The Reporter and the Photographer: Richard Tregaskis and Robert Capa

Writing an article in 1966 for the Overseas Press Club, veteran correspondent Richard Tregaskis pondered an essential question: why are reporters drawn to covering wars despite all of the dangers being in combat posed? He examined the question by examining a conversation he had in Sicily in 1943 with famed Hungarian-American photojournalist Robert Capa, who had covered the Spanish Civil War and continued to document war as Allied forces won victories in North Africa and Sicily.

“Good war correspondents, like other people of action, generally are loath to make themselves heroes,” Tregaskis explained, “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 Everest: ‘Because it is there.’”
 He added that reporters were often drawn “to front areas because they are usually well known as danger zones, and wars, like mountains, are exciting,” and war could be “as exciting as anything in life.”

Despite the deaths and disabilities of war, Tregaskis noted that there was another aspect of it 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.”

Tregaskis remembered talking about his theories with Capa when they were in a small Sicilian town called Licata with the men of the 82nd Airborne Division. “At that time, just before the Allied landing at Salerno and the invasion of Italy, the 82nd was expecting to be dropped in Rome, and Capa and I were going with them,” Tregaskis recalled.

“The top secret plan was that we would drop on Rome the day before the Salerno invasion. The Italians were to cooperate by lighting the way to Ciampino airport and keeping the German fighters on the ground,” noted Tregaskis. “Fortunately, the mission was aborted at the last minute—fortunately, because it was discovered that five German divisions surrounded the airfield.

On the night before the operation with the 82nd, Capa and Tregaskis were sitting on the edge of the Licata airfield, filling the time with conversation. “I mentioned that I had flown over from North Africa in a C-47 with one of the ranking officers of the division and that I had said to him that war is such a tragic waste and such bloody double destruction,” Tregaskis said. “The officer, a veteran, battle-toughened trooper, smiled and said frankly, ‘I like it.’” (The officer Tregaskis mentioned was probably Colonel James M. Gavin, who later commanded the division.)

Telling Capa about this, Tregaskis went on to venture the thesis that there existed “a distinctive philosophy about a frontline area (in those old days, you remember, there was always a clearly delineated front). I vouchsafed the idea that when you were at the front you didn’t expect to live long. Thus you tended to be free of the petty selfishness that governs us in times of absolute safety and assumed longevity.”

“At the front,” Tregaskis continued, “if someone wants your shirt you’ll give it to him. Men are unselfish and self-sacrificing as never elsewhere. While they’re trying to kill people on the other side they’ll die for people on their on.”

The reporter who had witnessed the Doolittle Raid, the Battle of Midway, and the relentless fighting on Guadalcanal, went on to tell Capa one of his related theories about war (“after all, this was a bull session, war-style”). Tregaksis said that one of the most dramatic stories anywhere was that of two intelligent human beings trying to kill each other. He mentioned Wilkie Collins’s famous story “The Most Dangerous Game,” which claimed that big-game hunting “was boring but to pit man against man—that was something.”

According to Tregaskis, Capa’s usual temper was “sardonic and cynical, and his upbringing in central Europe led him to poke fun at many of my ideas as ‘over-American.’ We were good friends, but he violently opposed some of my theses as too idealistic and unrealistic; at such times he would address me as ‘Tregasgoose.’ This time he called me by that name but subscribed to my idea—which was quite a concession for him:

“I agree with you Tregasgoose; fighting is exciting.”

Capa went on to quote to Tregaskis a saying familiar in any battle: “War is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of intense anxiety.” But, the photographer added, according to Tregaskis, that the intense anxiety “always makes life very dramatic.”

 

A Wounding in Italy

Walking down from the mountain, the man in the American uniform could hear the scream of something sinister headed his way. Months of previous combat experience caused him to instinctively dive to the rocky ground for safety. It was too late. He felt a “smothering explosion” engulf him. In the fraction of the second before unconsciousness came, he knew that he had been hit by a German shell.

He sensed a “curtain of fire” rise, hesitate, and hover for “an infinite second.” An orange mist, like a tropical sunrise, arose and quickly set, leaving him, with the curtain descending, gently, in the dark.

Unconsciousness came and went in seconds. When he awoke, he knew that he had been badly wounded. In that moment he realized something he had long suspected—there was no sensation of pain, only a “movie without sound.” 

Still stretched out on the rocky ground of Mount Corno in the Italian countryside, he could see, a couple of feet from him, his helmet, which had been gouged in two places—one hole at the front and the second ripped through the side. Catastrophe. How could he mange to make it to safety, nearly a mile away down the trail, where the officers that had accompanied him earlier on the mountain, Colonel Bill Yarborough and Captain Edmund Tomasik, he hoped, were waiting?

It was eerily quiet, as if time stood still. He could still move a bit. He sat up and saw figures of crouched men he did not recognize running up the trail. He tried to yell at them but found that his voice produced only unintelligible noise instead of words. Although rattled at first, he became calmer when he realized he could still think—he had lost his power of speech, but not his power to “understand or generate thought.”

Another shell came screaming down. He hugged the ground and braced for the imminent explosion. When it came, he found it was a “tinny echo” of what had before been powerful and terrifying. A frightened soldier skidded into his position to escape the danger, and he tried to talk to the man, seeking his help, but only produced the strangled question: “Can help?” As another shell burst farther down the mountain slope, the soldier, with terror etched across his face, could only say, before he ran away, “I can’t help you, I’m too scared.”

In a haze, he barely remembered the medic who flopped beside him, bandaged his wounded head, and jammed a shot of morphine into his arm. Almost as soon as he had appeared, the medic was gone, and again he was alone. He realized that if he wanted to ever get off that mountain, he had to get up and walk.

Almost miraculously, he found his glasses, unbroken, lying on the rocks a few inches away. He tried to pick them up with his right hand, and realized his entire right arm was stiff and useless. Using his left hand, he picked up his glasses, put them on, and, almost, absentmindedly, placed his helmet on his bandaged head, where it sat, a fine, if precariously balanced, souvenir.

As he staggered down the mountain, he kept dropping and picking up his helmet, and came under fire from a procession of shells. Once a shell burst so close to him that he could have touched it. He was not frightened, but only startled at its nearness.

Finally, he wedged his tall, lanky frame into a small cave to wait out the barrage. He remembered being unconcerned about his plight; nothing seemed to disturb him. In fact, it seemed somehow that after escaping so many close calls during the war, his luck would finally run out. Only his instinct for self-preservation told him what to do. Despite the blood running copiously down his face, blurring his vision, he got up and staggered down the mountain like a robot, unsteady on his feet but under some directional control.

Rounding a bend in the trail, he saw Yarborough and Tomasik trying to help a wounded enlisted man. A surge of pleasure surged through him as he realized he would be saved. The colonel started to wave to him, then stopped, noticing his bloody glasses and blood-soaked shirt. With Yarborough’s help, he made it to a house to await transportation for medical assistance.

The wounded man, Richard Tregaskis, a correspondent with the International News Service, looked across the room and saw a line of soldiers, with “fascinated, awed looks on their faces as they stared at me, the badly wounded man.” Those spectators, he noted, imagined more pain than he felt. “Such is the friendly power of shock,” Tregaskis remembered, “and the stubborn will for preservation.” Reflecting on his experience, he felt almost a sense of relief that at last it had happened—he had been hit. He felt sure he was supposed to die, but he did not.

Finally transported to the Thirty-Eighth Evacuation Hospital, Tregaskis underwent several hours of brain surgery performed by Major William R. Pitts. A shell fragment had driven ten to twelve bone fragments into Tregaskis’s brain and part of his skull had been blown away, with the brain, said Pitts, “oozing out through the scalp wound.”

Recuperating, Tregaskis received a visit from one of the biggest stars of journalism in World War II, Ernie Pyle, columnist for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. After chatting with his colleague, Pyle wrote in his popular column that if he had been injured as Tregaskis had been, he would have “gone home and rested on my laurels forever.”

Tregaskis did go back to the United States—to the U.S. Army’s Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC, where doctors put an inert metal (tantalum) plate to cover the hole in his skull. It seemed an end to what had been a brilliant wartime career that included witnessing the Doolittle Raiders take off from the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier to bomb Japan, being in the thick of the action during the Battle of Midway, surviving seven nerve-wracking weeks with U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal, writing a best-selling book about his experiences (Guadalcanal Diary), and accompanying American and British troops for the invasions of Sicily and Italy.

Despite his brush with death, and several months of painstaking effort on his part to regain his power of speech and the feeling in his right hand, Tregaskis did not decide to remain safely at home; he returned to the war. He traveled to Europe for the Normandy beachhead, then followed the First Infantry Division (“The Big Red One”) across France, Belgium, Holland, and into Germany.

Asked by the editors of a national magazine to return to the Pacific to follow the crew of a B-29 Superfortress as it prepared for bombing missions against Japanese cities, Tregaskis was asked by an editor, “Do you really want to go?” Without hesitating, Tregaskis gave an answer that any reporter who covered World War II would understand: “I don’t want to go, but I think I ought to go.” He went.

 

 

 

Richard Tregaskis and "Stronger Than Fear"

In 1945, former war correspondent Richard Tregaskis, author of the classic book of combat reporting, Guadalcanal Diary, wrote what he considered to be the most important book he produced about the war, Stronger Than Fear, a novel based upon his experiences covering the Battle of Aachen. Here is what he wrote:

In the late fall of 1944, I was working as a war correspondent alone the western front of World War II trying to keep up with our plunging armored columns as they swept through France, across Belgium and into Germany. The Third Armored Division crossed into Germany at a little town called Rotgen, and shortly after Rotgen our forces hit some sizeable cities in the Rhineland: Aachen, Duren, Eschweiler, Koln.

The street fighting in these German communities reminded me of the jungle campaigning I had seen on Guadalcanal and elsewhere in the South Pacific. The enemy fought hard in his home ground, and everything was close in, the rows of houses were like trees and street-corners were like thickets, and every house was a potential sniper’s nest or machine-gun position.

In the city of Aachen, I worked along with a squad of Company C, First Battalion, 26^th Infantry, of the Fighting First Division.

It was a great, battled-tested division with one of the best combat records of any of our fighting outfits, starting with the early days of North Africa and on through Sicily and into Europe. I had been with the First in Sicily through several hard engagements and I was full of admiration for these men and their know-how of night fighting, clever concealment, skillful use of fires and rapid movement through rough country.

Now, as at least we were penetrating Germany, the division was still a marvel of military know-how but by this time, two years after the North Africa landing and after many bloody battles, and casualties of more than a hundred percent of its strength in killed and wounded, it was showing signs of wear.

The platoon of ten men to which I attached myself was made up of soldiers none of whom had take part in the Sicilian or North African campaigns. And just as I joined them, two new replacements were reporting. Naturally, they were from Cook’s and Baker’s School, which was what you expected as qualification for front-line infantry in these days of American Blitzkrieg and the far-stretched battle line that came with lightning advances of tanks and truck-borne infantry. We had no reserves, our companies were stretched out like rubber bands and the few veterans who were still with the First Division knew our position was perilous.

Being veterans, they also knew the chances they were taking as the companies ploughed through the streets of Aachen, block by block and house by house. And those who had been wounded before knew that the likelihood was they would be wounded, not killed, if they were hit, because the odds were four or five to one that you would be wounded, not killed. Those were the statistics that the veterans knew, they had outgrown the presupposition of the raw recruit that he would either be killed or completely spared, and that naturally it would not happen to him.

They knew better, they knew what it was like to be ripped by the jagged steel of shell fragments, they knew the wrenching crump of mortar explosions that could rip your body apart, they knew that the snapping bullets of snipers or machine-guns could do more than make neat holes in arms as in the movies (only a flesh wound), they knew these bullets could tear out eyes, smash jaws and cheek bones, or lodged properly in the back, paralyze a man from waist or neck down.

My company commander was a veteran and he knew these things. His name was Ozell Smoot, he came from the Deep South and I watched him in admiration, almost with reverence, as he coolly ran his company through the advance into Aachen, through so many blocks per day, through smashing artillery shelling, through black nights in the cellars while tanks roamed the streets with rattling, grinding engines and fired down the boulevards; through the days of pushing through the jungle of the houses, and dodging down the streets to avoid giving the snipers and machine gunners good shots, and getting aid men to the unlucky ones who got smeared so their wrecked bodies could be carried to the rear.

By this time, I had seen a good deal of war action on the ground, in the air and at sea, in the Pacific, the Mediterranean and in Europe, and as I watched Ozell Smoot doing his job expertly, I reflected on a central question: to a veteran, like Ozell Smoot and many another good fighting man I had seen, what does it mean when it becomes a way of life, the reality, and peace is only a dream?

What, in other words, are the real values that emerge in a man’s character during a war? I had seen enough of war to know that war brings out nobler traits in a man than he might otherwise know in a thousand lifetimes. I knew that men at the front could be more generous, kind, unselfish than I had ever seen them elsewhere. It was a strange paradox that in a way of life devoted to killing, maiming and destruction of the enemy, men could be kinder and more unselfish and self-sacrificing towards those on his own side than he had ever been before or probably ever would be if he survived the war.

Eight months after the street fighting in Aachen I had finished a novel that grew from watching the men of the 26^th Infantry and a company commander named Ozell Smoot at work in the business of war.

I think this is the most important book I wrote about World War II because it strikes closer to the heart of war than any other I wrote. The New York Times critic Francis Hackett called this book “white-hot, ice-cold” and those were the temperatures of by observations and feelings about war as this story worked itself out of the back of my mind.

I believe it stands up well after the years because it hits into the basic human values involved in a war, aside from politics or patriotism. Some of the critics said I drew on some of my own battlefield experience to write about being wounded and combating fear.

At any rate, the characters show how much I like and admire good fighting men, and they are not literal transcriptions of actual people but drawn from many scores of soldiers I watched at work. Captain Paul Kreider is not Captain Ozell Smoot but he stands for many military men who fought the big battle and come out winners, even if they were killed doing their jobs. That’s what war or anything else is really about, if you get down to fundamentals. Captain Ozell Smoot was killed about a month after Aachen, in the front line in the Hurtgen Forest, but I saw enough of him to know that he was a winner in the important battle, the one that goes on inside. That’s what the book is about.

Carole Lombard: Hoosier Actress

Before the days of cable and satellite dishes, when there were only three major networks available for viewing, one of the few things on television that always sparked my interest was the perennial showing of old movies, usually on lazy Sunday afternoons.

The films ranged from Bud Abbott and Lou Costello meeting a host of monsters (Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Invisible Man to name but a few) to the detective adventures of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. My favorites, however, were the sophisticated, and often hilarious, screwball comedies produced by Hollywood studios during the height of the Great Depression in the 1940s and early into the 1930s.

These films, which often matched the wits of dazzlingly daffy females with those of hapless males, featured the talents of such well know stars as Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Katherine Hepburn, Clark Cable, and Claudette Colbert. Who hasn’t chortled over the budding romance between a spoiled heiress and a recently fired reporter in It Happened One Night (1934), the misunderstandings between a married couple in The Awful Truth (1937), the madcap search for a missing dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby (1938), and the underhanded attempts of a newspaper editor attempting to lure his ex-wife back to her former job in His Girl Friday (1939)?

My favorite screwball comedy, however, involved an actress who became a fixture in this film genre: Carole Lombard, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on October 6, 1908. In 1936 Lombard starred alongside here ex-husband William Powell (“the only intelligent actor I’ve ever met,” according to Lombard) in the Universal movie My Man Godfrey.

Directed by Gregory La Cava, the movie tells the story of Godfrey “Duke” Parke (Powell), a former Boston Brahmin who after a failed romance begins living at the city dump with victims of the depression. A scavenger hunt organized as part of a society fund-raiser for the underprivileged brings Parke—the proverbial forgotten man—in contact with Irene Bullock (Lombard), a young and scatterbrained member of an eccentric Park Avenue family who, upon their first meeting, charms him with such remarks as “You have a wonderful sense of humor. I wish I had a sense of humor, but I can never think of the right thing to say until everybody’s gone home.” Irene hires Godfrey as the family’s butler and eventually falls in love with her new “protégé.”

Of course, as often happens in screwball movies, Godfrey, representing the decency and forthrightness of the common man, teaches the wealthy family a thing or two about life and saves them from financial disaster. Godfrey, however, has a surprise or two waiting for him when Irene sweeps aside his reservations about romance and drags him to the altar.

A box-office hit at the time, the movie featured fine acting from not only its stars—both Lombard and Powell received Academy Award nominations for their performances—but also from its supporting cast. I still marvel at the fine comedic timing of Mischa Auer, who played Carlo, the piano-playing protégé of Irene’s mother, and Eugene Pallette, who portrayed the harried patriarch of the Bullock family. Not even a fine physical comedian such as Jim Carrey could hope to match Auer’s side-splitting imitation of a gorilla to amuse Irene during a (fake) crying spell.

Her role in My Man Godfrey reinforced Lombard’s developing image as the queen of the screwball comedy. Lombard, who had moved to California from Indiana with her mother and two brothers, had labored early in her acting career in minor roles in silent comedy films for Mack Sennett, had found in films such as Godfrey and 1937’s Nothing Sacred (famous for Lombard using her childhood boxing lessons to good form by punching co-star Fredric March) an outlet for her own often zany behavior, which included the ability to swear like a sailor when the opportunity called for it, a talent she learned from her brothers. She became America’s favorite screwball actress, both on the screen and off.

In addition to her film success, Lombard also found personal fulfillment with her marriage to screen idol Gable in 1939. Nicknaming each other “Ma” and “Pa,” the couple enjoyed an idyllic life together on their twenty-acre ranch located in the San Fernando Valley. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Lombard was finishing her last role, that of Maria Tura in the comedy To Be or Not to Be with Jack Benny.

Both Lombard and Gable immediately offered their services on behalf of the war effort to President Franklin Roosevelt. It was Lombard who participated, with her mother alongside her, in a whirlwind bond drive back home in Indiana, with several events in Indianapolis on January 15, 1942, including leading the crowd in a singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the Cadle Tabernacle.

“As a Hoosier,” Lombard told the crowd, “I am proud that Indiana led the nation in buying Liberty Bonds in the last war. I want to believe that Indiana will lead every other state again this time—and we will! We won the last war, and with your help we will win this war!”

On January 16 the plane carrying Lombard and her mother back home to California crashed outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, killing everyone aboard. To honor Lombard’s sacrifice, Roosevelt posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.