Where were you OTD in 1963? John Bartlow Martin, the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, had been recalled to Washington, DC, following a military coup in the Republic. On November 22 Martin went to work in his temporary office at the “antiseptic [State] Department—with its clean desks and locked files it always looked deserted.”

On this day in 1943, International News Service reporter Richard Tregaskis, tired of covering political maneuverings in Naples, became free to return to the frontlines in Italy. As he noted, "politics is not my field; I am a war correspondent." Tregaskis also mused: "The lure of the front is like an opiate. After abstinence and the tedium of workaday life, its attraction becomes more and more insistent."

As the sun rose for the second day of the Battle of Tarawa, the marines on the island were greeted with the remnants and smells of the carnage of the day before, with “bodies drifting slowly in the water just off the beach,” a lieutenant noted. The exposed reef stopped the Higgins boats, causing reinforcements to wade ashore under murderous fire. “One boat blows up, then another,” war correspondent Robert Sherrod said. “The survivors start swimming for shore, but machine-gun bullets dot the water all around them.”

On this day in 1943, World War II correspondent Robert L. Sherrod awoke on Betio island to cover the second day of fighting with the Marines at the Battle of Tarawa. As night turned into day, Sherrod could see the wounded walking on the beach. "Some are supported by corpsmen; others . . . walk alone, limping badly, their faces contorted with pain," Sherrod noted. "Some have bloodless faces, some bloody faces, others only pieces of faces."

As night fell on the first day of the Battle of Tarawa, American forces held a tenuous toehold on the island. Of the 5,000 marines who had landed on Betio, 1,500 were dead, wounded, or missing in action. As darkness settled on the island, war correspondent Robert Sherrod, who had miraculously found his friend Bill Hipple amidst the confusion, borrowed a shovel from a nearby marine and began looking for a place to dig a foxhole.

"No sooner had we hit the water than the . . . machine guns really opened up on us. There must have been five or six of these machine guns concentrating their fire on us... It was painfully slow, wading in such deep water.” “And we had seven hundred yards to walk slowly into that machinegun fire, looming into larger targets as we rose onto higher ground. I was scared, as I had never been scared before.”

The ferocity of the fighting on Betio Island during the Battle of Tarawa OTD in 1943 staggers the imagination even today. Flying over the battlefield in his Vought OS2U Kingfisher observation plane, Lieutenant Commander Robert A. McPherson could make out “the tiny men, their rifles held over their heads, slowly wading beachward. I wanted to cry.”

OTD in 1943 aboard the transport ship USS Zeilin, war correspondent Robert L. Sherrod of “Time” magazine prepared for the next day’s landing on Red Beach 2 on the island of Betio (given the codename, Helen) in the Tarawa Atoll in the Gilbert Islands. The night before the marines of the Second Battalion were scheduled to hit their designated target, the enlisted men started eating their “breakfast” of steak and eggs with fried potatoes at 10:00 p.m., while their officers ate at midnight.

Freelance reporter John Bartlow Martin practiced longfrom journalism before anyone called it such. In crafting his stories in the 1950s and 1960s for national publications, he came up with some suggested rules for for handling difficult stories. “First you study the printed public record before you interview anybody, then you interview the people involved who are likely to want the story told, and finally you interview those who are likely not to want it told, the hostile witnesses.”

Writers, believe you're pieces are too long? Well, when John Bartlow Martin finished his rough draft of his biography of Adlai E. Stevenson in 1970, it ran more than 16,000 pages and some 2.5 million words. Martin then worked 1 1/2 years cutting and rewriting the manuscript into a semifinal draft of approximately 3,200 pages, or nearly a million words. His Stevenson biography was finally published in two volumes, the first in 1976 and the second in 1977.

In the summer of 1942, as U.S. Marines struggled to take over an island named Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands from Japanese forces, 400 white and 40 black women gathered at an old cavalry barracks at Fort Des Moines in Iowa. These women had been carefully selected from more than 30,000 applicants to begin six weeks of basic training as officer candidates for the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps, an organization created by legislation signed that May by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Aviation and naval history was made this day in 1911 when the first landing of an aircraft on a ship took place as pilot Eugene B. Ely flew onto the deck of the USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco harbor. Just a few months before, on November 14, 1910, Ely had snapped on his goggles, revved his engine, and started down a wooden platform atop the scout cruiser USS Birmingham in a fragile aircraft built by aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss.

"The Vice-President's Chamber is adjacent to the Senate Chamber, and so small that to survive it is necessary to keep the door open in order to obtain the necessary cubic feet of air. “When the vice-president is in the room [the Capitol Guides] go by with their guests, stop and point him out, as though he were a curiosity.

On this day in 1968, after a funeral mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Newy York, the body of Robert F. Kennedy was taken by a private funeral train for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. RFK aide John Bartlow Martin attended the funeral and was on the train with his wife, Fran, and his two sons, Fred and Dan. Martin had stood vigil late the night before the funeral beside RFK's casket in the Cathedral with Burke Marshall and others.

On this day in 1943, WWII correspondent Robert L. Sherrod (far right in photo) of "Time" magazine accompanied a U.S.-Canadian task force primed to battle the Japanese garrison on Kiska in the Aleutian Islands (Operation Cottage). Allied forces, however, discovered that the Japanese had abandoned Kiska under the cover of fog, leaving behind just a few mongrel dogs. “We dropped 100,000 propaganda leaflets on Kiska, but those dogs couldn’t read,” said an American pilot.

Looking ahead for the war to end in Europe in 1945 (V-E Day), WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle had done a draft of a column; it was never published. It was found on his body after his death on Ie Shima on April 18, 1945. Here is what he wanted to let his readers know: "And so it is over. The catastrophe on one side of the world has run its course. The day that it had so long seemed would never come has come at last.