Was a War 71) or the “quality in the people of Dover that may well be the key to the coming German disaster. They are incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed” (Steinbeck, Once There Was a War 47). To some extent, the rhythm of these dispatches mirrors that of The Grapes of Wrath, as Steinbeck records the intimacies of conversation and then pans to the broader vision of the war effort in England (Parini 412). By late August, Steinbeck was sent to North Africa, where he found little to employ him. With the invasion of Italy, Steinbeck finally witnessed action at the front. He was assigned to a force commanded by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and with this unit he went to Palermo, Sicily, on September 9 1943, to capture the small island of Ventotene off the Italian coast (Parini 277). Here, and at Red Beach near Salerno, he participated in the action he had wanted, “I do know those things about myself …show more content…
“To this hard-bitten bunch of professionals I arrived as a Johnny-come-lately, a sacred cow, a kind of tourist,” Steinbeck writes in his introduction to Once There Was a War. “I think they felt that I was muscling in on their hard-gained territory. When, however, they found that I was not duplicating their work, was not reporting straight news, they were very kind to me and went out of their way to help me and to instruct me in the things I didn’t know. For example, it was [Robert] Capa who gave me the best combat advice I ever heard. It was ‘Stay where you are. If they haven’t hit you, they haven’t seen you’” (OWW xvi). In his four and a half months overseas, Steinbeck wrote eighty-six dispatches, which were published in the Herald Tribune between June 21 and 15 December 194. Twenty-three dispatches were published simultaneously under different titles in London’s Daily Express and many were also syndicated in more than forty leading newspapers (Benson