★ "WAR IN THE DESERT!" ★

Out of the scorching hell of the Libyan desert and the fortress of Tobruk, Croswell Bowen, ace photo-reporter, brings back to the American people a magnificent eye-witness account of the savage warfare being waged across the trackless Libyan wastes for the crucial prize of Suez. More than a month before Pearl Harbor, Croswell Bowen as a Collier's representative and as Official Photographer to the American Field Service joined a convoy of 18,000 British troops bound for the East. His unit's war-bound odyssey included service in South Africa, India, Egypt, Syria, the Lebanon, Palestine, and gruelling experience during the savage Axis push into the Libyan desert.

Stationed in Tobruk, he was invalided out just before its fall because of a paralyzed leg, Making his way by ambulance and train to Cairo, and from there by hospital ship to Durban, he recovered sufficiently to embark on a U. S. transport which brought him home.

His story is intended for those who want the real story behind official communiques and censored newspaper dispatches. Bowen realized that the real story of the war, the human side, was not to be found in the fancy, officer-filled bars of Cairo and Beyrouth, but in the dugouts and canteens of the plain soldiers — the men doing the fighting and the dirty work. And it was among these men that he spent his time — Free French colonials, Aussies, New Zealanders, South Africans, British Tommies, Grenadier Guardsmen, Jews, Poles, Czechs, Greeks, Arabs, Indians, and, just before he left, the advance guard of American doughboys now fighting in Egypt.

He lived among the soldiers learning their songs, their jokes, their stories of desert fighting, their hopes and fears and ambitions. And when the Stukas came over Tobruk dropping their "stuff" he crouched with these soldiers in the slit trenches. That is except when he set his camera to get such pictures as the one on the facing page of Tobruk's anti-aircraft barrage by night.

The soft desert night is streaked with tracer bullets and the burst of anti-aircraft shells as the ground defenses of Tobruk open up against enemy bombers trying to lay their "eggs" within the fortress. To take this remarkable photograph, Bowen had to leave his shelter and come out into the open, risking both enemy bombs and bursting shrapnel from the defending ack-ack barrage.

War brings grim contrasts to the Holy Land. A Polish soldier kneels in prayer at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

A British "Tommy" inspects a destroyed German anti-tank gun left behind by the Axis forces when they evacuated Tobruk.

★ Authentic Pictures of the War in Libya and the Holy Land ★

Exclusive Mgt.: LEE KEEDICK, 475 Fifth Ave., New York City

CROSWELL BOWEN

Croswell Bowen's background made him singularly qualified for the reporting job he has done in the Middle East. Educated at Yale and the Sorbonne in Paris, he began his career as a staff correspondent for the International News Service in New York and Washington. He also worked on the New York American, World-Telegram and Daily Mirror in New York.

Five years ago, recognizing the increasing importance of photographic journalism, he studied documentary photography at the New School for Social Research under Bernice Abbott. One of his early assignments was a photo-report on the Mississippi River from a river-boat which was printed in Town and Country. Other picture stories by him were published by Life, Harper's Bazaar and Acme Newspictures. He is also the author of the prose-photograph book GREAT RIVER OF THE MOUNTAINS: THE HUDSON of which one critic said, "It is a lasting contribution to the literature of the Hudson Valley."

On this assignment in the Middle East, his pictorial stories included the training of Sepoy troops in India, Arab tribes living in the ruins of Crusader castles, Allied soldiers worshipping at the Holy Places in Palestine, and the life of British soldiers fighting in the Western desert.