Laurence Edmund Allen

Laurence "Larry" Edmund Allen was an American journalist for the Associated Press from 1933 to 1961. Known for his coverage of British Mediterranean Fleet, for which he won first Pulitzer Prize for Telegraphic Reporting in 1942, he was also a prolific reporter on rise of communism in Poland and Cuba.

Biography Larry Allen was born on October 19, 1908, in Mt. Savage, Maryland. He began his journalistic career in the local bureau of the Baltimore News in 1926. He subsequently moved to West Virginia and joined the Daily Mail in Charleston, where he worked as a reporter and a telegraph editor for six years. In 1933, he was hired by the Associated Press's local bureau, where he worked as a local reporter and a site editor. After two years, he was transferred to Washington. In 1937, he moved to New York, where he became a foreign cables deskman.

Allen served as a European war correspondent for the Associated Press since July 1938 when he sailed to Europe to cover the Spanish Civil War and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia following the Munich crisis. When World War II broke out the AP assigned him to cover the British Mediterranean Fleet, making him the first war correspondent to travel with the British Fleet in wartime. During his assignment he took part as a journalist in the Battle of Crete and the Tobruk's raid. After the operation's failure, he was captured by Axis forces and held prisoner in Italy for 11 months.

Allen survived eight torpedo attacks and was held in a Nazi prison camp for eight months. In 1942, the journalist was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Telegraphic Reporting and the National Headliner Club Award for his combat correspondence during World War II. In 1945, Allen was also awarded the Bronze Star for the Defending Freedom Press as Prisoner of War, in 1947 — the Order of the British Empire by King George VI.

In September 1945 he arrived in Poland was an Associated Press correspondent on the occasion of General Eisenhower's visit to the country. He was a part of a reporter group which stayed permanently in Poland and regularly corresponded with Stanisław Mikołajczyk, leader of PSL (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe). Shortly after his arrival in September, Allen reopened the pre-war AP office in Warsaw. He covered the Communist takeover of Poland and directly criticized the actions of the communists for which he was attacked, and his works were censored by the regime and UB (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa). He cooperated with American ambassador Bliss Lane. Allen described the attack on Mikołajczyk on the day of the Polish election of 1947. Before the end of the Indochinese war in 1955, the French High Command decorated Allen with the Croix de Guerre for frontline reporting “without fear of danger.” In 1959 Allen organized his own news service called the American Press Service. Two years later he retired.