A Letter From The Publisher, Aug. 27, 1945

World War II has passed into history amid the roar of atomic bombs.

But before it passes entirely out of the hands of journalists and into the hands of the historians, I think you might be interested in reliving some of its great moments—as they seemed to the TIME & LIFE newsmen who so often risked and too often gave their lives to report the fighting firsthand.

And so perhaps this week you would like me to tell you something about History in the Writing, the new TIME book which seems headed for the top of the best seller lists if the critics are right in what they’re saying.

“The invitation to produce this book was simple and direct. Would I like to read ‘X’ millions of words of reporting from TIME correspondents at the battlefronts and see whether in this vast reservoir of wartime journalism there was some ‘best’ material for a book?

“The ‘X’ million words turned out to be about 8,000,000—enough to fill a half-dozen filing cabinets. They were the dispatches that some 80 TIME correspondents had filed from London during the blitz, from Manila as the Japanese struck, from Bataan before it fell, from Libya as Rommel lunged at Cairo, from battlefields in the Aleutians, in Burma, in Sicily, in Italy, in Russia, in the South Pacific.”

These are the opening sentences of Gordon Carroll’s foreword to History in the Writing—and here are some examples of the extraordinary impression this book seems to be making on the press of the nation:

“The best are always the best, you realize as you turn these pages,” writes Lewis Gannett of the New York Herald Tribune. “The best correspondents don’t just see and hear and then trumpet; they feel and think before they write.” . . . “These articles are not impersonal reports. They are experiences shared with the reader,” says Harry Hansen.

. . . “Written by men and women whose aim was the determination of truth,” says the San Francisco Chronicle. “Their willingness to examine every aspect of each topic before writing about it gives the book a tone of authority and accuracy which easily could be lacking in material less conscientiously tested.” … And The New Yorker says: “The fact is evident that a more able group of journalists has rarely been gathered together.” These cables were all written by reporters who faced battle side by side with our fighting men — shared the same K-rations, slept in the same fox holes, dodged the same bullets arid shells and land mines — and the reviewers have been quick to sense this. “They certainly got around,” writes Critic Marcus Duffield. “Wherever these correspondents found themselves, they insisted upon going right up front where death was. In fact, death overtook two of them while on duty, and two others suffered injuries. . . .” Quite a few of our correspondents have written best-selling books of their own out of their closeup knowledge of the fighting fronts — and many of these books grew out of cables you will find in History in the Writing. Lewis Gannett put it this way “Here is the raw material out of which John Hersey embroidered Into the Valley and the story about a major in Italy out of which came A Bell for Adano. Here are tired, hectic messages which later were built into Jack Belden’s Retreat with Stilwell.Here are bits which Richard Lauterbach rewrote in These Are the Russians.

Here are Robert Sherrod’s practice pieces.

“There will be other books later, and, to judge by this raw material, one of the best of them will be by Theodore H. White, TIME’S correspondent in Chung king. White’s conversational expense account, from Colombo to Delhi, is one of the freshest bits in the book . . .”