As seen in

Stamford Living

Reporting the Second World War extends historian Brian Best’s work on World War I, Reporting from the Front : War Reporters during the Great War, and smoothly transitions between the two through a brief prologue. Not surprisingly, the book has the same strengths and weaknesses as its predecessor.

Once again, Best synthesises a compelling summary about war correspondents and photographers from secondary sources and sprinkles in colorful and insightful quotations from contemporary mass media. As such, Reporting the Second World War provides a strong overview of the challenges, triumphs and costs of wartime journalism.

Best has admirably culled many of the strongest passages from dispatches and memoirs, including Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast accounts of the bombing of London and Robert Capa’s bravery in taking photographs of the D-day landings. Compared with other books of wartime journalism history, Best uses quotes liberally to re-create the texture of news as Western audiences received it...

... the range of material covered is impressive enough that even scholars of World War II journalism will find surprises scattered among the pages. One such discovery is that Eddy Ward of the BBC took a microphone and recording equipment to the front lines of the
Finnish-Soviet war, making him the first broadcast journalist to do so on the scene of live combat. Another is the intense training regimen of correspondents selected to go ashore at Normandy, including instruction in gunnery, signals, reconnaissance, aircraft and tank recognition, map-reading, parachute jumps, assault techniques, and field survival. “There was probably never a fitter corps of pressmen,” Best writes [146].

Given the broad arc of the war and the subject matter, Best deserves credit for creating an engaging but far from comprehensive narrative introduction to war correspondents in the field. The book would be a good primer for a scholar approaching this subject for the first time.

Cercles - Michael S. Sweeney

As reviewed in

Lancashire Life Magazine

Brian Best looks at the stories of the people who reported the war. An engaging and well researched new angle on World War II.

History of War Magazine Issue 24

When you read accounts like this, it's easy to see why some correspondents faced the problems that they did. With the amount of books dedicated to World War II out there, new books on the subject need to not only be well researched and engaging, they need to cover new ground, and it's certainly safe to say that this book does this. It's interesting that so few books are dedicated to the people who informed much of what we understand about history's most destructive conflict - well, now there's at least one more.

All About History Magazine