Journey for Margaret by William Lindsay White

He does a shift with the fire wardens and rides a fire engine as they respond to areas where bombs have dropped. He goes to an airfield, meets the crews of several bombers, listens in to their planned attack, then waits for them to return home. He meets with a French journalist he knows, Margaurite, and after dinner they check out various neighborhoods the Germans have hit with incendiary bombs.

White has discussions with a fellow journalist, a Canadian, about where the safest place to sleep is in the hotel. White was in London, his writing has an immediacy not often seen in other books about WWII. Journey for Margaret is his story.īecause Journey for Margaret was written while Mr. White was there to report on the fight and to see about adopting a war orphan and bringing him or her back to the U.S. Britain was fighting Third Reich and enduring the Blitz. destroyer, manned by Canadians & British sailors as part of the Lend/Lease program. In 1940-1941, journalist William Lindsay White traveled to England about a U.S. The book is more poignant because it is written as the horrific bombing occurs there is no perspective that the British will win or that America will get in the war. Bill White also loves and admires the British people, especially their ability to keep their lips stiff and upper as P.G. The writing is extraordinary because he provides such a sense of immediacy of what it is like to be in the streets after the bombs fell, when all of London is blazing pink to be out trawling for mines off the White Cliffs of Dover or what it would be like to be Butt-End Charlie in a bomber.

Bill White tells us what he saw, how he felt, how he slept, and what he ate (even during the bombings). This is the kind of book we should read in school. Rather, it is a war correspondent’s dispatches to America during the Blitz. The book has little in it about Margaret. I’ve never been able to finish the movie A Journey for Margaret that I started one afternoon on TCM, but I was so taken by the scenes I had watched, that I searched out the book (out of print) by Bill White.

Journey for Margaret by William Lindsay White