AE tattered signal flag from a U. S. destroyer on the Murmansk run ...

A helmet left behind when the Japanese stole quietly away from jog-bound Kiska . . . k.

A burned-out Luger taken at El Guettar when the Americans stopped Germany's famed Tenth Panzer Division . ..

I guess there's a little bit of the souvenir collector in even the most professional newsman.

For ever since the war began TIME correspondents and LIFE photographers and TIME, LIFE & FORTUNE men in uniform have been sending our home office all kinds of trophies of war--ranging all the way from the smallest ball-bearing turned out by the Schweinfurt works in Germany to a fully-rigged Nazi parachute of green and brown silk, 25 feet across.

There is the blood-red flag with the black double-headed German eagle that Photographer Bob Landry tore from the wall of Gestapo Headquarters in Gela, Sicily (it might have cost him his life; he found out later that two British officers were killed by a booby trap in that room). There is the Japanese flag a Marine Corps sergeant who graduated from the MARCH OF TIME'S School for Combat Photographers sent us after the battle for Hill 660 on Cape Gloucester (scribbled all around the Rising Sun are good wishes from the friends of the Jap who wore it wrapped around his waist --"Happy going to Manila" and "On to Washington")-And there is the Nazi flag inscribed (rather shakily) in Photographer George Rodger's hand:

"Captured at the sixth battle of Tobruk." (That flag hung on our wall for weeks until a stenographer in a neighboring building saw it from across the street, warned the F.B.I, that there was a "nest of Nazis" in the TIME & LIFE Building.)

But many more things than enemy flags are dumped on our desks to mark the trail TIME, LIFE & FORTUNE men have followed across the newsfronts of this war -- Japanese cigarets and German underwear--ashtrays made from the melted-down metal of Nazi planes which crashed and burned on the ground -- Japanese sabers and German commando dirks.

There are amusing mementos like the sign in Egyptian French and English that John Phillips brought home Cairo: "Guests of the hotel as well s officers of His Majesty's Forces are requested to refrain from abusing the privilege of the lifts" -and souvenirs that are pretty grim, like the fragments of a buzz-bomb that landed almost on the doorstep of the chief of the MARCH OF TIME's London office.

There are the snapshots Peter Stackpole picked up on the bloody beach of Saipan ( one shows a smiling, doll-like Japanese child waving the flag of Nippon) -and the stamp collection TIME Senior Editor Sidney Olson took from the knapsack of a Hitler youth who lay dead outside battered Nuernberg( " The Russians had already gone over him pretty thoroughly, but they won't take anything that has the swastika on it").

Then there is the Air Medal Correspondent Teddy White won for "the courage and bravery he demonstrated when he flew important and dangerous missions" with the men of China-Burma- India. Command and the felt patch Bernard Hoffman wore sewed to the back of his shirt when he went along on the first B-29 raid on Japan, to identify himself to Chinese guerrillas in case his plane was forced down.

All these war trophies are now on display in the Information and Reception Center on teh groung floor of the TIME & LIFE Building in New York, where you can see them any time you drop in.

Cordially,

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.