From the Pacific

War correspondents covered World War II for a variety of news agencies in conjunction with the United States military. As with any piece of writing, the views of these men often found expression in their work. My initial research, untaken in Historical Methods 3020 during the spring 2010 semester, was aimed at examining the work of war correspondent Norman Paige in order to determine his views of the Japanese, and if these views reflected public opinion about and an Orientalist perspective of them. I then chose to continue this research for my senior project for the Honors Program by expanding my examination to the work of four other war correspondents operating at the same time as Paige, Richard Tregaskis, Robert Sherrod, Noel Busch, and Ernie Pyle. I then compared the work of these men and Paige to American public opinion, which I established by examining New York Times articles, propaganda posters, and though an interview with a woman who lived at the time, and to the concept of Orientalism put forward by Edward Said in his book of the same name. This examination and comparison led me to conclude that these correspondents expressed a mainly negative view of the Japanese in their work, which reflected public opinion about and an Orientalist perspective of them.