I discovered this author when reading one of the Landmark young adult history books about John F. Kennedy and PT-109, so I'll include some of the information I posted in that review here as well.
Born in New Jersey in 1916, Tregaskis, too, was Harvard educated. He worked as a journalist for the Boston Herald until the war, whereupon he volunteered as what we would today call an "embedded journalist," a wartime correspondent for the International News Service. This remarkable account is thus written from an eye-witness perspective by an author whose survival to tell the tale was far from assured. Tregaskis was, in fact, one of only two journalists on location at Guadalcanal, so his insight is rare and invaluable.
Assigned to cover the war in the Pacific, Tregaskis spent part of August and most of September, 1942 reporting on the activities of the Marines on Guadalcanal, a pivotal campaign in the war against Japan. His writings have been described as being penned by "a crack newspaperman, who knew how to do his job. . . . Until [his] departure in a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber on September 26th, he ate, slept, and sweated with our front-line units. His story is the straight day-by-day account of what he himself saw or learned from eyewitnesses during those seven weeks."
Tregaskis later covered Cold War-era conflicts in China, Korea, and Vietnam, gaining even more experience in journalism on the front lines. Were it not for his tragic, untimely death by drowning at age 56 near his home in Hawaii, he may have become as renowned as yet another war correspondent, Walter Cronkite, who famously reported JFK's death that fateful day in Dallas (and later, the moon landing). Cronkite likewise got his start as a reporter assigned to cover the European theater, and became one of the primary reporters of events at the Nuremberg trials.
Tregaskis's account, as harrowing as it is, is of a rather short duration, covering a period of less than two months, but it bears witness to some of the most momentous events of the war in the Pacific theater. It speaks to the great hardships endured by the men on those far-flung islands, the constant anxiety (in one case, he wrote that one of the men wasn't sure if he had seen a fish or a submarine) which accompanied the waiting, waiting, waiting to see what would unfold, and when the vicious, all-out assault by the Japanese would finally occur.
The author braved the same dangers as the marines he accompanied, and shared in their hardships: from being shot at by snipers to enduring the constant pounding of the bombs which fell all around him, to a life-threatening bout with gastroenteritis, Tregaskis himself experienced what he wrote about, speaking to the gallantry of the men in his company and the heartbreak upon losing them, some of whom he had come to know well.
There are many ways to bear witness. Although reading firsthand accounts such as these, which chronicle in exquisite detail the horrors of war, may not be a pleasant one, this is a fascinating yet tragic account of time in the trenches, as it were, which describes in real time events which occurred so long ago but which are still relevant, and timely.
I wish that more people would read of the experiences of the men who fought and died in the terrible conflicts which have long afflicted mankind - I think if people acknowledged the great fragility of peace, and that it must be constantly pursued, there would be much less armed conflict of the type in which we now find ourselves once again embroiled.
Born in New Jersey in 1916, Tregaskis, too, was Harvard educated. He worked as a journalist for the Boston Herald until the war, whereupon he volunteered as what we would today call an "embedded journalist," a wartime correspondent for the International News Service. This remarkable account is thus written from an eye-witness perspective by an author whose survival to tell the tale was far from assured. Tregaskis was, in fact, one of only two journalists on location at Guadalcanal, so his insight is rare and invaluable.
Assigned to cover the war in the Pacific, Tregaskis spent part of August and most of September, 1942 reporting on the activities of the Marines on Guadalcanal, a pivotal campaign in the war against Japan. His writings have been described as being penned by "a crack newspaperman, who knew how to do his job. . . . Until [his] departure in a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber on September 26th, he ate, slept, and sweated with our front-line units. His story is the straight day-by-day account of what he himself saw or learned from eyewitnesses during those seven weeks."
Tregaskis later covered Cold War-era conflicts in China, Korea, and Vietnam, gaining even more experience in journalism on the front lines. Were it not for his tragic, untimely death by drowning at age 56 near his home in Hawaii, he may have become as renowned as yet another war correspondent, Walter Cronkite, who famously reported JFK's death that fateful day in Dallas (and later, the moon landing). Cronkite likewise got his start as a reporter assigned to cover the European theater, and became one of the primary reporters of events at the Nuremberg trials.
Tregaskis's account, as harrowing as it is, is of a rather short duration, covering a period of less than two months, but it bears witness to some of the most momentous events of the war in the Pacific theater. It speaks to the great hardships endured by the men on those far-flung islands, the constant anxiety (in one case, he wrote that one of the men wasn't sure if he had seen a fish or a submarine) which accompanied the waiting, waiting, waiting to see what would unfold, and when the vicious, all-out assault by the Japanese would finally occur.
The author braved the same dangers as the marines he accompanied, and shared in their hardships: from being shot at by snipers to enduring the constant pounding of the bombs which fell all around him, to a life-threatening bout with gastroenteritis, Tregaskis himself experienced what he wrote about, speaking to the gallantry of the men in his company and the heartbreak upon losing them, some of whom he had come to know well.
There are many ways to bear witness. Although reading firsthand accounts such as these, which chronicle in exquisite detail the horrors of war, may not be a pleasant one, this is a fascinating yet tragic account of time in the trenches, as it were, which describes in real time events which occurred so long ago but which are still relevant, and timely.
I wish that more people would read of the experiences of the men who fought and died in the terrible conflicts which have long afflicted mankind - I think if people acknowledged the great fragility of peace, and that it must be constantly pursued, there would be much less armed conflict of the type in which we now find ourselves once again embroiled.
