Around 3 a.m. on June 6, 1944, restless and unable to sleep, Lt. Vernon A. Walters turned on the radio in his room at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome. He heard German radio announce that the Allied invasion had begun, in Normandy, and pondered whether to tell his boss right away. Walters opted to sit on the news for a
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The flash hit the Associated Press wire at 4:39 p.m. Eastern War Time on Saturday, June 3, 1944: FLASH LONDON EISENHOWER’S HEADQUARTERS ANNOUNCED ALLIED LANDINGS IN FRANCE U.S. broadcast news operations had been poised for just such an alert for weeks, and immediately sprang into action. Seconds after the flash hit the wire, CBS broke into the Belmont Stakes broadcast
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Merrill “Red” Mueller of NBC spent nearly four months attached to Eisenhower’s HQ from D-Day on.
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The classic bit that sums up the tension between the press and its handlers ahead of the Normandy Invasion first appeared in Leonard Lyons’ syndicated column on June 12, 1944: Shortly before the invasion began, Britain’s Ministry of Information was besieged by hundreds of newspapermen seeking credentials to cover the story. For a while the confusion seemed interminable. One disgruntled
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World War II on Deadline 