Lee McCardell covers 'the biggest story that ever broke'

When Lee McCardell returned to Baltimore in late May 1945 after nearly three years spent covering the war in Europe for the Sun and the Evening Sun, his youngest daughter didn’t fully grasp who he was.

“She knew me only by reputation,” McCardell said.

For those few years, as for so many others, doing what he saw as his duty took precedence over family time, and McCardell was devoted to his craft.

As it became increasingly inevitable that the United States would become involved in the war, McCardell reportedly told a friend at lunch one day: “It’s the biggest story that ever broke. I want to cover it.”

Lee McCardell was born June 8, 1901 in Frederick, Maryland. He originally planned to become an engineer, but after a year at what was then called Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, he transferred to the University of Virginia to focus on writing.

A lecturer there suggested he try journalism and offered an in with the Baltimore papers. He joined the staff of the Evening Sun in 1925 and never looked back, covering every conceivable type of story in the years to come.

His first big wartime assignment came in August 1941, when he was one of 12 correspondents selected to accompany a U.S. Navy patrol to Iceland. After the Pearl Harbor attack, he went to the West Coast to gauge the mood on what amounted to the front lines of the war for the time, including the establishment of internment camps for Japanese-Americans.

Later in 1942 he covered domestic maneuvers across the South as U.S. troops trained up in a hurry before shipping overseas. That fall, McCardell joined the 29th Infantry Division, which had a large Maryland contingent, in sailing to England. After writing about training and covering the bombing campaign for much of 1943, he headed to Algiers in mid-January 1944 before getting his first taste of the front lines in Italy the following month.

Attached to the Fifth Army, he covered the seemingly never-ending fighting around Cassino for the better part of two months before moving briefly to the Anzio beachhead and Naples and heading back to England in mid-April, once again traveling via North Africa.

On D-Day, McCardell flew over the Normandy beachhead in a Ninth Air Force plane. The assignment was a crushing disappointment to McCardell, as he shared with Sun readers when reporters were allowed to reveal that the 29th Infantry Division had led the assault on France.

As the corespondent who came overseas with the 29th and who had hoped to go through its campaigns with the outfit, I know the hopes and spirits of the men were high when they hit the beachhead.

The greatest regret of my life is that I could not go with them because I had known many of them personally for years and known many members of their families as well.

Personal news from the division may come in slowly. But because they are close to hearts, because they are our folk and because they are a source of terrific pride, every man in this theater of operations will strain himself to the utmost to relay home news of the Blue and Gray as rapidly as censorship and communications permit.

McCardell got to Normandy in late June with the 79th Infantry Division and suffered perhaps his closest call of the war about a month later near Saint-Lô. He was with Associated Press photographer Bede Irvin on July 25 when a barrage from American bombers began to drift back toward U.S. lines.

Everyone in the area ran for cover, but Irvin was caught in the open and killed by shrapnel. McCardell found him in a ditch, one camera still around his neck and the other resting near his outstretched hand. Two days later, after Irvin’s burial ceremony, McCardell attempted to write about this loss, but managed only three paragraphs.

“Words are inarticulate,” he wrote. “We all loved him too deeply, and admired him too much for what he was — an honest, gentle, genuine man, whose soft voice and sweet, ingratiating smile we will never forget.”

Irvin’s death clearly cut deep, but McCardell would witness much more bloodshed before the fighting ended. He accompanied troops at the liberation of concentration camps at Ohrdruf and elsewhere the following spring, at first having difficulty processing what he was seeing — he would quote himself as repeatedly saying “Good God” as he surveyed the scene.

On April 21, 1945, McCardell filed a one-paragraph sidebar to accompany his story of a Czechoslovakian town’s liberation by American troops. It read:

Perhaps Americans are tired of reading these atrocity stories. God knows we correspondents are sick of writing them. We are sick of seeing these people, sick of listening to their tales. But they belong to the Nazi wreckage, laid bare by the ebbing tide of war on the battle front. And the tide is still running out.

Thankfully, the fighting in that theater would end less than three weeks later. But McCardell gave himself one last assignment before heading back to his wife and three daughters.

The correspondent had accumulated some 150 letters from home from friends and relatives asking him to check on service members they had not heard from. Now, he did, setting out across Europe in a jeep on what would become a 4,500-mile journey that didn’t produce much in the way of answers but did leave McCardell feeling like he had at least tried to help.

After the trip, he wrote back to those who had originally sent the letters telling them anything he had learned, then set off for Paris. From there he flew to London, where he was offered a seat on a flight back to Washington from Scotland — a far better outcome than the transatlantic sail he was expecting — that would get him back home to Maryland before Memorial Day.

When the Japanese surrendered in August, McCardell’s editor called and asked him to write something. He filed a stream-of-consciousness piece reflecting on all he had witnessed in his years at war. He ended it this way:

May in Maryland. You’re in a Baltimore and Ohio day coach. You look out of the window at Laurel flashing past. You’re coming home, after three years. Your insides should be tingling. But it doesn’t seem as if you’ve ever been away. You feel a little ashamed of coming home whole, of coming home at all. There were so many others, less lucky.

People look at you and say: “You look a little thinner. You must have seen a lot … but I guess you don’t like to talk about it.”

There’s no war in Baltimore. You read about the war in the Pacific. You look out of the window at the sunshine, and listen to children laughing. Your heart is full of ache. And your dreams are full of tears. And the telephone rings.

That’s the way the war ends.