(2008), which won the Harry S. Truman Book Award, When Soldiers Fall (2014), which won the Neustadt Prize, and The War Beat Europe (2017) which won the American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year Award.
Casey applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War Against Japan, and reported the following:
For more than a year after Pearl Harbor, the fighting in the Pacific remained shrouded from the American home front. Super-strict censorship at a time of defeat and retreat was one reason, for both the navy and the army were desperate to deny Japan any information that would give it operational advantage. The difficulty of getting to distant battlefields, as well as the heat, insects, and disease that awaited in the jungle, were another, for logistical obstacles and grueling living conditions meant that few war correspondents survived at the front for long, even without the danger posed by the marauding enemy.Learn more about The War Beat, Pacific at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99 of The War Beat, Pacific shows how these second set of difficulties hampered reporting on Guadalcanal in September 1942. Only five correspondents had made it on to the island by the time of the fighting along Bloody Ridge, when the Marines repulsed a major Japanese attack, and two of them left as soon as this battle was over. The three reporters who remained exhibited all the telltale signs that afflicted almost everyone on Guadalcanal: a torn and grubby uniform, black rings around the eyes, and a semi-emaciated frame. Small wonder that they, too, soon decided to depart. Richard Tregaskis, who had landed with the Marines on invasion day, left in late September suffering from a bad bout of dysentery. On making it safely to Pearl Harbor, Tregaskis compiled a diary of his time on Guadalcanal, which, on the back of a Book-of-the-Month Club deal and a Hollywood film contract, became the way that many Americans first learned what had happened during this campaign, but neither appeared until 1943. While the battle raged, so little news made it back to the home front that some reporters began referring to the fighting in the Pacific as “the unknown war.”
Page 99 highlights this aspect of war reporting in the Pacific theater in 1942, but a browser who looked no further would miss many of the book’s other themes, from the attempts made by Douglas MacArthur to dominate the headlines, even at a time of setback, to the navy’s efforts to publicize their campaigns more effectively from 1943, which set off a dynamic interaction with the army that, in turn, ensured a much fuller coverage of the fighting by 1944 and 1945.
The Page 99 Test: When Soldiers Fall.
The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Europe.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
