result in riot and massacre. Reluctantly Kalisch looked elsewhere and found another suitable spot- Beaugency. Two roads converged on the blasted bridge. At the junction stood a house which provided a perfect camera platform and press gallery. He spoke to the proprietor, M. Hertschap, and got him to clear the second floor. Carefully, Kalisch figured out the best time for shooting film and set the surrender hour at 3 P.m. Some of the staff wanted to change the time-but when General Macon agreed, the camera- men heaved a sigh of relief. General Charles de Gaulle was extremely interested in the details of this surrender and asked for strong assurances that the weapons of the 20,000 Germans be placed under U. S. Army guard. De Gaulle already saw France's up-coming troubles with the lawless FTPF Communists who were raiding and pillaging the countryside and would submit to no orders. De Gaulle knew what might happen if the weapons of 20,000 men fell into Communist hands. He could order the FFI one day to give up their arms, and they would, but he was equally sure the FTPF would not.

This posed Magill and his platoon with another problem, and the problems were serious enough already. There was the need to provide hay and feed for a thousand horses in the German column, fuel for 2,000 commandeered vehicles, and bread for twenty thousand troops. The big risk, however, was that the Germans, having refused to surrender to the French, were being allowed to carry their arms, loaded, all the way to the Loire. A secondary concern was the Chateau Valancey, home of the Duc de Talleyrand, grandnephew of Napoleon's foreign minister. A British agent got in touch with Lieutenant Magill and said it was absolutely necessary that all German columns be diverted from the Chateau, the reason being that, under the Chateau, 480 of the most priceless of the Louvre art treasures, including the Winged Victory and the enigmatic Mona Lisa, had been hidden for safekeeping. Immediately, a part of Sam's platoon had to spot hundreds of mines across the Chateau road in order to make it noticeably impassable and divert any stray detachments.

As we were first looking over the Chateau grounds with one of the household staff, it was early in the morning. We were all startled when a sparkling-eyed, black-haired girl in her late teens appeared suddenly at one of the spacious second-floor windows sans a stitch of clothing. She held her arms wide in a gesture of welcome and greeting. "Ooo, la-la," she said blowing a kiss, "les Amiricains!" We all waved, then she seemed to sense for the first time her state of nakedness, crossed her hand over her breasts, and pulled back from the window. We saw her no more. "Who was that?" somebody wanted to know. The guide explained that she was a prot6g6e of the duke's. A little later we met the duke, who was seventy-three.

The war correspondents were busily writing day-to-day developments of the Magill-Elster saga, but did not know that all their copy was being held up by the censor. The ruling was that not one line of the story would hit print until the last PW walked into the Beaugency cage. Although this news disturbed our Romorantin contingent, they were somewhat sobered to realize how delicate our situation really was, seventy-five-miles deep in German territory. Who really had who south of the Loire was something nobody knew for sure. The Germans were armed, the French were hostile, the custodial force was small, and some of the correspondents trying to join us were being nipped by Germans over whom General Elster seemed not to have control.

On September 12, the extreme fluidity of the situation was illustrated when a trio of correspondents departed the Third Army press camp to cover the surrender. In the jeep were six-foot-six and skinny Wright Bryan, Atlanta Journal, who had weathered two aerial D-Day runs with both paratrooper and glider-tug planes; Ed Beattie, UP; and John Mecklin, Chicago Sun. They were tooling down the road near General Pershing's old World War I headquarters town of Chaumont and found themselves less than a hundred yards from a German road- block before they recognized it as such. All three of them were cap- tured, and Wright was wounded in the shinbone. He was carted off to a German hospital. Beattie was a major coup, the Germans thought. He had been based in Berlin before the war and was well known to the crowd around Dr. Josef Goebbels.

John Mecklin, who had fallen young and whole into the hands of the Germans, was waved off and sent back to the Third Army press camp, which got him a lt of needling. He was compared with the worst blow came from the traitorous conduct of his colleagues. When Mecklin returned to the Third Army press camp, he was loquacious about his experience. The rest of the correspondents fed him on brandy, questioned him closely, and at intervals, left the tent where he was holding forth to file their stories. Mecklin got around to send- ing his own version a day later and got a blast from the Chicago Sun, which reminded him next time to file first, then talk, since he had been scooped on his own adventure by every paper in the states.

News flashed into Atlanta, Georgia, contained the statement that Wright had been "wounded in the fleshy part of the leg." An Atlanta Journal colfort, Sam Dull called Mrs. Bryan in an attempt to be reassuring. "I wouldn't worry yet, Ellen," he said, "because we both know there ain't no fleshy part of Wright Bryan. They must have captured somebody else." Kalisch had sent a message to his old roommate, Lt. Col. George Stevens, the celebrated Hollywood producer-director, asking him for a sound-on-film crew to be emplaced at the Beaugency bridge. George dispatched a unit bossed by Captain Joseph Birm, whose professional Hollywood lensing had never presented anything to equal this genuine article, and backed him up by Lieutenant Bill Montague, late of Columbia Pictures in Hollywood, and First Lt. Joseph Zinni of Philadelphia, photo unit head with the Eighty-third. Midway in the march- up of the Germans, two more correspondents joined us, Robert Barr, BBC, and Alton W. Smalley, St. Paul Dispatch-Pioneer, nailing down a Minnesota angle. Smalley found it in Stanley L. Pope, one of Magill's platoon, and Pope had a good story in that, while he was completely courageous in the face of desperate odds, he had a horror of the day when he would actually be in a spot where he would have to kill. This package capture had uncommon appeal to Pope. By stretching his circulation field somewhat, Smalley included John W. Baird, Jr., who came from the town of Embarrass, Wisconsin.

The German columns, three of them, moved up toward the destinations of Orleans, Beaugency and Blois. They included Wehrmacht (Army), Kriegsmarine (Navy), and Luftwaffe (Air Force) troops, with the Navy admiral making the trek in a horse and buggy of ancient vintage. Magill's platoon had broken camp and parts of it were riding at the head of each colu .

Colonel Crabill was still anxious about these armed columns and wanted nothing to excite them. Hal Boyle and Cy Peterman had almost been in an incident when they planted their jeep at an inter- section where the column made its turn for the last miles. Peterman was standing in the jeep, taking pictures.

A German lieutenant worked himself into a lather. "Look pretty," he said to his men. "Look nice for the American photographer. Let him show the Americans what real German soldiers look like." Then he lashed himself with his riding crop and was getting a little frothy at the mouth. "Get the hell down from there with that camera," said, Boyle to Peterman, "and let's get out of here. First thing you know, you'll be shooting pictures, and he'll start shooting pistols." At this point Major Charles Madary of Baltimore, Maryland, Army manager of the Scribe, arrived from Paris with a coeducational group of correspondents, including Geoffrey Parsons, New York Herald Tribune; David Anderson, New York Times,- Erika Mann, Liberty; Lady Margaret Stewart, Australian Consolidated Press; Betty Knox, London Evening Standard; and Lee Miller, Vogue.

Crabill did not want this new batch of sightseer correspondents to go across the river until the next day, so we made arrangements for them in an Orl6ans hotel and prepared to sweat out the next day, the seventeenth, when Generals Elster and Macon would perform the last rites.

The Paris correspondents were briefed the next morning on the complete plans, then Crabill authorized me to take them over. "Tell them to be careful," he said. "We haven't got the Germans in the cage yet, and their guns are loaded." One of the feminine war correspondents was Erika Mann, daughter of the famous Thomas Mann, who had suffered persecution and endured exile because of Hitler. As we came upon the leading elements of the column and passed alongside it down the road, Erika was emotionally moved, began to talk incoherently, then uttered profanity in the German tongue, and finally as the command car slowed, she got out. When I could get the jeep stopped and get back to her, she was less than a yard from the marching Germans, her hands on her hips, her tongue stuck out, rendering a juicy Bronx cheer right in their faces. That was the end of the ride, because she was bundled up and the retinue went back to the Beaugency bridge to await the rest of the affair. By then, no Germans would be armed, and it would be a lot safer for her to stick out her tongue.

At 3 P.m. Generalmajor Eric Elster came up to the bridge in his battered Citroen, got out, surveyed the scene: the battery of motion picture cameras, the microphone, and General Macon backed by division, corps, Air Force and Ninth Army staff representatives. He probably did not notice some hasty scurrying at the left of the receiving group, where I bustled Lieutenant Sam Magill into position with the staff. He had been sitting on the fence, because nobody had seen fit to include him. As Magill came up, one of the Ninth Army colonels, fresh from the States, and seeing his first German soldier, looked about with some disgust, wondering at the discipline of the Eighty-third Infantry Division for having "gate-crashing" lieutenants at a time like this.

Lt. Col. Jules French placed himself on General Elster's left. "Shall we go, Herr General?" he asked, quietly.

Elster, pulling down on his tunic and straightening his cap, managed a smile. "Ja, mein Oberst," he said, and they moved out. The whir of the cameras was like a hive of bees, and New York Timesman David Anderson wrote that this must have been "the best covered surrender of this, or any war." What no one knew then was that the story was being smothered by a trio of airborne divisions-the American Eighty-second, and 101st and the British First-being dropped in the Netherlands at Nijmegen, Eindhoven, and Arnhem. The censor pulled the stop off both events at the same time, and relegated Magill's tremendous exploit to second-string position. But Paramount News made a special out of the movie film, labeling it unreservedly, "The Strangest Story of the War," and afterward, in the November 11, 1944, Saturday Evening Post, Collie Small, UP, wrote of the event and described the setting: "News of the war south of the Loire drifted into the bar at the Scribe Hotel in Paris where correspondents gather nightly to plot new ways of poisoning the censors, who also drink at the Scribe bar, but from different stools-like big-league umpires and ballplayers. The inevitable happened almost immediately. Army public-relations officers, who never tire of devising new ways to torture weary correspondents, announced prematurely that 20,000 Germans were surrendering the following morning. Three hours later, they frantically announced it was all a mistake, and for everyone to stay as far away as possible, because the Germans might not surrender after all. Unfortunately, three of us left between amouncements...." "Unfortunately," Collie Small wrote, but this exploit of Sam Magill got Small a contract with the Saturday Evening Post, and tripled his salary, among other things.

Sam Magill, who crossed the English Channel a lieutenant, went home a lieutenant at war's end. This was partly because Colonel Crabll said he felt Sam's platoon "was more valuable to the security of the regiment than another battalion of infantry would have been, and I never considered him replaceable in that job." Once, much later, he was offered a captaincy if he would leave the platoon, but he refused, saying he would see the "boys" through to the end of the war, which he did. The nervy exploit of Magill, who violated orders, penetrated into German-held territory a hundred miles, and brought off the first big PW bag for the Ninth Army, finally was put on orders for the Legion of Merit eleven months after the incident. The war was over, and he was about to go home with the Ninety-ninth Infantry Division. They didn't give him the ribbon in the Scribe bar, or even in a ceremony. He had to go to a Ninety-ninth Division supply room and draw it.