Within a few weeks an event of unique significance will be available to you via your television screen. It is the MARCH OF TIME'S documentary film of General Dwight Eisenhower's best-selling book, Crusade In Europe.

This filmed and televised account of the war in Europe as Eisenhower saw it is the first public showing of thousands of feet of film shot on the battlefronts of World War II by combat and civilian cameramen and hitherto withheld for security reasons. It will be presented in 26 two-reel episodes of 20 minutes each.

After General Eisenhower turned his manuscript over to Doubleday & Co., 20th-Century-Fox bought from the publishers the television rights to Crusade In Europe, asked the MARCH OF TIME to film it, and leased the film series to the American Broadcasting Co., which will telecast it.

For MOT, which has been in business 15 years and now turns out news films for a worldwide audience of moviegoers, this was a major assignment. In the first place, this was Eisenhower's story, and his account had to be reproduced faithfully in pictures. Secondly, MOT found itself overwhelmed with riches. The U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard; the British War Office and Ministry of Information; the National Film Board of Canada and other hitherto inaccessible sources suddenly made 165,000,000 feet of restricted war-film available for the project. Fortunately, MOT had the staff (120) and the know-how to cull and present it.

The only similar undertaking was Lawrence Stallings' The First World War, which ran for seven reels and consumed about all the good photographic material available on World War I. MOT Producer Richard de Rochemont had a first-hand acquaintance with World War II as European manager of MOT -- until the German Wehrmacht ran him out of Paris -- and as a SHAEF correspondent during the battle for Europe. His associate producer, Arthur Tourtellot, had served his wartime hitch in the Coast Guard. Between them, with the aid of ex-U.S. Marine sergeant and MOT Scriptwriter Fred Feldkamp, and a big crew of film editors, librarians, researchers and technicians, they managed to put the Eisenhower story on celluloid.

It was not easy. Eisenhower, unlike many a U.S. author, had not written his story with an eye on the movies. Therefore, without betraying its honest, factual presentation, his book had to be refitted into 26 connected episodes that would make dramatic use of the most valuable war film available. In the process Feldkamp found that he had a full-time research job on his hands. Eisenhower could state a fact or a situation in a sentence, but Feldkamp, in order to pictorialize it, had to know what was going on all over the battlefield--and elsewhere--at the same time. His reading included authentic War Department reports of battle actions, etc., and was, to say the least, extensive.

Although Westbrook Van Voorhis, longtime "voice" of the MARCH OF TIME, narrates Crusade In Europe, and quotations from Eisenhower are spoken by another commentator, viewers will also hear the actual voices of such wartime leaders as Prime Ministers Churchill and Chamberlain and President Roosevelt. And, despite MOT's work on it, the first bow for the dramatization of the Eisenhower story goes to the U.S. Signal Corpsmen and the other combat cameramen who made the film under fire and, in some cases, died doing it.

Crusade's opening scene is inside the Allied Headquarters at Reims on May 7, 1945, with Colonel General Jodl on hand to sign the German surrender. Within the next week or two, when the date and time of the first ABC telecast of Crusade In Europe have been set, TIME'S Radio & Television department will announce them.

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