Fifty years at the front

About this book

In a career spanning nearly half a century, Frederick Palmer reported on more different armies in action than any other journalist. From the 1890s through World War II, his war correspondence was featured on the covers of Collier's, Scribner's, Harper's, and other leading magazines, and on the front pages of daily newspapers across the nation, including the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times. Fifty Years at the Front is the story of a man selected in 1914 by his peers in the press to fill the single slot allotted American journalists with the British forces on the Western Front. Palmer subsequently donned his own country's uniform to handle press relations for the American Expeditionary Force, for which he became the first war correspondent to win the U.S. Army's Distinguished Service Medal. Between wars, Palmer wrote thirty-one books, including Our Greatest Battle, the classic account of U.S. participation in World War I. In his books, he provided thoughtful analysis of the future impact of weapons and strategies he had seen on the battlefield and sounded the alarm on conflicts in the making, often with remarkable accuracy. He had already issued several warnings that a second world war was on the horizon when Princeton University awarded him an honorary doctorate of letters in 1935. To paraphrase that award, Palmer's career was an unparalleled journey into the dark heart of a century defined by war. Though a witness to the escalating destructive power of modern weaponry, he held tightly the hope that mankind would someday heed the message of war correspondents like himself and outsmart what he called "the War Devil."