American Reporters on the Western Front, 1914-18

By Emmet Crozier

Oxford University Press,  1959

Reviewed by John Beatty

In the pantheon of works on World War One, those specifically about war correspondents are few and far between. Emmet Crozier (1893-1982) was a reporter, editor and war correspondent for the Kansas City Star and the New York Herald Tribune in his long journalistic career. Having covered the Pacific theater in WWII, he wrote a well-received book on Union war correspondents, Yankee Reporters 1861-65, and followed it with this book. Written in an older prose style than most readers are used to, the work is well done and fills critical gaps in our understanding of the Great War. Arranged in 24 chapters, an appendix and bibliography, American Reporters feels partly like a news story and partly like a memoir. Crozier was not in Europe during the war, but he certainly knew many, if not most, of the veteran correspondents who were, and could cover them with a humane and almost touching understanding of their trials and triumphs.

Starting with Chapter I, "Panic on the Bourse," the reader gets an understanding of French and British reluctance to accredit any correspondents at all. The French, especially, felt that their defeat in 1870 was due to too little censorship; the British felt much of their inability to smash the Boers was due in part to too many reporters. The Americans who happened to be in France and Belgium at the beginning of the war were beyond the reach of the military, however. But the Belgians and the Germans weren't much friendlier to the American reporters trying to scoop each other. Just getting their stories out meant getting them onto already crowded telegraph circuits. The best, most effective reporting was on the Americans trapped in Europe when all the banks closed and they boarded the hotels up for lack of labor. These stories, too, reveal another aspect of WWI that is infrequently discussed.

In the next three chapters, "The Advanced Guard Sails," "Germans on the March," and "Fakers and Atrocities," Crozier tells us where American war correspondents came from, and what they were accustomed to covering. Most came from police reporting, some from the sports blotter, but many were veterans of covering conflicts from Santiago to Peking, from Korea to the Balkans. Three and four-war reporters weren't unusual. And they expected to see the aftermath of battles, but nothing prepared them to see...next to nothing. The British and French would not accredit any American reporters—or any others—until 1916. Nonetheless, subsequent chapters reveal the dogged determination of Americans to get the story. In "The Splendid Story," we see how the battle of Loos was singled out as a major victory while they ignored the Marne...on purpose, just to get the story out because the French wouldn't allow any mention of the titanic fight. But the American coverage of the survivors of Lusitania was the first time the British didn't interfere with the Americans, as we see in "Survivors in Queenstown."

After 1915, Crozier's story petered out until 1916, when the British and French both accredited the reporters. In 1917, when the Americans entered the war, the American reporters had been covering the conflict, sort of, for three years. However, the Americans sent a whole new batch...with the same issues of access and censorship.

Throughout the work, we get to see the life of a war correspondent as that of a vagabond working for a few days, writing and resting for a few more, and after a few cycles of this taking ship for home. It was expensive keeping these men—they are all men—in hotels and hired cars for weeks at a time, especially when they weren't writing much about the war itself, which was practically forbidden, even by the Americans. Since 1941 we've been accustomed to the Ernie Pyle-style embedded coverage that simply wasn't seen in WWI. If a reporter was in France for over four months, he was a veteran and his wife was near. 

What is most useful about Crozier's book is how Reporters treat the conflict itself as a character that people talk about, defend, attack, and otherwise describe as if detached from its drama. Even the chapter on "The Lost Battalion" is a riff that could have described many of the myths that shaped other exaggerations of the press, including the "Thunder Run" into Baghdad in 2003.

The last chapter, "Runaway Correspondents," covers the three reporters who not only followed the Germans back out of France, but managed to make it all the way to Berlin to report on the brewing chaos there in November 1918. While breaking loose of their censorial masters was frowned upon by officialdom, they were the first reporters anywhere to get first-hand accounts of Germany in collapse.

While covering battles was important, narratives like Crozier's fill in gaps not just about the civilians covering the fighting, but how the officials treated the reporters, and how the "first draft of history" gets drafted, despite resistance from the higher-ups. Crozier's book, if you can find it, is well worth exploring as a lesson in historiography and history. It can be ordered online at Amazon HERE.

John D Beatty, MA, Military History