Pacific War Uncensored

“He was one of the last great foreign correspondents” – Larry Meredith, United Press “The story of how Guard gate-crashed journalism is in itself an epic.”– Newspaper World magazine “...rate with the best reporting of this or any other war.”– Hugh Ballie, United Press President Harold Guard became a war correspondent after he had been invalided out of the Royal Navy; thereafter, he gained a front row seat to many of the most dramatic events of the century. In March 1942, he arrived in Australia, having narrowly escaped from Japanese forces invading Singapore. His dispatches from that disastrous front prompted one observer to comment on“the crisis days when everybody except Harold Guard was trying to hush up the real situation.” Over the next three years he was to have many more adventures reporting on the Pacific War, including firsthand experience of flying with the U.S. Air Force on 22 bombing missions, camping with Allied forces in the deadly jungles of New Guinea, and taking part in attacks from amphibious landing craft on enemy occupied territory. He also travelled into the undeveloped areas of Australia’s northern territories to report on the construction of the airbases that were being built in preparation for defending the country against the advancing Japanese. Harold Guard passed away in 1986; however thanks to years of work by his grandson John Tring in assembling his dispatches, private correspondence, telegrams, and audio accounts, the full story of Guard’s experiences and observations during the Pacific War can finally be told.