He was part of a group of eight reporters, known as the Legion of the Doomed or the Writing 69th, selected to fly bomber missions with United States Eighth Air Force.
Post was the son of a well-to-do New York lawyer; his family summered in a mansion called Strandhome on Long Island's Great South Bay.
He decided to become a journalist while attending St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and got his start working at the New York Evening World only a few weeks after graduating.
[1] While attending Harvard, Post spent his summer vacations working at various publications including the Putnam Patriot and the New York World.
Upon graduation from Harvard in 1932, Post took a position with the Boston American, and in 1933 he applied for a job with Arthur Krock, the head of the New York Times Washington bureau, as a junior correspondent.
Krock, after telling Post to do it the hard way and work his way up, offered him a position as an office boy running messages for the phone operator.
As a firsthand witness to the bombing of London he put into words what he saw after a German air raid destroyed Commons Chamber of the Houses of Parliament and blew the roof off Westminster Abbey.
But Londoners recovering from this raid – and though it was bad it is too early yet to say that it was one of the worst in history – felt a savage satisfaction when they read in their papers or heard on their radios that thirty-three raiders had been shot down, four by anti-aircraft fire and twenty-nine by fighters.
– Robert Perkins Post, New York Times, May 12, 1941By the early 1940s the Times London bureau included bureau chief Raymond "Pete" Daniell, Tania Long (who later married Daniell), David Anderson, Hal Denny, Walter Leysmith, Jamie MacDonald, Drew Middleton, James Reston, and Post.
After a Sept. 7, 1940 air raid destroyed their headquarters, Daniell moved the staff to the Savoy Hotel, where many journalists had gathered after the fall of France.
He and the other journalists trained with the Air Force for a week, learning relevant skills such as adjustment to high-altitude flying, parachuting and weapons use.
It encouraged them to have the feeling that the people of the United States would be given a true picture of what they were trying to do and what must be done at home if democracy is to survive.One of the two crew members who did survive the explosion, Second Lieutenant Wayne Gotke, later wrote about the experience after he was released from a German POW camp.
The German fighter pilot who shot down the bomber, Heinz Knoke, wrote about the incident in a book, I Flew for the Führer, after the war.