Holbrook Bradley

War Correspondent: from D-day to the Elbe Holbrook Bradley

The Blue/Gray shoulder patch told us he was one of ours. He'd been hit in the left shoulder, the uniform ripped and bloody, a temporary bandage on the jagged tear which seemed to cover a quarter of his torso. That wax-like face, eyes closed, no sign of breathing will be with me until I die. During World War II, author Holbrook Bradley's frontline stories of the Twenty-ninth Division, stationed in Europe, became a daily Baltimore Sun must-read. Between 1943 and 1945 thousands of families, friends, and lovers followed Bradley's reports as the chronology of Hitler's defeat unrolled. Now Bradley retells his story in a far more personal narrative. War Correspondent tells the intimate details of his life as a correspondent fully "embedded" in a division that successfully completed every mission assigned to it, at a cost of thousands of dead and wounded. From the beaches of Normandy to the crossing of the Rhine and the early duties of occupation, Bradley chronicles the collapse of a nation physically destroyed by hubris and a war that changed the face of Europe.