CB's War: A Writer’s Journey

Early in World War II, before the United States entered into the conflict, a young American journalist—CB Wall—traveled to the capital of wartime Germany to see how Berliners fared as the Royal Air Force assaulted their city in sporadic bombings during 1941. Living under threat of internment behind enemy lines, the foreign correspondent captured stories of civilians enduring the privations of war, with food and clothing rationed, and sleepless nights in basement air raid shelters. He observed the grim treatment of increasingly desperate Jews in Germany and Poland at a time when the horrors of the Holocaust could not yet be known. CB’s newspaper accounts recorded his dealings with the German propaganda and foreign ministries, brushes with the Gestapo, encounters with the Nazi high command and even Hitler himself.

Later in the war, CB crossed the Atlantic twice to England as an accredited war correspondent, telling the stories of American servicemen at war, flying with them on a bombing mission into Germany and venturing into a frigid North Sea on a torpedo boat sortie. With no word from CB for months at a time, his bride, Alice, kept home fires burning, recording her innermost feelings and fears in a meticulous wartime diary. “CB’s War” is a story told more than seventy-five years later by CB and Alice’s son, based on their contemporaneous accounts of ordinary lives lived during extraordinary times. This is also a story of discovery by a son who had long admired the handsome young couple in old photographs and who came to learn through writings and artifacts he uncovered about their early lives together, their loves and losses during war, and their struggles in peacetime to make a home for a young postwar family.

“CB’s War” is an artfully constructed, pleasing memoir that weaves together elements drawn from primary sources, including published as well as deeply private writings. Original color and black-and-white images help bring this compelling personal story to life. The narrative is cleanly written, in homage to a father’s journalistic style displayed throughout the book in excerpts from CB’s original feature newspaper stories and magazine pieces. Well-documented secondary source material is smoothly integrated into the whole, yielding a fresh and informative perspective on those perilous times decades ago for one family, America and the world.