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.”