He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the execution of the French serial killer Henri Désiré Landru ("Bluebeard") in 1922.
He also began reading the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and carried a copy of the work with him for the rest of his life.
He worked as a captain on a passenger steamboat (he was fired after wrecking the ship) and as a schoolteacher in Walnut Grove, Minnesota.
He observed the war-time air raids against the city, and his reports of the terrifying bombardments brought him worldwide notice.
He interviewed Sinn Féin founder Arthur Griffith and political activist Michael Fitzgerald, both then in hiding.
[1][2][4] In 1922, while traveling in France, Miller saw Henri Désiré Landru (known as "Bluebeard") guillotined in a Versailles street for murdering 10 women and a boy.
[1] His Middle East experiences later landed Miller a job reporting on the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.
Once more, he walked alongside an army traveling in the desert, telling his audience how his shoes and socks turned to bloody rags as he marched through the sand and rocks.
Miller reported on the "surprising efficiency" in which the Italians—armed with bombers, tanks, field artillery, gasoline and napalm—massacred thousands of natives armed only with spears, slings and the occasional handgun.
He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize a third time,[11] in this instance for a 44-minute report delivered by telephone at the start of the war.
[12] Exhausted from his constant travels and depressed after seeing so much bloodshed, Miller flew to the United States on the inaugural trans-Atlantic flight of the Hindenburg.
His success in Ethiopia led UP to assign him to cover the initial stages of the Spanish Civil War in late 1936.
[1] Miller reported widely on many of the key early events leading up to World War II.
He traveled to Czechoslovakia immediately afterward, and reported from the scheduled advance of German troops into the Sudetenland.
He remained in the country for the next six months, and again reported from the front lines on March 12, 1939, when German troops occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.
He spent Christmas Eve in four inches of newly-fallen snow with Finnish soldiers on the front lines of the "Winter War.
[1] In 1943, the U.S. government announced that Liberty ships would begin to be named after distinguished journalists who had died in action.
[15] Webb Miller was also the inspiration for the character of Vince Walker in the movie Gandhi, portrayed by Martin Sheen.
Most of the dignitaries and world leaders he met over the next 10 years inscribed their names on the case, including Benito Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt, David Lloyd George, Adolf Hitler, and author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.