Italy, Tregaskis was returning to headquarters to write his story when a German shell landed near him. Shrapnel struck and pierced his helmet, lodging in his brain and causing partial paralysis that robbed him for a time of his power to speak, read, and write. “They carried me out with a hole in my skull the size of a soup spoon and bone and steel fragments embedded two inches deep in my brain,” he recalled. “I worked my way toward the States through six Army and Navy hospitals. Finally, a tantalum [metal] plate was put in my head at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington—and I went back to the fighting front.”

A recovered Tregaskis caught up with Americans forces in the summer of 1944 after their successful breakout from the Normandy beachhead. He noticed, however, a change in his attitude after his wounding. “I was aware of a new and dreadful sensitivity to the dangers of war—an acute, nervous state that made the sounds of incoming shells or enemy machine-gun fire crushing and unbearable.” His nerves continued to be “shaky” as he made his way across France, Belgium, Holland, and into Nazi Germany. Tregaskis decided to put himself to the test by participating in the battle for Aachen alongside a frontline unit—a company with the Twenty-Sixth Infantry Regiment (known as the Blue Spaders), First Infantry Division (the “Big Red One”). If he survived he knew he would be equipped with a new set of nerves, and “probably a good story, too.”

As Tregaskis cautiously made his way through Aachen’s rubble-filled streets to join the second squad of the first platoon with whom he would be staying, he felt “waves of terrible apprehension” washing over his body. He was now more aware than ever that the “worst could happen to me, that I could be a statistic in the casualty list and not someone else.” Because of what he had suffered on Mount Corno, Tregaskis knew what being wounded meant to a person—the “long sessions of jolting pain, the horrible hours of not knowing whether you would ever recover, the contemplation of ways to kill yourself if you became no more than a vegetable.”

Before he participated in any military operation, Tregaskis always took some time to prepare himself for the coming ordeal, including calculating his odds for survival. He usually remained confident that the “worst could not happen to me; that chance would stay on my side.” What he witnessed in Aachen, however, almost overwhelmed him, describing what he saw as “a blur of terror, a living nightmare: running down streets; faces full of dirt as shells screamed in and you hit the rubble which was the earth; the shock of the cracking bullets that were coming too close (close ones don’t whine as they do on TV—if they’re dangerous, they crack); the knowing that an unseen enemy rifleman or machine gunner is trying to kill you; the breathless hunt for him among the ruins; the silencing of him, usually with grenades or artillery; the horror on men’s faces at the moment you know well—when you have been hit; and the dreadful ignorance of whether or not you are going to die.”

The madness of combat might have overwhelmed Tregaskis if it had not been for one man—Captain Ozell Smoot. The officer from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, always seemed to appear when his soldiers needed a steadying hand. Darting into the street “while the firing was still going on all around,” said Tregaskis, “he would stop to talk to the platoon leader as calmly as if we were on maneuvers. He would make sure our wounded were carried out and reached ambulances. And he would spot snipers and Kraut artillery and observation posts with a cool eye and call artillery or mortars down on them.”

When one of his officers was hit by a sniper’s bullet and seriously wounded, Smoot raced up to his comrade to offer “the tender uprintable things that one brave man will say to another,” Tregeaskis reported. Smoot cut the wounded man’s clothes away from the gaping wound and fed him sulfa pills while bawling out directions to bring up a medic and a stretcher team to take the fallen soldier away. At the same time, Smoot never let his attention waver from his duties as commander. “He’d say, with great tenderness, that the wounded man would be all right; that the jeep would be coming any minute now,” Tregaskis wrote. “And then he’d wheel and bark an order, and lard that order with hair-curling cuss words.”

In addition to serving as an example for his men, Smoot helped calm to the anxious reporter’s shaken spirits, as Tregaskis suffered from what he described as “Purple Heart syndrome.” Almost every soldier, he noted, naturally assumed that he would be safe while under fire and that “the wounds will happen to anybody else but him, that he is not a statistic, and that somehow some unquestioned magic will keep him safe, no matter how bad the casualties get or how scared he is.” When the nearly worst happened, and the soldier was wounded, shock and pain followed. “And very often,” said Tregaskis, “if he is not given to powerful flights of imagination, if he is not the imaginative type, more a man of deeds than thought, the shock can get very profound. The idea is burned in letters of fire in his brain: I can get hurt too.”

Tregaskis, while huddled in a hole in the ground in Aachen, suffered from his own brand of “Purple Heart syndrome.” He could hear a fusillade of small-arms fire coming at him like a cascade. “It seemed closer; it seemed to be moving in my direction.” The sound stopped for a moment and, at that instant, Smoot skidded into the broken bricks that formed Tregaskis’s sanctuary. The commander grinned at Tregaskis and mentioned in an offhand manner that it had been a “rough day.” 

Reading Tregaskis’s face, or perhaps having heard from members of his platoon that the correspondent had “been running much too scared,” Smoot quietly related: “I got it myself a couple of times. I came in with the Division at North Africa.” In another lull in the fighting, Smoot added, without looking at the reporter as he talked: “It took me a while to figure it out. Your chances aren’t any worse after you’ve been hit once. It just seems like it. It takes more guts because you know what can happen.”

Just seconds after he finished his talk, Smoot left the safety of Tregaskis’s hole and ran down the street toward his men, but his words had made a difference to the shaken reporter, who recalled that the “fighting seemed less dreadful, and I knew I had gained a new grip on myself.” The commander had restored to Tregaskis the toughness he would need—a “new kind of toughness, the seasoned kind of inner strength that comes after battle scars.” Both Tregaskis and Smoot emerged from Aachen physically unscathed. The reporter was lucky enough to be able to return to the United States for some needed rest before an assignment for the Saturday Evening Post to follow the crew of a B-29 Superfortress bomber making its way overseas for service in the Pacific against targets in Japan.

As he prepared to report on the final push against the Japanese in the Pacific, Tregaskis lost touch with Smoot. Not until the war was over did he learn about the officer’s fate—Smoot had been killed in combat on November 17, 1944, about a month after he and Tregaskis had parted company in Aachen. The officer had been one of the approximately 33,000 American casualties of the tough winter fighting in the HürtgenForest. “He died a soldier’s death,” Tregaskis noted of Smoot, “leading his troops in battle, taking the chances he had to with his usual calm competence. He died facing the ultimate danger, respected and loved by his men.”

Tregaskis had often pondered why he, and others, risked their lives to report on the war. Good correspondents, like other people of action, were generally unwilling to make themselves heroes, he said, but most “will admit that they take chances in war zones for the same reason the mountain climber gave when asked why he wanted to scale [Mount] Everest: ‘Because it is there.’” Although Associated Press reporter Hal Boyle joked that all one needed to be a war correspondent was “a strong stomach, a weak mind, and plenty of endurance,” he and his colleagues were aware of the dangers they faced.

Casualty rates for reporters during the war matched that of the American military, with 2.2 percent of reporters killed and 6.8 percent wounded, while the figures for the armed forces was 2.5 percent killed and 4.5 percent wounded. Despite the deaths and disabilities that went hand in hand with war, there was another facet, Tregaskis said, that drew people “whatever their personal persuasion or sex: the instant elimination of personal ambition in favor of unselfish sacrifice to a great cause. Never mind that the fact that the cause is the destruction of an enemy and the expenditure of resources—including life and health—to destroy something the foe considers highly valuable.” Still, he acknowledged, “War can be as exciting as anything in life.”