The Press: Assignment at Dieppe

U.S. correspondents in London drew lots to see who would go to the party. The five who won, along with 17 British and Canadian newsmen, sailed across the Channel with the Commandos, ducked bullets and bombs throughout the battle and returned to London to write some of the most vivid stories of World War II (see p. 26). Three of the 22 landed on the Dieppe beaches and got back alive. Only casualty was International News Service’s Larry Meier, who was cut in the face and chest by shrapnel but got himself patched up and wrote his story.

Most exciting story was that of Canadian Press’s Ross Munro, 28. Crouching in an assault barge, he was beached directly in front of Dieppe, under fire so withering that his boatload was unable to get ashore. Machine guns in Nazi positions on the cliffs overhead rained bullets into the boat, wounding or killing half of its men. Eventually, after shifting from boat to boat and surviving a heavy dive-bombing, Munro got ashore for a few minutes. He arrived in his London office in a torn, bloody uniform, haggard from three days and nights without sleep, and wrote for twelve hours straight, keeping himself awake with benzedrine tablets.

Longest ashore was the Montreal Standard’s Wallace Reyburn, who had six and a half hours of it, finally had to swim off to a torpedo boat. Collier’s Quentin Reynolds saw the battle from a destroyer, flagship of the raiding fleet, Associated Press’s Drew Middleton from a 100-foot launch. Other U.S. correspondents: National Broadcasting’s John McVane, the New York Sun’s Gault MacGowan. MacGowan, a veteran roving reporter and soldier of fortune, had the unluckiest tale, got it through to the Sun, a day late, only after a long struggle with censors. Shipped, against his will, in an old rattlebox of a ship named only with the number 13, he discovered too late that she was merely a transport for reserve tanks. He sat fuming offshore while his fellow correspondents moved up to grandstand seats, consoled himself by drinking brandy with the ship’s doctor.

Headline writers who handled the story on U.S. copy desks covered themselves with less glory than the correspondents. Wildest headline was in the Los Angeles Times, which cried in four-inch letters: FRANCE INVADED.

The New York Herald Tribune’s London Correspondent Geoffrey Parsons Jr. cabled his paper: “Americans in Great Britain . . . blushed with embarrassment this morning when London papers reprinted the headlines of several New York evening papers . . . ‘U.S. AND BRITISH INVADE FRANCE’ . . . ‘TANKS AND U.S. TROOPS SMASH AT FRENCH COAST.’ All these headlines are outrageous exaggerations of the role American troops played. . . . Actually, not more than several score of American Rangers went along and, although they performed gallant and dangerous jobs, they played a minor role.”