This week on Weapons and Warfare, as the world reflects on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Host Ryan Robertson has a conversation with a journalism professor and documentarian, Barney McCoy, about his latest film, “Running Towards The Fire: A War Correspondent’s Story.” This new documentary centers on the experiences of World War II correspondent Robert Rueben who made the jump into Normandy with airborne troops in the early hours ahead of the Allied invasion.
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Below is an excerpt from Ryan’s conversation with documentary producer and University of Nebraska Professor Barney McCoy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ryan Robertson: Thank you so much, Barney McCoy, for joining us today. You have a great documentary that just came out. It’s called “Running Towards the Fire.” It tells the story of a war correspondent, the first American war correspondent on the ground, reporting from the Allied invasion of France.
So, you know, we’ll go into all the different stories about it and everything, Barney, but how did you hear about this story?
Barney McCoy: It really began with another Nebraskan by the name of Barney Oldfield, a graduate of this college. And he was a public information officer with the U.S. Army Airborne in World War II, and going into the Normandy invasion months and months beforehand. He was tasked with beginning to vet some of the correspondents that would be credentialed to to go ashore during the invasion and report on what was happening with the Allied troops, the U.S. troops in France and certainly beyond that.
So as I was looking through Oldfield’s extensive volume of materials at the State Historical Museum, I came upon some correspondence between Oldfield and this guy named Robert Reuben. And that’s what I really found out about Reuben’s story because Barney had recruited Reuben and five other work correspondents. If they could go through airborne jump school, if they were crazy enough to do that and survive five successful parachute jobs, they would have the privilege of flying with the U.S. Army Airborne, five hours before the D-Day invasion began, behind German enemy lines, and then if they survived, to report on what was happening on the ground.
So Reuben was the first of the six correspondents to actually hit the ground in Normandy. Ruben was working for Reuters as a Reuters correspondent. And so I contacted Reuters and I said, “Do you have any photographs, you have any records?” I’ve got a lot of the newspaper articles that Ruben wrote during this whole process, during Normandy and beyond into Germany, but I just didn’t really have much in the way of photographs, or really anything else to tell me much about Rubens job as a Reuters correspondent. Long story short, an archivist in London, went out to their warehouse, and about a month later contacted me back he said, “Hey, Barney, I’ve got some photographs. You could use these photographs of Ruben when he was a correspondent for Reuters.”
Robertson: It’s amazing that it’s just sat on a shelf in a warehouse. For all these years when you, when the archivist said “Oh, we found this manuscript,” what did you say, “What do you mean you found a manuscript?” What was going through your mind?
McCoy: Well, number one is, “Can we get a copy?” Cause it was like, you know, like, okay, you hear about things like this. And you think to yourself, “Okay, this could really be wonderful,” but I need to actually find out what kind of things he was writing in this memoir.
Robertson: Just because it’s 400 pages doesn’t mean it’s good, right?
McCoy: It doesn’t mean it’s good at all. They sent us a copy of the memoir, I started going through this, and I said, “We want to produce a story about the important role that correspondents played in World War II.” And this guy was the very personification of that and describing in very intimate and personal details, the things that he was experiencing, as he was reporting to the rest of the world on what was unfolding in combat and World War II.
Robertson: One of the archival pieces of footage that you found was Reuben with Eisenhower and Churchill.
McCoy: It’s one of the first things that Reuben talks about early in his memoirs, and he said, “I got really fixated on the idea of trying to see if I could go with the airborne. We knew that they were going to go into Normandy, but I wanted to be there with them when they parachuted into Normandy at the very beginning,” what became the D-Day invasion.
Robertson: While you’re reading through his memoirs, some of the things that stuck out to me in the documentary that you mentioned, obviously must have stuck out to you because you included it in the documentary. He was on the road to Paris. There was the big push to be the first to report on the liberation of Paris. He and a Reuters buddy take alternate routes to try to increase their odds of getting there. He makes it, and his buddy doesn’t.
Later on, he talks about being some of the first American boots to be in some of these liberated areas, being some of the first Americans that these Europeans have seen, that they’ve been praying for. What were some of the stories, some of the things that really stuck out in your mind from Reuben’s time documenting all of his travels?
McCoy: I think just the overwhelming over the the period of time that he was reporting in the field, 25 years old, and witnessing combat for the very first time in his life, and, you know, all the horrific things that happen in combat. And just the sheer exhaustion, I mean, literally 24 hours a day, seven days a week, he was either in the field covering combat, or he was trying to get him back through censors back to, they haven’t published back in Great Britain and sent around the world. I think what we really see in this program is just the erosion of the physical, the mental wear down that combat puts on anybody who’s a participant in that.
It really gave me a much greater appreciation for the kinds of sacrifices that war correspondents were making, guys like Robert Reuben and so many others, hundreds of others, as they were trying to chronicle, the incredible the ultimate sacrifices that so many soldiers and sailors and airmen were making in World War II as well. At the same time, they made sure that those people who were fighting these wars knew that people back home had not forgotten about them. They could read stories about themselves or their units in the newspaper and know that all their efforts were not in vane. So I think that was an important thing that really came through. And certainly, when Bill Stringer, who was a colleague of his was killed, was ambushed by German troops as they were both trying to be the first among the first to get to Paris for the liberation of Paris, in 1944. To me, that is one of the heartbreaking scenes of that, that whole documentary where It all comes together and, and ruin was just so devastated.
Robertson: What impressed you the most about Ruben and about his ability to carry on?
McCoy: How dedicated he was to the task of reporting, even though it was taking a terrible physical and mental toll on him, there’s no doubt about that. And yet, he kept coming back time and time again, and doing some amazing reporting.
Robertson: He did these things 80 years ago, but I was still inspired by Rubens. As you said, he had a major commitment to journalism. He knew, “I want to parachute out of a perfectly good plane and float down into enemy like occupied land. I want to do that knowing full well like the caveat is if you survive, then you can go do your job.” How do you think that level of journalism compares to some of the journalism that we see today?
McCoy: I’ve had to put that under the lens of war correspondents. And I would say, if I were to take a look at the kind of war correspondent reporting I’m seeing today, for example, in places like Gaza, or certainly before that over the past couple of years in Ukraine, I’d say that level of dedication is still there, the the risk that war correspondents today are taking to be able to report and get word out, in many regards, may be more dangerous, because of the weaponry and the technology and the lethality of weapons today than it was even back in World War II. Sixty-nine war correspondents and photographers were killed in World War II, and more than that more journalists than that had been killed in Gaza over the past six months. So that really tells you again, just how lethal being in a war zone can be for a correspondent and certainly in places like Ukraine, too. I would say the dedication is still there, the risk may, in many regards, be even greater today for war correspondents who are working in war zones.
As far as the rest of the journalism pack, we know that we’re living in a world where there are different focuses by news outlets on the way that they cover the news. Some have a left bias, some have a right bias, some do a good job of being straight and down the middle. But we have more of that separation.
In terms of news outlets, I think, than we’ve had in modern history, certainly a much different story than what we had back in World War II, when pretty much everybody was on the same page, as far as their values, what they were attempting to do, the stories they were writing, who they were representing, and so forth, and so on. I think that that probably is the biggest difference in what we see with news outlets today, and why people really need to be sure that they stay informed and find trustworthy, reliable news outlets that they consistently can rely upon to stay informed.
Robertson: Why is it important for you to tell the story of war correspondents like Ruben?
McCoy: I think that some people really understand how important it is to have independent sources out there that can report to them, that they can make up their own minds about that, they can get information when it’s important for them to be informed. Certainly in times of war, that’s a critical thing. There are all risks involved with all of it to some extent, but riskiest of them all has to be a war correspondent, they understand that anytime they’re out in combat, anywhere near a place where a battle is unfolding, that their lives are also potentially at risk, too. And we’ve seen that. How many journalists have died in Gaza? How many journalists have died covering the war in Ukraine?That, again, is a reminder that there is a price for information. There are tremendous sacrifices being made by these news outlets who are deciding that they’re going to try and cover these stories, and have independent ears and eyes on the scene, their reporters or correspondents, helping to get that word back home to people like you and me.
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