Bombing Season
Melville Jacoby Bill Lascher Melville Jacoby Bill Lascher

Bombing Season

Three quarters of a century ago, today, at the height of “bombing season,” World War II correspondent Melville Jacoby took a brief break from his radio broadcasts for NBC, his writing and photography for Time and Life magazines to write to his mother and stepfather about life in wartime Chungking, or Chongqing, then the capital of China.

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Introducing "Monsieur Big-Hat"
Melville Jacoby Bill Lascher Melville Jacoby Bill Lascher

Introducing "Monsieur Big-Hat"

Most of my posts about Melville Jacoby focus squarely on nonfiction. He was a journalist. I am a journalist. Though Mel worked for a time as a broadcaster and was handy with a camera, he was first and foremost a writer. So it shouldn't be terribly surprising that he dabbled in fiction a bit. I found one of those stories — "Monsieur Big-Hat" — and put it together with some photos Mel took of an air raid in Chongqing to make a short ebook that's now available online. The story describes what happens when an American correspondent meets a French diplomat as bombs fall on the Chinese wartime capital in June, 1940.

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