A Letter From The Publisher, Feb. 26, 1945

Bill Walton marched into my office in paratrooper’s boots this afternoon on his first trip home after 22 months with the A.E.F.

When Walton went overseas in March 1943 he was one of the youngest-looking writers we had, with blond hair and an unlined face that made him seem much less than his 33 years. He came back ten pounds thinner and looking ten years more mature, for he has gone through some never-to-be-forgotten experiences and grown into one of our most knowledgeable correspondents.

The war caught up with Walton only six days out to sea, in the darkness before dawn when a U-boat attacked the Coast Guard cutter on which he was crossing the Atlantic (perhaps you remember his vivid story of the eight-hour battle in which the Spencer finally killed the sub).

In England, waiting for the invasion, Walton lived and flew for months with the men of our Eighth Air Force—and the first time he saw Paris he was “shaking like an aspen” in the nose of the Flying Fortress Georgia Peach in the celebrated Bastille Day bombing. “Ahead of us Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts dived and rolled, spitting lead, and bursting flak made black puffballs all around us . . .”

But that was just the beginning. On D-day Walton went in with the paratroopers long before dawn, flung himself out of the plane door at such low altitude that “there was only a moment to look around in the moonlight as my chute opened. I landed in a pear tree, which was a good shock absorber, but I didn’t filter through to the ground; instead I dangled helplessly about three feet above ground, a perfect target for the snipers I could hear not far away.”

Walton was finally rescued from the pear tree, but for the next three days he was under constant fire—never had his boots off, got only three hours sleep in 72. Once he had to plunge through a swamp, wade away from the enemy with machine-gun bullets pinging all around him. But all during those hours he somehow managed to hang on to his typewriter.

From then on Bill was almost continuously in the thick of the fighting with one or another of our Armies—took his chances with our men at Cherbourg, Saint Lô, Avranches, Orleans, Nijmegen, Aachen, the Hürtgen Forest (“that was the nastiest fighting”).

The day before Rundstedt’s counterattack in the Ardennes, Walton left the First Army to head for Christmas at home, and “it seemed queer to find myself leaving the front actually alive and unhurt after so many days when I woke up in the morning wondering if I would be dead before night.” But as soon as he heard of the attack he headed back toward the battles. He was with General Vandenberg all through the terrible days when the pea-soup fog kept our tactical air force grounded, finally got back to the front with General Patton’s men east of Bastogne.

Walton will spend the next few weeks in Jacksonville, Illinois, resting up and getting reacquainted with his wife Emily Ann and the two children he hasn’t seen in almost two years. But come March he hopes to be back in uniform and off to the Western Front again for you.