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The Atlantic Clipper brought Mary Welsh back from TIME'S London office last Friday on her first trip home since Hitler marched on Poland.

Two of America's top-flight generals saw her off: General Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower, Commander in Chief of U.S. Forces in Europe--and Brigadier General Robert McClure, the U.S. military attache in London.

Her visit is such an event here at TIME and she herself is such an exciting sort of person that I thought you would like to know more about her and some of her experiences.

Until Dunkirk Mary Welsh was the only woman war correspondent with the R.A.F. in France, and before that she was at Munich and in the Sudetenland when Hitler's troops marched over the border. She was working for Lord Beaverbrook's London Express then--but when the Nazi tanks rumbled into Paris she lit out two jumps ahead, got through to London, and took a job on trial with TIME. Six weeks later Bureau Chief Walter Graebner called her "without doubt the ablest female journalist in London." And Graebner does not toss bouquets around.

Like all our correspondents, Mary Welsh's job with TIME goes beyond the kind of news the Associated Press sends us. Her job is to make sure TIME'S editors and readers get the insider's viewpoint, and for that purpose her friendships with so many of the great and near-great are invaluable.

Any day in London Mary Welsh is likely to turn up for tea at Ambassador John Winant's austere flat --or arguing the Atlantic Charter with H. G. Wells--or eating fish pie in the Archbishop of Canterbury's sombre palace. You might find her talking with Labor Minister Ernest Bevin at the Trade Union Club--playing tennis with Ronald Tree of the Information Ministry--dining at the Savoy with Hore-Belisha. . . . She is probably the only woman who ever appeared at a formal Cliveden dinner in a tricked-up red bathrobe. (She had left all her clothes in Paris when the Nazis came.) But the next week she was dancing a cockney tango with some of England's "little people" in an East End pub.

Mary Welsh was in London for every one of its 400-odd air raids. Once a shell fragment sailed through the window of her Berkeley Square flat, nicked her left ear and shattered the sugar bowl on the table. She got down on her hands and knees to salvage the sugar before she patched up her ear. In those days her friendships in the R.A.F. brought TIME'S readers many stark, poignant stories of the men who turned back the Luftwaffe. She had learned to know a very great many of them by their first names at the front, had carried Paris lingerie home to their girls in England, given their Cobber Kain (the Paddy Finucane of 1940) a party at Maxim's the week before he crashed.

In the U.S. Mary Welsh will visit her folks in Thief River Falls, Minnesota--and steal a short vacation with a Chippewa Chief named Kau-kau-kan who taught her to paddle a birchbark canoe when she was twelve. Before she goes back to London she will do a short stint in TIME'S editorial office here, to share her intimate, on-the-spot knowledge of Britain directly with our editors.

And in between she will finally get around to buying herself some new clothes. But what she will do with them in England is another question --for she returns as one of the only two women correspondents accredited to the American forces in Europe--and she will be in uniform practically all the time.

Cordially,

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