Walter Boardman Kerr

Walter Boardman Kerr (November 18, 1911 – January 10, 2003) was an American journalist, publisher and book author.

Early life and education Walter Boardman Kerr was born on November 18, 1911, in Syracuse, New York.

He entered Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in 1925, and finished the school in 1930. He joined its European staff as a foreign correspondent in 1937. Kerr had to move to Lisbon to send his censor-free report on the Paris occupation, which made it to the newspaper's front page. In 1940, he was appointed chief correspondent for South America, but a year later was dispatched to Europe again.

From November 1941 until April 1943, he worked as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in Moscow. He was a true field reporter, being on the frontline and interviewing guerilla leaders. In 1943, he visited Stalingrad and interviewed Lieutenant general Rodion Malinovsky and captured Nazi officers about the Battle of Stalingrad. In 1943, he resigned from The Herald Tribune, joined the US Army and then the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. He spent his last six Army months collecting documents in Berlin for use in the Nuremberg trials. It received a warm welcome in the Soviet Union. In this book, he first explored the question of how the Soviet Army managed to stop the German invasion, first in Moscow and next in Stalingrad.

In 1946, he returned to The Herald Tribune as a diplomatic correspondent and covered all the major post-war conferences. In 1947 he became chief of the Herald Tribune's Paris Bureau. According to The Post-Standard, in 1948 he was awarded the Legion of Honour award from the French government. In 1950, Kerr returned to Paris to become editor for both the Paris and the European editions. In 1954 he was appointed Washington bureau chief. Having moved to Santa Fe, he also became a political adviser to Republican Governor David Cargo. He was granted access to previously classified Soviet documents and came to the conclusion that Stalin had millions of troops concealed both from Hitler's generals and from the Allies, but deliberately chose not to use this resource at once. Kerr published his finding in 1977 in a book titled The Secret of Stalingrad (15 editions). It gained good press in the United States, but it was poorly received in the Soviet Union where it was labeled as "imperialist propaganda". She was a daughter of Walter Howland Lovell, a World War I volunteer pilot and an American serviceman. They had two children, Philip Alan Kerr (born in 1948), and Cynthia Boardman Kerr (born in 1950).

Books