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Publishing November 15, “Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire From Guadalcanal To Vietnam”

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As mentioned on this blog, I’m a lifelong fan of reading biographies, and it’s a delight to work on so many good ones, like Ray E. Boomhower’s new portrait of the life and career of Richard Tregaskis, one of the most accomplished combat correspondents of the twentieth century. Here’s how the catalog copy for University of New Mexico Press’s High Road imprint describes the book:

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…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.

 

Richard B. Frank, author of Guadalcanal: The Definitive Account of the Landmark Battle, says of the new biography:

“Alongside Ernie Pyle, Tregaskis was perhaps the most outstanding American war correspondent of WWII. [He’s] best know for…Guadalcanal Diary, but that book covered only one small chapter of his reporting from the front lines. Ray Boohmoer’s excellent new biography finally does justice to Tregaskis in this deeply researched, thoughtful portrait of the man and his times.”

 

The book’s official pub date will be November 15, and I’m getting an early start on congratulating the author, for whom I’ve already sold a second biography of an important journalist to UNMP, The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World. Congrats, Ray!

 

 

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Sold: “WAR DIARIST: The Many Battles of Richard Tregaskis” by Ray E. Boomhower

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January 2021 update: The book on Richard Tregaskis will be published in Fall 2021. The author and University of New Mexico Press have settled on a final title: Richard Tregaskis: Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam.
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Delighted that I’ve sold Ray E. Boomhower’s WAR DIARIST: The Many Battles of Richard Tregaskis by independent scholar Ray E. Boomhower to University of New Mexico Press (UNMP) for publication in fall 2021. In 1943, combat reporter Tregaskis published GUADALCANAL DIARY, acquired by Bennett Cerf at Random House, which became an instant bestseller and the first book to emerge from the Pacific theater, when Americans had had little chance to read about the fighting there. Here are some grafs from the pitch letter I sent to the editor at UNMP, and photos that will be in the book, including one of the lanky reporter.

In 1942-43, Tregaskis (1916-73) was one of just two reporters “embedded” with US forces in the Pacific, before the specialized use of that term existed. He observed the fierce fighting between the Americans and Japanese, sending daily dispatches that had to be cleared by military censors before they could go to his editors at the International News Service. Some things he did not share with any editors or readers, as Boomhower writes:

“During his time on Guadalcanal, Tregaskis and United Press International reporter Bob Miller armed themselves with Colt 1911A1 pistols in direct contravention of U.S. War Department regulations prohibiting correspondents from using weapons. “We knew and the Marines knew that if we ran up against Jap[anese] snipers, they weren’t going to ask for our credentials.” Upon leaving Guadalcanal on a B-17 bomber, Tregaskis also helped man one of the plane’s .50-caliber machine guns and fired on an attacking Japanese Zero fighter.”

While breaking the mold for a war reporter, Boomhower notes that Tregaskis also harbored a distressing medical secret:

“Neither his colleagues in the field or his superiors at the International News Service knew that when he began his work in the Pacific Tregaskis had to contend with a recently diagnosed condition—diabetes, a debilitating disease that plagued his family.”

At one point, while briefly laid over in Pearl Harbor, he sent an expanded collection of his combat dispatches to a wire service editor who shopped the manuscript to more than a half dozen book publishers in NY. Bennett Cerf read it overnight and acquired the rights the next day. This became Guadalcanal Diary, an early example of “an instant book”; it was an immediate bestseller for Random House, and before WWII had ended, a Hollywood movie with Anthony Quinn, William Bendix, and Richard Conte.

At another point during Tregaskis’s reporting career, while covering combat action in Italy, the 6-foot, 5-inch tall reporter was struck by an artillery shell that punctured his helmet and nearly killed him. Following brain surgery—when a metal plate was inserted into his skull—and a difficult five-month recuperation back in the States, he learned to speak again by reciting poetry, and in June 1944 resumed work, reporting from the Normandy beachhead established on D-Day.

Boomhower’s book will chronicle Tregaskis’s whole story from before the war, and beyond. He was a Harvard grad, Class of ’38, whose classmates included Kermit Roosevelt, Joseph Kennedy, Jr., and the historian Theodore White. Tregaskis knew Ernie Pyle and the photographer Robert Capa.

I’ve found Boomhower’s writing in the sample chapters as alive and vivid about reporting under extreme and dangerous challenges as Tregaskis’s own indelible war reporting. By the late 1960s, more than three million copies of Guadalcanal Diary had been sold and it had been translated into twelve languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Danish. The book is in print as a Modern Library edition with an Introduction by Mark Bowden, while many of Tregaskis’s wartime dispatches are included in volume 1 of the Library of America’s book Reporting World War II. Ray E. Boomhower is senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press. He is the author of more than ten books including Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Democratic Primary (2008, Indiana University Press), which won the Indiana Center for the Book’s 2009 award in nonfiction.

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