Richard Tregaskis: Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam

by Ray E. Boomhower

In the late summer of 1942, more than ten thousand members of the First Marine Division held a tenuous toehold on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal. As American marines battled Japanese forces for control of the island, they were joined by war correspondent Richard Tregaskis. Tregaskis was one of only two civilian reporters to land and stay with the marines, and in his notebook he captured the daily and nightly terrors faced by American forces in one of World War II’s most legendary battles—and it served as the premise for his bestselling book, Guadalcanal Diary.One of the most distinguished combat reporters to cover World War II, Tregaskis later reported on Cold War conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. In 1964 the Overseas Press Club recognized his first-person reporting under hazardous circumstances by awarding him its George Polk Award for his book Vietnam Diary. Boomhower’s riveting book is the first to tell Tregaskis’s gripping life story, concentrating on his intrepid reporting experiences during World War II and his fascination with war and its effect on the men who fought it.

384 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2021

About the author

From famed World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle to unlucky astronaut Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, author and historian Ray E. Boomhower has produced books on a variety of notable figures in Indiana and American history.

Currently senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press, where he edits the quarterly popular history magazine Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Boomhower has also published books on the life of Civil War general and author Lew Wallace, reformer and peace activist May Wright Sewall, U.S. Navy ace Alex Vraciu, and journalist and diplomat John Bartlow Martin.

In 1998 he received the Hoosier Historian award from the Indiana Historical Society and in 2010 he was named winner of the Regional Author Award in the annual Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Awards. In 2009 his book Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary was selected as the winner in the historical nonfiction category of the annual Best Books of Indiana contest sponsored by the Indiana Center for the Book. His books have also been finalists in the annual Benjamin Franklin Awards from the Independent Book Publishers Association.

Reviews

[Gary Sosniecki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember a copy of Richard Tregaskis' "Guadalcanal Diary" on Dad's bookshelf. And Tregaskis' name was so familiar that I mistakenly thought he was one of those talented World War II correspondents who later reported from around the world on CBS. From reading Ray E. Boomhower's excellent biography of Tregaskis, I surmised that I probably recognized his name from his later book on John F. Kennedy's PT-109 exploits and from his articles in the Saturday Evening Post, to which Dad subscribed. Tregaskis' courage, ingenuity, and storytelling ability made him one of the best-known war correspondents of his day, and author Boomhower skillfully relates the dangerous journey Tregaskis took "from the Soloman Islands in the Pacific to the mountains of Sicily and Italy, from the rubble-lined streets of Aachen, Germany, to the skies over Japan inside the steel shell of a Boeing B-29B Superfortress." Later, he reported from Vietnam. Despite being seriously wounded in Italy, despite trying to manage his diabetes, Tregaskis kept returning to the battlefield, amazingly talking his way onto ships, into fighter planes, whatever it took to get to where the action was. He carried a typewriter with him and wrote news stories and books that made readers feel as if they were experiencing the battle themselves. And Tregaskis made a point of identifying each soldier, each sailor by full name and hometown. As a journalist myself, my only complaint is that the book doesn't tell why Tregaskis switched employers (from the International News Service to the Saturday Evening Post) in the middle of the war. I enjoyed the book. If you enjoy military history and biographies of journalists, you will, too. (Full disclosure, I bought the book because I know the author personally; I wrote an article for a magazine he edits. Objectively, I still think it deserves five stars.)

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ray was very kind to send me a copy of this great book. I knew Tregaskis has written Guadalcanal Diary but not much else about him. His WW2 journey is truly remarkable, he may have seen more kinds of combat than any other person. His experiences are remarkably wide ranging, from watching the Doolittle raiders take off, to the battle of midway, then landing with the first Marines on Guadalcanal and experiencing the jungle fighting, flew in bomber missions and even manned a machine gun, was in the mountain fighting in Italy, was wounded there, recovered, then returned to Europe for penetrating the Siegfried line and pillboxes to the urban fight for Aachen, then went back to the pacific and flew in the super fortress bombers and fighters until VJ Day. Then later trips to Korea and Vietnam.

The book really opened my eyes to combat correspondents. I would highly recommend it

[Indiana Authors Awards]

Ernest Hemingway may be the most legendary war reporter, but there are many unsung heroes among the war correspondents of World War Two whose lives of bravery and skill deserve wider recognition. Hoosier historian Ray Boomhower seems to be on a one-man mission to address this neglect, giving us in just the last four years two major biographies of journalists whose epic careers on the front lines have faded from public memory.

First came Dispatches from the Pacific (2017), Boomhower’s book on correspondent Robert Sherrod, of Time and Life, whose reports from the front lines at Iwo Jima are still harrowing to read. And now we have the historian’s second work in this field, an ambitious effort to recover the amazing story of a long-forgotten reporter, Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam...

Read Michael Shelden's full review at: https://www.indianaauthorsawards.org/...