Ryan moved to London in 1940, where he became a war correspondent for
The Daily Telegraph in 1941. He initially covered the
air war in Europe. After the US entered the war, he flew along on fourteen bombing missions with the
Eighth and
Ninth United States Army Air Forces (USAAF). He joined General
George S. Patton's
Third Army and covered its actions until the end of the European war in 1945. That year he transferred to the Pacific theater until the war ended there. He travelled to
Jerusalem in 1946 to cover the end of the Palestinian mandate and rise of an independent Israel. Ryan emigrated to the United States in 1947 to work for
Time. He reported on the postwar tests of atomic weapons carried out by the United States in the Pacific. On a trip to Normandy in 1949, Ryan became interested in telling a more complete story of
Operation Overlord than had been produced to that date. He began compiling information and conducting over 1000 interviews as he gathered stories from both the Allies and the Germans, as well as French civilians. Ryan's 1957 book
One Minute to Ditch! is about the
successful ocean ditching of a
Pan American Boeing 377 Stratocruiser. After publishing an article about the ditching for ''Collier's'' in their 21 December 1956, issue, Ryan expanded it and developed it as a book. His next work was
The Last Battle (1966), about the
Battle of Berlin. The book contains detailed accounts from all perspectives: civilian, and American, British, Russian and German military. It deals with the fraught military and political situation in mid-1945, when the western Allies and the Soviet Union competed to liberate Berlin and
occupy Germany. The book contains echoes of Soviet disinformation about their investigation of the
death of Adolf Hitler, namely that they found Hitler's body instead of
a body double (along with Hitler's liberated dental remains). Ryan followed this work with
A Bridge Too Far (1974), which tells the story of
Operation Market Garden, the ill-fated assault by Allied
airborne forces on the Netherlands, culminating in the
Battle of Arnhem. This work was also adapted for the cinema and released as a
major 1977 film of the same name. He was diagnosed with
prostate cancer in 1970, and struggled to finish
A Bridge Too Far during his illness. He died in
Manhattan, Ryan's literary agent was Paul Gitlin. ==Legacy and honours==