First published 2022
James Joseph Cassidy was among 362 American journalists covering the European Theater from D-Day until Nazi Germany's surrender. This book combines his personal diary with censored radio scripts from his NBC broadcasts. Cassidy achieved several broadcasting firsts, including the initial live transmission from German territory and organizing a Jewish religious service broadcast from inside Nazi Germany while mortar shells landed nearby. His diary reveals how he gathered stories, navigated military censorship, and transmitted reports from combat zones to American audiences. Radio lacked visual elements, forcing correspondents like Cassidy to develop vivid descriptive techniques. He transported listeners to bombed Aachen, spy-filled back roads, and a Belgian tavern where a child cried as American forces withdrew. The book provides previously unavailable eyewitness accounts and balances the Edward R. Murrow-dominated scholarship on wartime radio journalism. Cassidy's reporting captured both personal fear under German aircraft attacks and grief over fallen colleagues, delivering these experiences through precise journalistic prose.
Genres: history, 20th-century, american, non-fiction, biography-memoir, military-history, journalism, american-history
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: eyewitness-accounts, personal-narrative
Setting: Aachen, Belgium, Germany, Nazi Germany
Period: D-Day, World War II
192 pages · Hardcover · Fordham University Press