Ralph Barnes (journalist)
Ralph Waldo Barnes (June 14, 1899 – November 17, 1940) was an American journalist from Oregon who worked as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in Europe during the 1930s. He was born in Salem, Oregon, and after finishing Salem High School in 1917, studied at Willamette University and earned a master’s degree in economics from Harvard. He married Esther Barton Parounagian in 1924.
Barnes joined the Herald Tribune in 1924. He reported from Paris, interviewing Gertrude Ederle in 1926 and Charles Lindbergh in 1927. In 1930 he covered Mussolini in Rome, and in 1931 he became Moscow correspondent, reporting on the Soviet Union and often publishing stories the regime did not want. In 1935 he moved to Berlin to cover the Nazis, despite censorship. After Germany invaded Poland and then France and the Low Countries, he predicted that Germany would next attack the Soviet Union, and the Nazi government expelled him from Germany.
On November 17, 1940, Barnes died in a plane crash in Yugoslavia while traveling to cover Mussolini’s invasion of Greece; he was the first war correspondent killed in World War II. He is buried in the Florence American Cemetery in Italy. A few years later, a Liberty ship was named SS Ralph Barnes in his honor.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 01:05 (CET).