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Introduction Throughout his distinguished career as a journalist, Donald Ford Whitehead always aspired to be where the action was. From the time he was a young boy growing up in Harlan, Kentucky, where he once witnessed a murder between feuding families, Whitehead not only understood the necessity but relished the opportunity to witness the breaking news he was charged with reporting. Like his friend and fellow journalist Ernie Pyle, whom he first met during the Sicily campaign, Whitehead assumed the considerable risks of frontline reporting, so that he could get a more authentic story for his readers back home. Years later, he explained that the reason he wanted to leave the safety and security of reporting out of the Associated Press headquarters in New York City was that he ‘‘wanted to be up front where the fighting men were.’’ Born in Inman, Virginia, on April 8, 1908, newsman and author Don Whitehead became city editor of the Harlan Daily Enterprise in 1929 and covered the labor wars of the early 1930s in Harlan County, Kentucky. Whitehead’s affiliation with the Associated Press began when he joined the wire service in 1935 as night editor in Memphis, Tennessee, and then became an AP correspondent in Knoxville from 1937 to 1940. In early 1941, Whitehead was transferred to New York as a feature writer. His pay increased from $65 to $85 per week, but only after he informed his boss in New York that he could not make ends meet on his Knoxville salary. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Whitehead increasingly saw his assignments shift, as he began to cover the preparations for war stateside, including the Lend-Lease shipments of bombers to England via Newfoundland and military maneuvers in the Carolinas, where recruits trained with logs on wheels in place of artillery and shouldered pieces of wood instead of rifles. Like many, he knew that the army had a long way to go before it would be ready to tackle the disciplined, well-equipped troops of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. In August 2 Introduction 1942, he was notified that he would be going overseas and began the process to be accredited as a war correspondent. Upon his arrival in the Middle East to cover the British Eighth Army’s pursuit of General Erwin Rommel for the Associated Press, Whitehead quickly learned the difference between the war correspondent and the combat correspondent. As he wrote in his unpublished autobiography in the early 1950s, the text of which is incorporated in this book: ‘‘Here was the opportunity I had been seeking, the chance to become a combat correspondent. Those of us in the trade developed a snobbish pride in drawing a distinction between a ‘war’ correspondent and a ‘combat’ correspondent . WE righteously considered our combat status a step higher in the correspondents’ caste system and, consequently, we had the same clannish feeling that bound combat troops against the rear echelons who had never heard a shot fired in the war.’’ On a personal level, staying in Manhattan to work for the largest and most prestigious wire service in the world surely must have made good sense to Whitehead. He was thirty-four, and he, his beloved wife Marie, and their young daughter Ruth had moved to a nice home on Long Island. At a time when many women did not normally pursue careers, Marie Whitehead had taken a job with a Manhattan advertising agency. Don Whitehead’s career path looked bright as well. But there was a war that needed to be covered, and Don was convinced that he was just the man to do it. Despite warnings of the considerable personal risk he would undergo and the uncertainties as to when he could return home to his family, Whitehead did not blanch. In his usual gung-ho manner, he acknowledged these pitfalls and challenged his cautious higher-ups, ‘‘Time’s a-wastin. When and where do I go?’’ While Whitehead referred to the supportive role that his wife played in his switch to the hazards of frontline war reporting, it is abundantly clear from her letters to him in North Africa that she missed him deeply, just as he so profoundly missed her. Some of his most poignant entries relate to their separation. On December 4, 1942, Whitehead wrote from Cairo, a city that he found both enticing and maddeningly frustrating: ‘‘I found seven letters from Marie waiting for me at the office...

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