Tyler Bridges, twice a member of Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, is a journalist based in New Orleans who reports on Louisiana politics for the Baton Rouge/New Orleans Advocate, and has also written for the Washington Post, Politico Magazine and other publications. He is the author of five books, was a 2011-12 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, was awarded Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Award in 2010 for his 10 years of foreign reporting in South America, was a Shorenstein Center Fellow at Harvard in the fall of 2017, and is a distinguished fellow in residence at the Annenberg Public Policy Center for the fall semester of 2021. He is a graduate of Stanford University.
Tyler writes: “I’ll talk about my new book, The Flight: A Father’s War, a Son’s Search, published by LSU Press. I began the book several years after my dad died in 2003, wanting to know about the formative experience of his life, his service during WWII. I pieced together the story from archives all over the world, and what I found surprised me – and it changed my views of my father. The book begins on October 1, 1943. Dick Bridges is sitting in the cockpit’s seat of a B-24 bomber, taking off from Tunis, with orders to attack Wiener Neustadt, an Austrian city. The intelligence briefers that morning said it would be an easy run, with minimal German defenses. They were wrong. I tell the story of that day and the following days, including my father becoming the first American prisoner of war in Hungary.”
