Your late uncle sounds like he was a great person, although Vince and I were both talking about service members who worked as journalists, not civilian journalists. Not demeaning your uncle's work, but it's not comparable. Civilians can leave anytime they want. Service members cannot.
Of course you did not intend to demean my uncle, but you underestimated the dangers of his occupation and his commitment. Prior to becoming a correspondent, because my grandmother was a native of France, Uncle Lowell felt duty bound to join the French Army, but he was captured when that country surrendered to Nazi Germany in June 1940. The United States was neutral at the time, and being an American by birth, he was released and ended up in London.
Actually, some folks like my uncle could not leave anytime they wanted. This is why he couldn't; 'LONDON, Jan. 21 -- Lowell Bennett, 24-year-old war correspondent of the International News Service, who has been missing since he went as an observer on an RAF attack on Berlin on Dec. 2, is alive, unhurt, and a prisoner of war in Germany, it was revealed here today.
https://www.nytimes.com/1944/01/22/archives/missing-us-reporter-is-captive-in-reich-lowell-bennett-took-part-in.html You might find this article interesting as well,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pow_Wow_(newspaper) Lowell Bennett was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1920. He embarked early on a life of adventure that took him all over the world, before meeting his Scottish wife-to-be in London in 1940, (Aunt Elizabeth) and becoming a war correspondent for the American International News Service. His first war assignment was covering the Allied invasion of Tunisia in October 1942, a story he tells in his first book Assignment to Nowhere, published by the Vanguard Press in 1943.
Parachute to Berlin, full synopsis:
The vivid account of a war correspondent shot down over Germany and taken prisoner.
Bennett was one of several journalists to fly a night raid over Berlin in November 1943. This is the vivid testimony of an American journalist shot down over Berlin. After he was captured in Berlin, he was taken on a tour of Germany and shown what the civilian population was being subjected to. Bennett spent the rest of the war in Stalag Luft I, where he started the newspaper POW WOW, secretly read by 9,000 prisoners. Bennett's experiences led him to condemn the Allied policy of systematically bombing civilian population centers.
Uncle Lowell joined the State Department and saw service in Germany during the Berlin Airlift. Eventually, he became a career diplomat.
In 1948, when I was four my grandmother took me with her to France. It was decided on this trip that I would stay with my uncle and his second wife in Berlin for a while prior to when Aunt Noelle gave birth to their first daughter. I had the privilege of attending a German speaking preschool while there.
Thank you, Dos, for inspiring me to assemble these pieces of my uncle's illustrious biography. Most of which I already knew. I found additional information and articles about him, which I will add to what I have in Family Tree. The last time I saw uncle Lowell and Aunt Noelle was in 1988 when my wife and I visited them at their 300-year-old chateau in Lafat, France, which is where they lived for many years. He passed in 1997.
