Russian War Coverage
Sirs:
Let me tell you that this week's issue of TIME with its inside story about the flight of Hess to England, the Germans' demands on Russia and Marshal Timoshenko on the front cover with the big iron man Stalin is journalism of the very highest order.
I don't believe I have missed an issue of TIME from cover to cover since it first appeared. This issue is something. You hit the tops I think. Yes, I have heard about that exciting memo you sent to the staff, how you had to make waste paper out of the Emir and the wonderful follow-up of last week's Zamzam with this week's Robin Moor.
Why don't you let your subscribers read that memo in TIME?
ROY DICKINSON New York City
Sirs:
. . . An outstanding job in journalism.
DANIEL W. ASHLEY Washington, D. C.
Sirs:
... In playing golf I have often noticed that the best players seem to have the best luck. Their balls miss sand traps by inches, roll up on the green and stop near the hole; where others (mine) are apt to trickle into the pit or land short of the green by a few inches.
This occurred to me as I read your dramatic story of this current issue. . . .
L. H. SHINGLE Philadelphia, Pa.
Sirs:
Damn good in any man's language! Heartiest congratulations.
TERENCE F. MACGRATH
New York City
Sirs:
[This] issue of TIME is one long and enormous scoop. . . .
Congratulations!
ALAN GREEN
New York City
-- Herewith excerpts from the Publisher's memorandum to the entire staff, many members of which had had a hand in the job but few of whom, even in the editorial department, knew the whole story.--ED.
You may possibly hear quite a bit of comment on this coming week's issue of TIME; partly because TIME'S cover is right on the nose of the Russian situation and partly because TIME has so much swell Russian stuff in its World War and Foreign News sections. . . .
So I think you might be interested in knowing a bit more about this issue and being assured that neither the cover nor the coverage was just a matter of luck. . . .
First, as to why we have so much hot dope on Russia inside the magazine: The reason for this is that ten days ago we called out one of our special correspondents in Germany and got him safely across the frontier into neutral country, from which he could send us the uncensored truth. The day after he left Germany he telephoned that he had tremendous news but that he could not jeopardize his position by spilling it to us at that time over the wire. But as soon as the new war broke out he called us again on the telephone; said he would have to take a chance on what would happen to him, but his news was too hot to hold any longer.
The head of TIME'S newsbureau put two fast stenographers on the wire at this end and our correspondent dictated to them for half an hour the inside story about Hess' flight to England, about the discontent in Germany, about the wholesale arrests of once-active Nazis, about the growing isolation of Hitler and his unwillingness to listen to any disagreement, about the demands Germany made on Russia and when those demands were made. . . .
We could have put a great big EXCLUSIVE on almost every Russian war story in this week's issue of TIME, and this is one week when it really gets my goat that TIME presents its hot news in such a matter-of-fact way, without scare heads, boxes, big type. . . .
As for how come we have Stalin and Timoshenko on the cover:
Once again, this wasn't luck. This was a matter of preparedness:
The first word that Germany had declared war on Russia came in over the radio at five minutes past twelve New York time Sunday morning. By that time, 800,000 TIME covers were all printed with the anticipation that the big story of the week would probably be the Syrian campaign. But since the Russian situation was hot (as a matter of fact, if you will look in TIME last September you will see we practically predicted the Russian-German war then), we had cover plates standing in Donnelley's plant all ready to slam on the press.
By one o'clock in the morning, the 800,000 printed covers were just so much waste paper. The Emir plates had been torn off the press. The Stalin-Timoshenko cover plates had been bolted on in their place, a special extra crew of press men had been routed out of bed to come down and rush the makeready, and a complete foundry force had been summoned by telephone to make 210 additional press plates on Sunday double time to make it possible to print the Timoshenko cover 16 up--65,000 an hour.
Without doubt, TIME'S cover turnaround was the fastest color printing job ever done in this country. ... It wouldn't have been possible without wonderful co-operation from the print er, with the vice-president of Donnelley's supervising the operations over the telephone in the small hours of Sunday morning and Donnelley's No. 1 production man putting in a 24-hour day at the plant.
The job would have been complicated enough if our whole problem had been to have all those covers ready in Chicago when the presses started rolling Tuesday afternoon. But the problem was doubly complicated because 350,000 of those covers had to be in our Philadelphia plant. The only train that would get them there in time was the Broadway Limited Monday after noon and one interesting complication we ran into was the fact that the Broadway Limited couldn't handle bag gage the size of a printed TIME press sheet, so we had to cut the sheets up small and make special small size boxes to fit them. So among the crews which were working for us on double time on Sunday was a crew of carpenters summoned to Donnelley's plant for the packaging job! While we are talking about interesting things in this issue of TIME, perhaps I should also tell you that the pictures of the Robin Moor sinking are 100% exclusive with TIME.
They were taken by one of the crew of the Robin Moor.
What happened was that one of our National Defense editors had a friend on the Robin Moor. As soon as we saw his name on the list of survivors we telegraphed him for a special story, which was the basis of the Robin Moor report you saw in last week's issue of TIME.
At the end of his cable about the sinking, he added that he had an un developed roll of film. We immediately put in a telephone call to him and sent him a cable. We got back word that he had sailed on another boat that was not due in New Orleans until too late for us to reach him for this week's issue. But Saturday afternoon we got a phone call from our Washington of fice that he had received our cable after all and had given his undeveloped roll of film to a friend who was coming north on the Pan American Clipper.
Relayed from Washington, the films got in late Saturday night and we got them printed not long before midnight.
Naturally these pictures are not ex actly a professional job, but to the best of my knowledge and belief they are the only photographs ever published of an American ship being shelled and sunk by a Nazi submarine and they are the first pictures I have ever seen of the survivors of such an act of piracy setting out to sail 1,500 miles across the Atlantic in a small boat.
It turns out that if we had been about half an hour slower in getting our cable off to buy the pictures, we would have missed the man entirely.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.