Russ Freeburg was born March 4, 1923 in Galesburg, Illinois.  He grew up in the railroad town against the backdrop of the Great Depression, graduating from high school in 1941.  Just a few months later Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the US into the war.  Russ remembers that he and others saw the clouds of war forming; he was attending Knox College by that time and had enrolled in the ROTC. In February 1942 he enlisted in the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps, from which he would be called to duty in June 1943.  He went through basic training at this time but was returned to university until March 1944, when he was assigned to the 8th Armored Division, 49th Armored Infantry Battalion, C Company.  They headed to England on the HMS Samaria, and once there they were stationed on the Salisbury Plain.  Russ was a Staff Sergeant and a squad leader at this time, as he was when they were shipped over to France.  The Battle of the Bulge was underway by this time, so they crossed France and were stationed on the Metz front.  After the Bulge wound down, they were transferred from the 3rd to the 9th Army and moved to the northern front and stationed in southern Holland.  The  crossing of the Rhine and Ruhr rivers followed in short order as Russ and the rest of the 9th moved into Germany.  They became involved in the Battle of the Ruhr Pocket and encountered significant German resistance in a number of locales.  All the while they continued to move east and at war’s end Russ was in Czechoslovakia not too far from the Russian lines.  The move to the west began soon after, as the men made their way back through Germany to the “cigarette camps” in France, and then onto the ships that would take them home.  Home for Russ meant a few army camps at first, to be followed by his discharge in February 1946.  During this time Russ married and began his journalism career, first as a reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He then joined the Chicago Tribune in 1950 and stayed there the next seven years, followed by a 1958 move to Washington D.C. to cover the Justice Department and the White House.  He was named the executive director of the Tribune‘s Washington bureau in 1966 and he rounded out his career by serving as the Tribune’s managing editor for a year.  Freeburg co-authored Oil & War with Robert Goralski of NBC News, which was published in 1987.  He was interviewed over zoom by Scott Masters and Zach Dunn in January 2025.