Soldiers of the Press — 1944

Frank Hewlett goes into northern Burma with the hand-picked jungle force the war remembers as Merrill's Marauders.

Life on the Anzio beachhead once the Allies had dug in -- a wedding, a baptism, laughter and death -- gathered from Robert Vermillion's features. Off the air, a German bomb once interrupted his own birthday party in Naples.

An unusual program: not one reporter at the front but the whole of D-Day as United Press covered it, from correspondents leaving on secret assignments to editors in New York waiting for the official word. Virgil Pinkley, UP's European general manager, had the byline on the invasion story.

Robert Vermillion's story of two friends on the road to Rome, and how it ended for them.

The only home-front program in the surviving set, and the hardest. Joan Younger is assigned to the men at the Mitchel Field hospital who have to find the words to tell their families and sweethearts that they are coming home as amputees.

Robert Vermillion talks his way onto a 2 a.m. paratroop drop into southern France on forty-five minutes of training. A colonel asks whether he is after another scoop; a serviceman tells him, with respect, that he is nuts.

The one outright comedy in the surviving set, and the furthest the series ever got from a battlefield: Boyd Lewis on an English village convinced somebody had disturbed the Witch of Scrapfaggot Green.

Henry Gorrell on the destruction of Aachen, a city eleven hundred years old, and what its fall meant.

Ralph Teatsorth at sea in the Pacific -- the log places his report with the Seventh Fleet at the battle of the Philippine Sea.

Leo Disher's story of a pilot blinded in the air and the crew who brought him home. The program announced on air that it would be made into a film -- and it was.

Mac Johnson flies the first raid on Tokyo mounted from Saipan, with crews who took it as revenge.

A strange Christmas on the Western Front, told by Henry Gorrell through a general, a private and a sergeant.