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Reporting on WWII for the Chicago Daily News from 1941 to 1945, George Weller (1907-2002) filed stories from every theater. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for a story on an emergency appendectomy performed with kitchen utensils on a submarine in Japanese waters. He was strafed and shelled, contracted recurrent malaria, trained as a paratrooper, flew a mission over Italy on a B-17 with two engines down. He was the first outside observer at nuclear-devastated Nagasaki. He reported it all in an urbane, understated style that never palls. Weller had no sense of himself as a Great Journalist-which perhaps is why he was one. Weller's 1944 presentation of "the worldwide American" stands out as a model of brevity and insight: "His foreign policy represents an attempt to become popular by being benevolent, rather than to be respected by being reasonable." Weller has been obscured by better known personalities like Ernie Pyle. This anthology, edited by his son, should give him the recognition his work merits. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.George Weller wrote for the Chicago Daily News for 35 years, achieving fame for his widely ranging dispatches from the many fronts of World War II. He was captured by the Gestapo in Greece, escaped from Java on a boat strafed by Japanese fighters, marched with Belgian colonial troops fighting Italian colonial troops in Ethiopia, and slogged through swamps with Americans and Australians locked in grim struggles in New Guinea. Weller's war reporting won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1943. Here, his son assembles many of his dispatches, which add tremendously to our understanding of the war at ground level, the people's war. His aim was to tell the people back home what their heroes were doing. Anthony Weller previously edited First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, a book of his father's unpublished dispatches from post-surrender Japan. Anyone interested in World War II will want to read both volumes.
—Edwin B. Burgess
Foreword 1
I Early European Dispatches 15
II The Fall of Greece 31
III Canopies over Crete 71
IV The de Gaulle Debacle in Brazzaville 89
V The Belgian Campaign in Ethiopia 111
VI "In Darkest Africa" 135
VII With Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa 149
VIII Singapore Is Silent 169
IX The Collapse of Java 231
X "Luck to the Fighters!" 259
XI The Defense of Australia 319
XII Somewhere in New Guinea 355
XIII The Struggle for the Islands 453
XIV Bases Overseas 485
XV The Home Front 505
XVI Flak over Italy 513
XVII The Liberation of Greece 527
XVIII Across the Middle East 559
XIX From Burma to China 577
XX Japan Defeated 601
Acknowledgments 631
Index 635
Overview
Vivid and heart-stopping, the dispatches of World War II correspondent George Weller (1943 Pulitzer Prize) are as resonant and relevant today as when they first appeared more than sixty years ago. With nearly a hundred pages of never-before-published reports, enhanced by detailed maps and a selection of Weller's own photographs, this incisive and memorable volume sets a new pinnacle of excellence in wartime journalism.