Investigator

Pearl Harbor:

The Pearl Harbor Naval Base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu is the hub of United States Pacific naval power. Most of the Navy's major commands have headquarters there. Yet even after fifty-seven years, its name is still synonymous with the surprise Japanese attack of "December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy." The United States suffered 3,700 casualties, along with damage to twenty-one ships and 300 planes.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was the culmination of a decade of deteriorating relations between Japan and the United States over the status of China and the security of Southeast Asia. The breakdown began in 1931 when Japanese army extremists in defiance of government policy, invaded and overran the northernmost Chinese province of Manchuria. Japan ignored American protests, and in the summer of 1937 launched a full-scale attack on the rest of China.

Role of Women:

World War II opened a new chapter in the lives of Depression-weary Americans. As husbands and fathers, sons and brothers shipped out to fight in Europe and the Pacific, millions of women marched into factories, offices, and military bases to work in paying jobs and in roles reserved for men in peacetime.

For female journalists, World War II offered new professional opportunities. Talented and determined, dozens of women fought for--and won--the right to cover the biggest story of their lives. By war's end, at least 127 American women had secured official military accreditation as war correspondents, if not actual front-line assignments. Other women journalists remained on the home front to document the ways in which the country changed dramatically under wartime conditions.

THERESE BONNEY

War's mindless uprooting of innocent civilians provided the principal subject for photographer Therese Bonney (1894-1978) during World War II. Bonney's images of homeless children and adults on the back roads of Europe touched millions of viewers in the United States and abroad.

Not content with publishing solely in mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, Bonney sought other opportunities to present her work. She published the photo-essay books War Comes to the People (1940) and Europe's Children (1943) and mounted one-woman shows at the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, and dozens of museums overseas. Bonney's concept for a film about children displaced by war became the Academy Award- winning movie, The Search (1948). A media star herself, Bonney was the heroine of a wartime comic book, "Photofighter."

MARVIN BRECKINRIDGE PATTERSON

When World War II broke out in 1939, freelance photojournalist Marvin Breckinridge Patterson (b. 1905) took the first pictures of a London air-raid shelter. She was, however, new to radio when friend Edward R. Murrow hired her as the first female staff broadcaster in Europe for CBS. Before her marriage to an American diplomat ended her career in May 1940, Patterson broadcast fifty times from various locations in Europe, including Berlin.

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