Cornelius Ryan and the origins of the New Journalism, a new branch of Vietnam Voices, and some of Motown’s one-hit wonders: newsletter, June 19, 2020

Today, we would call it crowd-sourcing. Back in 1956, however, it didn’t have a name.

Cornelius Ryan, a well-known but out-of-work journalist, had an idea that he was shopping around. He wanted to write a book about D-Day, figuring that in three years — the time it would take for him to do the book and get it published — we would be celebrating the 15th anniversary of the event. But he didn’t want to write it from the generals’ and politicians’ point of view. That would be easy enough to include.

What Ryan wanted to do with this book was to include the soldiers’ point of view. He wanted to tell their stories and to put ordinary readers into the scenes that he would be describing.

Ryan was an Irishman, born in Dublin in 1920. He came to London in 1941 and joined the staff of the London Daily Telegraph, covering the air war over Germany. He flew 14 often dangerous missions with U.S. bombers as they sought out German targets. He then was assigned to Patton’s Army. He was there on D-Day, along with dozens of other reporters, and he followed Patton’s Army until the end of the war in Europe. Then he went to the Pacific, where he covered the end of the war with Japan.

After the war, he went to Jerusalem for the Daily Telegraph and the next year was offered a job as a contributing editor to Time magazine. That prompted a move to New York City, and he eventually he became a U.S. citizen. In 1949 he made a trip to Normandy, where he began to develop the idea of a book on Operation Overlord, the codename of the invasion.

During the next few years, he continued to cover major stories for Time and Collier’s and won recognition and numerous awards. The idea of the D-Day book never left him, however, and in 1956 when Collier’s went bust, he decided to see if he could find a backer for his idea. The Readers Digest got interested enough to finance Ryan’s method: advertising in personal columns around the U.S. to find soldiers who had been in those first waves of troops who came ashore on June 6 and 7, 1944.

More than 1,100 people responded to the ads, and Ryan asked them to write down what they could remember about the experience. He interviewed more than 150 face-to-face.

Ryan’s book, The Longest Day, is full of small stories and riveting details: what it was like to get shot, parachuting into France in the dark behind enemy lines, what German General Erwin Rommel had for breakfast (when he remembered to eat at all). It was an instant and huge success, and the movie on which it is based sealed its fame as one of the seminal works on World War II.

Ryan wrote two more significant World War II books: The Last Battle and A Bridge Too Far, both of which were also full of the telling stories and details that made the books so readable. He died of cancer in 1975, after struggling through chemotherapy treatments while working to finish A Bridge Too Far.

Ryan’s books weren’t just good and popular. Michael Shapiro argues that they portended a new type of journalism that eventually became known as the New Journalism, the type of immersive reporting that was famously practiced by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese:

In a sense, Cornelius Ryan started reporting The Longest Day on June 6, 1944, and never really stopped. That day, that war, was his story. And when a reporter comes back with something that, as Norman Maclean once wrote, “tells him something about himself,” readers know it. They feel it on the page and in the prose, and willingly join along in that relentless need to know, and to make sense of things.

Ryan, it turns out, did learn something of himself in his work, and came to know himself well enough to have it inscribed on his tombstone, beneath his name and the years of his too-short life. A single word: Reporter. (Shapiro, Michael. (May/June 2010). The reporter whom time forgot: how Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day changed journalism. Columbia Journalism Review.)

We have recently expanded the Blount County Public Library’s Vietnam Voices project by creating the Tennessee Vietnam War Roundtable, a monthly online conference for those interested in learning more about America’s involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. 

We had our first meeting on Monday, June 8, and the featured speaker was Billy Minser, an artillery officer who was the “forward observer” for an infantry unit. Billy talks about what it meant to be a forward observer and what it took to call in artillery and airstrikes to support his unit.

We have posted these videos that include part of what he said: 

https://bit.ly/tvwr-forwardobserver1 – What it was like to be a “forward observer” with a combat unit

https://bit.ly/tvwr-forwardobserver2 – “A wall of exploding steel around us”

Billy was one of the editors of the first volume of Vietnam Voices: Stories of East Tennesseans Who Served in Vietnam, 1965-1975.  This book is a set of transcriptions of some of the interviews we have conducted with veterans who served in-country in Vietnam.

We are working on a second volume of Vietnam Voices and hope to have it published this summer.

Here’s the official description of the Tennessee Vietnam War Roundtable:

The Tennessee Vietnam War Roundtable (TVWR) is an online presentation and discussion program that is a part of the Vietnam Voices project of the Blount County Public Library and the Blount County Friends of the Library.

TVWR conducts periodic online meetings (via the Zoom conferencing software) that feature short presentations by knowledgeable speakers about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1965 to 1975. These presentations are open to anyone who is interested in learning about the Vietnam War, and there is no charge for participating.

A major focus of this program is hearing from people who served in-country in the U.S. armed forces during that period. TVWR is not limited to this focus, however. We seek to hear from anyone who has expert knowledge about America’s involvement in Vietnam.

The Vietnam Voices project of the Blount County Public Library is an audio archive of interviews with Vietnam War veterans. In addition to the audio archive, the project to date has published one volume of these interviews that is available for sale in the library and on Amazon (https://bit.ly/vietnamvoices1).

Format

TVWR typically meets as a Zoom conference, and the meetings last for 30 to 45 minutes. The meeting has a host and a speaker. Meeting times are the second Monday of each month at 7 p.m. Eastern Time.

The speaker gives a 10- to 20-minute presentation. During this time, other participants are able to use the chat function of Zoom to ask questions or make comments. At the end of the presentations, the host and/or speaker will choose which questions to answer or comments to respond to. Participants can turn on their audio so they can ask questions directly and make comments.

Audio and video of the meeting are recorded using the Zoom recording function.

YouTube

After the meeting is concluded, the video of the meeting will be edited and will be available on a TVWR YouTube channel.

Purposes of TVWR

The purposes of TVWR are

— to increase our knowledge and understanding of the American involvement in Vietnam, 1965-1975;
— to allow those who served in Vietnam an opportunity to tell their stories in a public format;
— to record and archive those stories for our historical record;
— to allow more people to participate in the Blount County Public Library’s Vietnam Voices project;
— to extend the reach of the Vietnam Voices project beyond the confines of Blount County and East Tennessee.

Reactions

Marcia D.: I live in an apartment so no garden. However, my Parish leases the land by my apartment building for a garden which is fenced. Before the Virus, my Parish was feeding about 300 people a day, 5 days a week. It would be a hot meal. The vegetables in the garden supply fresh vegetables for their meals. The garden committee has done an awesome job of decorating the garden. 

Jacqueline M.: Love your newsletters … especially about your bee  keeping.

Tod W.: I especially enjoyed your notes on William McIlvanney, an author I’d also never heard of. It took me a while but I finally found where ebook versions could be bought. They’re available here on Amazon in case your readers might be interested. 

I also liked your section on early violin crafting. Jorja Fleezanis is a great friend and my next-door neighbor and has held a chair in Violin at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. Prior to that position, she served as Concertmaster in the Minneapolis Symphony under the direction of Osmo Vänskä, and Assistant Concertmaster of the SF Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas. Until his death in 2009 she was married to critic Michael Steinberg.  I have no idea what her violin’s lineage is but, in performance, it sounds wicked good.

Thanks for your ongoing jottings,