Lowell Bennett was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1920. He embarked early on a life of adventure that took him all over the world, before meeting his Scottish wife-to-be in London in 1940 and becoming a war correspondent for the American International News Service. His first war assignment was covering the Allied invasion of Tunisia in October 1942, a story he tells in his first book Assignment to Nowhere, published by the Vanguard Press in 1943 in New York.