John Thompson Whitaker (January 25, 1906 – September 11, 1946) was an American writer and journalist who served as a correspondent for several prominent newspapers in different parts of the world.
He was trained as a journalist at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee, and began his career as a reporter at the Chattanooga News. He joined after the New York Herald Tribune, where he was sent as a correspondent to Geneva (Switzerland) from 1931 to 1935, to report on the League of Nations. He had a brother named Spires Whitaker who worked as a doctor for the army during World War II.[1]
Shortly after he was assigned by his newspaper to Spain. He entered the country around September 10, 1936.[3] Six years later he would claim he had interviewed General Yagüe, who allegedly had declared having shot 4,000 Republicans in Badajoz;[4] until today this statement is quoted as proof that the Badajoz massacre indeed took place. He also claimed to have interviewed Mohamed Mizzian, a Moorish general of the Nationalists, and reported on Mizzian giving two captured teenage girls, one found with a trade-union card, to some forty of his troops for mass rape near Navalcarnero. Whitaker described how Mizzian "smirked when I remonstrated with him. 'Oh, they'll not live more than four hours,' he said."[5][6]
He moved back to Europe in mid-1939, in connection with World War II, working for the Chicago Daily News and the New York Post. He moved to Rome, from where he reported the war and the activities of the National Fascist Party. As a convinced democrat, his articles criticized the atrocities of the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. This made the fascist regime uncomfortable, and in 1941 he was ordered to leave Italy.[2]
At the time of his expulsion from Mussolini's Italy, Time reported that Whitaker's dispatches were "displeasing" to the government. The Italian government was reluctant to formally expel the reporter on whom they had bestowed the Italian War Cross five years earlier, and officials told Whitaker they had "nothing personal" against him and advised him, "You are not expelled, but you must leave."[2] Whitaker reportedly insisted on being formally expelled.[2]
^Whitaker published artices in The New York Harald Tribune of September 17, 19 and 25, but with no mention of alleged Yagüe's statement. He first made this claim in 1942, see John T. Whitaker, Prelude to World War. A Witness from Spain, [in:] Foreign Affairs 21/1 (1942), p. 106
^Beevor, Antony (2006). The Battle for Spain. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. p. 102. ISBN978-0-7538-2165-7.
^Tremlett, Giles (2020). The International Brigades. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 99. ISBN978-1-4088-5398-6.
