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My fascination with World War II started the same way I suspect many of yours did: on the screen. From a certain point in my childhood, my father made sure I saw the classics. You know, The Dirty Dozen, The Longest Day, Bridge on the River Kwai, Tora! Tora! Tora!, The Guns of Navarone. Not to mention Hogan’s Heroes.

As I got older, I wanted to learn the real stories behind that golden era of pop culture, so I turned to books. The work of historians like Max Hastings, Carlo D’Este, James Holland and Rick Atkinson has filled in countless gaps and given me a much deeper understanding of the war at every level.

But as a journalist by trade, I’m naturally interested in contemporary accounts of the war — words written and broadcast without the benefit of knowing what would happen on Dec. 7, 1941 and June 6, 1944 and Aug. 6, 1945. This fascination actually predates my professional career. My grandmother’s basement in the Detroit suburbs was wallpapered with old newspapers, from Pearl Harbor through Reagan’s election, and I spent hours as a kid standing there reading the walls.

Since about 2010, I have actively researched media coverage of D-Day in particular, visiting numerous archives and accumulating far too many books written by and about World War II-era correspondents. A decade later, that research finally has an outlet in the World War II on Deadline website, Facebook page, and this newsletter.

A few times each week, I’ll send you snapshots of how significant events in World War II were covered at the time, profiles of the correspondents who were on the front lines, and other items of interest.

Subscribe to the newsletter and you won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition goes directly to your inbox. Thank you for reading.

About the author

Marc Lancaster has worked as a journalist for more than 25 years, mostly covering sports. He has held a variety of reporting and editing roles at print and online media outlets, including The Cincinnati Post, The Tampa Tribune, The Washington Times and what was then called CNN/SportsIllustrated.com. He was a baseball beat writer in Cincinnati and Tampa and has been a Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2013. He now lives in Charlotte with his family and works as an editor at The Sporting News.

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The original stories behind the World War II history you know