"The Magoo"

To all appearances, it was a routine press conference at Allied headquarters in North Africa. General Eisenhower spoke casually of the overall military picture. He was in good form, smiling, crinkling his forehead, moving his eyes swiftly from face to face. It was the middle of June. Then the General said quietly: Overseas operations will begin within a month. Objective: Sicily.

This was it. The correspondents felt themselves tighten up. The General was not smiling now; his icy blue eyes moved from one to another of the reporters. None of them had expected the top Allied commander to take them so intimately, so significantly into his confidence. The General warned them that they must not talk.

They Fly Through the Air. For days thereafter the 100-odd American and British correspondents in North Africa went about with the guilty demeanor of men bursting with a secret. When they had TIME, July 26, 1943 to refer to it, they called it "the magoo," "that thing," or just "it." This was what they had trained for. Some veterans had been almost four years around the front lines. Others had studied invasions at service schools in Britain. One and all, they kept the secret.

Empty chairs began to show in the press room. No one asked where his colleagues had gone. When "D Day" came, fewer than a dozen reporters went into Sicily with the first wave. They had a rocky time.

Big, bold, bearded (35) John Thompson of the Chicago Tribune floated down from the night sky with a flight of tough U.S. paratroops. It was his second invasion jump (the first: near Tabessa, Algeria, last November). He crashed through an olive tree before he hit the ground, cracking a rib, wrenching a knee, skinning his knuckles. His tired old secondhand portable typewriter got to earth in a parachute bundle. Thompson found it, hid it behind a stone wall. But by the time the paratroops had taken Vittoria, someone had stolen his portable.

Bataan to Vittoria. I.N.S.'s ace, steady Clark Lee, who covered Bataan and the Solomons for A.P., went in with an amphibian task force. When the beachhead was made, he joined seven U.S. soldiers in two jeeps and entered Vittoria. They were somewhat premature. Two German armored cars surprised the Americans in a garage. Lee led his party out the back way. The armored cars caught up with them and killed a sergeant, but Lee and the rest finally made the U.S. lines.

Burly, silent, broody Jack Belden (TIME & LIFE) boiled on to the beaches near Gela with an amphibian force and, when the front line had been moved far enough inland, sat down at a headquarters shack to bat out some copy. German tanks were lobbing shells overhead against landing craft on the beach. An officer hurried in: "Tanks are two miles from headquarters! What's the use of writing a story when you may be captured in a few minutes?"

All for One. Lean, quiet Ross Munro (Canadian Press), one of the best of all war reporters, went in with the Canadians and scooped the world. His copy, filed via Malta and London, was the first eyewitness story out of Sicily. It beat every U.S. correspondent by hours. Canadians, recalling how the Hearst press misplayed the Dieppe raid (which Munro covered) as an American adventure, felt compensated.

For once, Americans had all they could read about an Allied move. The copy was slow getting under way, but within 24 hours after the troops were on the beaches it was spinning through OWI's Washington headquarters--from Sicily, from the invasion fleet, from Allied headquarters in North Africa. General Eisenhower insisted that all stories be pooled and distributed by the news associations. That meant that every correspondent's copy was available to all U.S., British and Canadian papers. The result was the best war coverage Americans had yet had.

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