A Letter From The Publisher, Jun. 19, 1944

To answer some of the questions subscribers all over the world have been asking about how Time gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news. Copy Boy Bill Lohden was on all-night duty at the A.P. machine when the invasion flash came. His heart went right up in his throat (as most hearts all over America did), but like every one else at TIME he had known for weeks just what his job would be at H-hour, and the bells on the A.P. printer had hardly stopped ringing before he put in the first telephone call that started editors, writers and researchers on their D-day assignments.

Make-up Editor Bob Boyd had just put the regular edition to bed. The teletypesetter circuits were still open, so Boyd was able to flash the word at once to all our printers to shift over to their D-day plan. All work stopped on the old Battlefronts form; instead the electrotypers began rushing extra plates of the other news sections. When our presses started running at the usual hour Tuesday morning, the extra plates enabled us to turn out these other sections at twice the usual rate—so that all the presses would be clear that night to run the invasion section more than 100,000 copies an hour. This gave our editors all day Tuesday to study the reports from Normandy—and still permitted us to finish our printing run just a little behind schedule.

And this explains how most of our subscribers got their copies complete with the invasion analysis, just as promptly as if nothing had happened!

All told, some 50 men and women were on the invasion team on the editorial floor. When the flash came we told them to get a good night's sleep (for they would need it), but to set their alarm clocks for an early start on June 7. First arrivals began coming in sleepy-faced a little after six—and long before the first story conference at 9, we had a fine start integrating the day's news with our stacks of advance research.

At 8 o'clock the first cable came in from the 20-odd TIME & LIFE correspondents with General Eisenhower's men (Wertenbaker was with General

Omar Bradley, Walton with the paratroopers, Ragsdale on an American warship, British-born Dennis Scanlan on a British destroyer; White was attached to Montgomery's headquarters; Jack Belden was assigned to the American landing forces near Carentan; and Mary Welsh was flying around the airfields in Britain talking to returning flyers).

And a little later correspondents all over the world began telling our editors just how people around them were reacting to Dday. One of the first was Lauterbach's report from Moscow, beginning with how his landlord had kissed him when he came down to breakfast and cried: "We love you, we love you, we love you."

We put the Invasion story to bed at 9 o'clock that night—and I think we owe our editors some sort of tribute for the job they did. I reread their stories Friday— and even at that time, 65 hours after their last correction was made, every sentence in their stories still "stood up"—and they gave me as good a grasp of what was happening as all the thousands of other words I read that day written on the basis of much later news.