A Letter From The Publisher, Sep. 17, 1951

Perhaps you have seen the first few chapters of Crusade in the Pacific on your television set. This MARCH OF TIME documentary is the most comprehensive project of its kind in terms of resources used as well as length and scope of the final film. Its subject, the Pacific war from its opening guns in 1931 to its explosive aftermath in late 1951, is man’s most concerted struggle over huge areas of land and water.

The new 26-chapter series sprang from the success of Crusade in Europe, which you probably remember as the film based on General Eisenhower’s book. Now being shown for the fourth time in some U.S. cities, Crusade in Europe proved the country’s appetite for serious TV documentaries, a taste soundly confirmed by TIME-sponsored telecasts of Kefauver hearings, and by Your Stake in Japan, TIME’S joint CBS-ABC network program last week on the Japanese peace treaty.

Like the vast and on-going war it covers, Crusade in the Pacific differs considerably from its predecessor. The Allied troops in Europe made up a tight-knit team under Supreme Commander Eisenhower, whose quarterbacking story set the pattern for Crusade in Europe. In the Pacific war, the Marine, Navy, Army and Air outfits fought under various separate and shifting commands that sometimes passed the ball to each other, more often starred individually in sallies against the enemy. Even today, MOT’s research staff often has to dig long and well to resolve hard-held disagreement over the strategy used by Admiral Nimitz’ fleets, General MacArthur’s forces, or the various commanders in China, Burma and India. Working only a few weeks ahead of telecast dates, the scripters and editors are pulling together the story of the five years of restless peace since V-J day, will do the final chapters on the Korean war from the news being made each week by U.N. soldiers and negotiators. MOT runs a sort of celluloid race with history, for each chapter of the past struggle reflects and forecasts the events now making headlines.

One of the three key men for Crusade is Jack Bush, who heads the filmediting staff that is pulling the dramatic story together from film shot by combat photographers of six nations, enemy and friendly, in history’s best-photographed war. For a look at this work, I recently dropped by Jack’s editing room to find him barricaded behind some 10,000 feet of film for the twelfth chapter, “The War at Sea.” As he flicked the knob of his film viewer, I saw a periscope’s view of a torpedo-blasted Japanese ship. Another strip showed another side of the submariner’s life—a U.S. jazz trio playing a jam session 150 feet under the sea. He showed me many other interesting strips—a Navy plane’s gun-camera record of dive-bombing a Japanese ship and an enemy ship’s movie of a U.S. Navy plane attacking.

Jack works with Assistant Producer Fred Feldkamp, scripter on both Crusade pictures,* who freshened up his knowledge of the Pacific theater on a trip to Tokyo for talks with surviving enemy foot soldiers and officers. In one interview, he found that the Japanese ex-officer, with whom he was talking, had directed mortar fire on the town of Garapan, Saipan, where Feldkamp, a World War II Marine Corps combat correspondent had been crouching in a hole ducking the fragments.

Producer Arthur Tourtellot, also a veteran of the Eisenhower story, shows little caution in his open enthusiasm for the new series, MOT’s first TV release since dropping its traditional movie-theater productions to concentrate on television. After a look at a New York Times review of MOT documentaries since 1935 (“a symbol of real accomplishment in the ‘pictorial journalism’ field”). Tourtellot took a careful second look at his new project. “I want to be sure,” he said, “that Pacific gets us well along the way toward the same kind of results on TV.”

Cordially yours,

*To his 73-hour work week, Writer Feldkamp has added time for editing the late humourist Will Cuppy’s bestseller, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, and the forthcoming, How to Get from January to December.