World War II correspondents are a vanishing breed. In September 1989, five hundred of them were invited to a reunion in New York City. Half that number was expected; only about 50 showed up. One of them was Bob Sherrod. He was also one of 14 U.S. correspondents sent to Australia in early 1942 to cover the activities of General Douglas MacArthur. Only two of those correspondents still live, and one of them is in a nursing home. The other, at age 81 and still very active, is Bob Sherrod.
He was born and raised in Thomas County, Georgia, and, despite many years spent working with “Yankees” and Patrolling a beat that took him to most parts of the world, retains the courtly manners and easygoing ways of a southern gentleman. Not even old friends can recall hearing him raise his deep voice above an easy conversational pitch. His origins can still be detected at times (instead of “push” he says, Georgia style, “mash the elevator button”). Sherrod’s low-pressure personal style is reflected in his attire, in which he always looks casual and comfortable. The late Foster Hailey of The New York Times “Profile” described him as “the sort of man whose he women are always either straightening, or wanting to.” Even in uniform in World War II, the casualness of his olive- drab ensembles set him apart.
A vast curiosity led to his journalistic career. He worked his way up from being University of Georgia campus correspondent for the Atlanta Constitution to, by the late 1930s, the Washington, D.C., correspondent for Time magazine.
In mid 1941 Sherrod decided to learn more about the military, so he abandoned Political reporting and covered maneuvers in Louisiana and the Carolinas. As a result of this experience, he became one of Time’s first correspondents to be sent overseas after the Pearl Harbor attack. His first assignment, in March 1942, was Australia. It was not until he shifted to the Aleutians in May 1943 to report on the battle for Attu that Sherrod experienced combat firsthand—and had a narrow escape.
Sherrod had flown in to Attu, a Japanese-occupied island on which the U.S. Army, assisted by naval support, had landed. He had been there a week and had just spent two days observing the heavy fighting in the frigid hills. On the afternoon of 28 May—hungry, weary, and chilled to the bone—he slid and slipped down icy slopes to the Massacre Bay plateau, where the main U.S. force was concentrated. At the rear command post of the 17th Infantry he shared a tent with Lieutenant Colonel James Fish, four other officers, and two sergeants. There, he crawled into the relative warmth of his sleeping bag.
Captain Harold Rosenthal, a Poughkeepsie surgeon who had come ashore from the Army transport David W. Branch to get a few souvenirs, stopped by the tent. He urged the shivering correspondent to go with him to the transport to get a hot bath, a steak, and a night’s sleep in a warm bunk. When Sherrod demurred—it was two miles to the beach over ankle-deep tundra—Rosenthal mentioned that his shipboard bottle of whiskey would be a sure cure for Aleutians chills. Sherrod paused, briefly considered how long it had been since he had had a drink, and wearily stirred himself. They trudged to the shore and took a boat to the ship.
Revived, Sherrod was writing “Company X on Attu” (Life, 21 June 1943) the next day when word came that during the night a thousand howling Japanese had stormed onto the plateau in a maniacal banzai charge. They overran the command post of Colonel Fish and killed everyone in his tent, as well as about 300 other Americans, including wounded soldiers at a medical clearing station. Finally halted by a detachment of Army engineers, the last five hundred Japanese committed suicide, mostly by hand grenades. That ended organized Japanese resistance on Attu.
Sherrod observed the devastation ashore, including the remains of the tent in which his companions had all perished. He says he has been “living on velvet” ever since.
Sherrod was one of nine correspondents to receive Army commendations for their conduct during the 20-day fight for that island. Sherrod was also commended by the Navy.
The Allies landed 35,000 U.S. Army and Canadian troops on Kiska on 15 August only to find that the enemy had skillfully evacuated the island 28 July, leaving the U.S. command with egg on its face.
Soon after, Sherrod reported to his editors back home, in New York, traveling there via Pearl Harbor. “The three September weeks and the 10,000-mile round trip between Honolulu and New York,” he wrote, “were a confusion of flying in an army transport across the Pacific seated on mail bags—one can never imagine, just to look at it, that a mail bag can be so rocky—of battling priority officers to get across the United States, making four round-trip train trips between office in New York and home in Washington, seeing editors and generals and admirals, kissing my wife and children hello and goodbye, flying back from San Francisco to Honolulu on a Navy PB2Y which was rolling down the ramp into the water when I caught it.”
When he reached Pearl Harbor again- he had just three hours to board the new aircraft carrier Lexington (CV-16). From her deck, Sherrod flew in a scout bomber to observe Wake Island under attack on 5-6 October. This resulted in another Life article, “Hold Your Hat, Here We Go”— the pilot’s admonition to his passenger as he began a dive from 15,000 feet.
For all his war experience, Sherrod had never covered the Marines. So he talked Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner into shifting him to the Tarawa phase. He arrived at the Tarawa lagoon in the early morning of 20 November, and climbed down into a vehicle and personnel landing craft loaded with 30 Marines. At the boat rendezvous they transferred to an amphibious tractor that took them within 700 yards of the shore, where they , jumped into neck-high water and headed for the beach through heavy machine-gun fire. “As you got closer,” he wrote, “and the water got shallower, the more of you was exposed. But I made the beach and dried out my notebooks and started taking notes.”
Between the water and a sea wall was 20 feet of sand and coral, 100 yards long. At first that little stretch constituted the , toehold on Red Beach Three. It was the end of the third day before Sherrod got out to the cargo ship Virgo to write for Time his chilling account of the hottest battle of the war thus far.
Bob Sherrod’s book, Tarawa: The Story of A Battle (Admiral Nimitz Foundation, 1973), recreated this bloodiest beach in all of U.S. history, in “perhaps c the finest bit of eye-witness reporting of the war,” according to Lewis Gannett of the New York Herald Tribune, who called it. “The most ghastly, graphic, factual, frightened and frightening picture of front-line battle that I have yet seen in print.”
Sherrod himself says that if he is remembered for anything, it will be because his Tarawa was reviewed favorably by Edmond Wilson—the most eminent literary critic of his time—in the New Yorker in March 1944.
Other reviewers were unanimous in admiration of his work as a war correspondent, and military experts followed suit. Typical was Colonel Evans F. Carlson, who wrote after the Tarawa invasion:
“I came to know Mr. Sherrod when we shared the same transport en route to the target area, and gained a respect for his ability to evaluate events. It did not occur to me that he would attempt to land before a reasonable beachhead had been secured. However, I met him on the beach during the critical first day, and learned that he . . . had accompanied the assault waves of the center battalion ashore. Such devotion to factual reporting deserves special commendation.” Sherrod was planning to go to England in early 1944 to cover the Normandy invasion when Under Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal confided to him that interesting things were about to happen in the Pacific. So back to the Pacific he went, flying to Eniwetok to catch a transport for Saipan (“a tough, tough fight”) and, in 1945, the invasion of Iwo Jima (“the nastiest of all”) and the landing on Okinawa. These battles resulted in another book. On to Westward: Saipan and Iwo Jima (Nautical and Aviation Publishing, 1990), which follows the war from Tarawa to Okinawa, November 1943 to April 1945.
Sherrod hastens to affirm that his wartime books are not definitive history: “The function of a war correspondent, as I see it, is not to write complete stories. He cannot write with the perspective which time alone can furnish. Leave that to the historians and their mountains of official records. At best, the war correspondent can write what he sees and hears and feels; he can perhaps reflect the mood of men in battle, as those men appear and talk and fight.” And he did just that; successfully transferring his sensations and experiences to the printed page.
One of the things that made Sherrod a great war reporter was revealed on a patrol craft during the invasion at Iwo Jima. A colleague who had already been ashore urged him not to go; it was too unimaginably bloody, he said. Agreeing that this business of taking long chances could be carried too far, Sherrod doffed his field pack and put it on the deck of the patrol craft. But then he looked down into the faces of the men in the boat that had brought him to the line of departure, and “saw written on them the same fear that gripped at my guts.” He knew that these men could not stay on a patrol craft, where it was warm, and there was coffee, and there wouldn’t be much danger. They had to go in. He knew then that he had to go in too. He reshouldered the pack, was asked, “Are you ready to go?” “And I said, ‘Sure,’ very bravely, though I was mighty scared.”
After the war, he lived in Shanghai with his wife and children until 1948, reporting for Time on the collapse of colonialism in India, Burma, Indonesia, and Indochina—“real history in the making.” When he returned to the United States he was asked by the Marine Aviation History Board to write a history of its aviation. After a year’s leave he returned to Time as its chief Pentagon correspondent. For three more years, with the help of a uniformed staff, he wrote the aviation history at night and on weekends. He also wrote the text for Life’s Picture History of World War II (Time, 1950), which sold 600,000 copies. His History of Marine Corps Aviation in World War II (Nautical and Aviation Publishing, 1986) was published in 1952 to general acclaim as a real history.
Sherrod’s career took a new turn when, in 1952 he joined The Saturday Evening Post as Far East correspondent. When he came home on leave in 1955, the magazine chose him as its managing editor, and in March 1962, as editor-in-chief. His years of editing other people’s writing left little time and opportunity for his own.
He became editorial coordinator of all Curtis magazines in 1965, after a spell as the Post's editor-at-large, wherein he became a correspondent again, but this time the world was his beat. Sherrod teamed up with the immortal Norman Rockwell and photographer Ollie Atkins to produce exclusive interviews with Prime Minister Motilal Nehru of India, President Gamal Nasser of Egypt, and Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, among others. In July 1966 Sherrod resumed his own writing career, focusing on historical writing and freelance work, including two years as a contract writer for Life.
“Notes on a Monstrous War,” which Sherrod wrote for the 27 January 1967 issue of Life, was a landmark article. The former war correspondent concluded: “After nearly two months in Vietnam 1 find this the most hateful war we have ever fought. ... We find ourselves supporting a government of mandarins with little basis of popular support, fighting for an army that has little inclination to do its own fighting.” Up to that point the Time publications had been wholeheartedly supporting this “hateful war.”
Sherrod’s current avocational interests are two sons, four grandchildren, and a . mountainous library of history, military, and political works that fill every nook and cranny of his comfortable office I home in northwest Washington, D.C. He lives alone, having lost two wives— Elizabeth Hudson and Mary Gay Labrot Leonhardt—to cancer. An in-between marriage ended in divorce.
His text for Life’s Picture History of the Pacific War was translated into Japanese, as were his Tarawa and On to Westward (the Japanese translations all were runaway bestsellers). Sherrod is coauthor with Wemher von Braun, James E- Webb, astronaut James Lovell, and others, of Apollo Expeditions to the Moon (Government Printing Office, 1975). which is still in print, as are Tarawa On to Westward, and History of Marine Corps Aviation. He has contributed to other books.
He still writes essays to set the record straight, reviews many books—which he calls “dwelling in the sub-basement of creative writing”—and is working on another long-term book project that he proposes not to talk about yet.
He is a founder, charter member, director, and adviser of the Marine Corps Historical Foundation, which in October 1987 gave him its second ever Distinguished Service Award.
Will he write his memoirs? “I don’t think so,” Bob Sherrod says, then after a pause he muses, “I might write about my being scared to death by the kamikazes and by the great typhoon of December 1944,” when Admiral William Halsey almost put Third Fleet’s fast carrier task force into the Mindanao Deep.
Asked about the transition from journalist to historian, he reports: “We journalists frequently don’t get things right- Sometimes we are conned into errors, other times we surmise wrong. But correcting journalism is what history is about.”