In the first week of May 1943, Mazo crossed the Atlantic Ocean at age 24 as a second lieutenant and a trained bombardier in the
US Army Air Corps. He survived a remarkable 32 missions over Europe in the rickety but reliable
B-17s of the era, remarkable because the standard task was 25 missions. By the time Earl signed on for a second round, only 27 of the original 225 men in his wing remained alive. The records show a stunning number KIA—
Killed in Action—while others were wounded or missing "somewhere in France" or in German prison camps. Mazo stopped at 32 missions because the military offered him the opportunity to become a staff writer for
Stars and Stripes, the newspaper published by the army in all theatres of action. Mazo had been a journalist in
Greenville, South Carolina, when the war began before joining up in the spring of 1942. Having seen Europe from the skies in a B-17, Mazo was then deployed on the ground in France on
D-Day plus 12 (12 days after D-Day) and accompanied Patton's Third Army across France into Germany. The following year, he published a series of exposés on serious
voter fraud he believed had cost Nixon the
1960 United States presidential election. His reports prompted a failed attempt by Nixon to convince Mazo to cease his reporting, followed by a successful appeal by Nixon to Mazo's editors to terminate the series of stories on the grounds that the United States could not afford a
constitutional crisis at the height of the
Cold War. Mazo was both stunned and disappointed at the decision, adding that he believed the series would have put him in contention for the
Pulitzer Prize. == Personal life and death ==