Grove Koger
Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War. Random House, 2022
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Three-quarters of a century after its conclusion, World War II continues to fascinate us. Histories of its frightening run-up, ruinous course, and numbing aftermath are legion, and their number continues to grow. Like World War I, which after all laid the groundwork for it, World War II was a world-encompassing earthquake whose aftershocks look as if they might continue forever.
Thanks to all those books, we in the twenty-first century may feel sometimes that we know too much about the conflict, but the ordinary British and American citizens who lived through the events relied almost totally on what they read in the newspapers and what they heard on their radios. And it was thanks to a band of foreign correspondents working on the ground in Europe and, to a lesser extent, Asia—chief among them John Gunther, his wife Frances Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson—that they could do so.
The correspondents were young and pretty green. Most seem to have been neurotic and many were alcoholic, or were well on their way. They were often right about what they saw, sometimes wrong, frequently brilliant. They were also promiscuous and astonishingly brave. For them, the conflict was personal, and they managed to make history while reporting it. As Cohen observes, “The fault lines that ran through a crumbling Europe … ran through their own lives as well.”
Of the individuals I’ve mentioned, I was familiar with only John Gunther. He was once famous for Inside Europe, the first edition of which appeared in 1936, and although I haven’t read it, I intend to remedy the situation soon. I knew the names Sheean and Thompson, but I couldn’t have told you anything about them. If you’re in the same boat, then you’ll find Last Call as fascinating as I have. I’ve never encountered another work that mixes personal and world history so effectively and so well.
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