Daniel De Luce

Daniel De Luce (born June 8, 1911 in Yuma , Arizona , † January 29, 2002 in Escondido ) was an American journalist.

Life and activity

After attending Los Angeles High School, De Luce studied economics at the University of California , which he left in 1934 with a bachelor's degree. Before he even started his studies, he had started working for the Associated Press office in San Francisco (initially as a delivery boy). During his studies he worked for the Los Angeles branch of the AP and for the newspaper Los Angeles Examiner .

In the 1930s he became a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press. In 1939 he was stationed in Budapest : from there he traveled to Poland to report on the fighting there after the German attack on this state. In the following years he reported successively on the Italian attack on Albania, the Greco-Italian war, the battles of the British 1st Army against the German Africa Corps in Tunisia, the American invasion of Sicily and the Italian mainland (1943).

De Luce's greatest journalistic success is usually considered to be a coup that he landed in September 1943: At that time, he crossed the Adriatic Sea from Italy in a small boat and landed in Dalmatia, from there to talk about the fight of the Yugoslav partisan movement against the Germans Occupation troops report. This made him the first Western journalist to report on him since the country was occupied by the German Wehrmacht in 1941. For this achievement he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the category "Telegraphic Reporting (International)" in 1944.

In 1944 DeLuce was the first American journalist to report from Rome since 1941, after it had been occupied by the Allied armies that year. After the war he reported u. a. about the Nuremberg Trials.

From 1947 to 1948 De Luce reported from Jordan on the Arab-Israeli war. He then became office manager of the AP in Frankfurt am Main .

From 1956 De Luce worked at the AP headquarters in New York City , most recently as Deputy General Manager. In 1976 he retired.

In 1980 De Luce settled in Rancho Bernardo near San Diego . He died in January 2002 at Palomar Medical Center in Escondido of the aftermath of a fall he had suffered in his home a few days earlier.

De Luce was married to Alma.

literature

• Current Biography Yearbook , Vol. 5, 1945, pp. 149f.
• Heinz Dietrich Fischer / Erika J. Fischer: Complete Biographical Encyclopedia of Pulitzer Prize Winners, 1917-2000 , 2002, p. 56.

Web links

• Obituary in the LA Times January 31, 2002