"From the London Blitz to the entrance into Berlin, John MacVane was NBC's voice in Europe and North Africa. Here is his unique, on-the-spot story of those epic events. In a vividly personal account that is at once high adventure and authoritative, informative history, NBC's chief radio correspondent in the European theater relives the great conflict."--Cover. "'This is London. John MacVane speaking.' During the long, anxious days of World War II these were magic words, for Americans knew that whatever the news, good or bad, that this man brought them over the radio, it was as reliable and up-to-the-minute as circumstances would permit. Indeed only he and Ed Murrow of rival CBS had the distinction of being permitted to broadcast without prior censorship. The outbreak of World War II found John MacVane, young newspaper reporter, and his bride living in Paris. After the phony war they fled to London, and there MacVane began his broadcasts--member of a new breed. Throughout the Blitz he ducked bombs to describe the Battle of Britain for Americans not yet at war. At the same time Lucy became pregnant, and along with his depiction of the air raids he recounts a poignant story of family hopes and expectations culminating in the birth and later death of a son. Here also are anecdotes of his colleagues--Larry LeSueur, Merrill Mueller, and Charles Collingwood among them--and of the Free French, in particular Charles de Gaulle, whom he interviewed and so became deeply sympathetic to his cause. After Pearl Harbor, MacVane witnessed the arrival of the first American troops in Britain and took part in the chiefly Canadian-manned raid on Dieppe, that gallant rehearsal for D-Day, still nearly two years away. In the interim he accompanied U.S. troops to Algiers and the North African campaign. In his narrative of that action, he not only provides vignettes of the difficult broadcasting conditions in which he worked and of the high brass, the Free French, and other Allied correspondents, but also turns his analytical mind to a dissection of the murderous political situation. So on to D-Day, when he landed at Omaha Beach with the First Infantry Division--the liberation of Paris in the spring of 1945--the drive from the Rhine to the Elbe--the linkup between Allied and Soviet troops. Here he reveals for the first time that he and several other correspondents were actually in Berlin while the mopping-up of that city was still in progress--an example of enterprise at one with the vigor and thrust of this book."--Dust jacket.