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Bennett CerfBennett Cerf
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Session:         Page of 1029

before. It was not even done in book form. It was just a day-to-day diary.

Then we rushed it out, and of course it was a sensation...Guadalcanal Diary.

Then another wonderful book came along. Bob Considine wrote a book with a pilot who had helped bomb Tokyo, and called it Thirty Seconds over Tokyo. Oh boy, did that one cause a sensation!

Now the interesting part about that book was that we got it before the story had been released that these planes had come from a carrier. Nobody yet knew where these planes had come from that had bombed Tokyo. President Roosevelt did not want this secret divulged. He made a big story about Shangri-la. You may have forgotten this. The fiction that the planes came from Shangri-la, which was taken from a book called Lost Horizons. We were told that we couldn't publish Thirty Seconds over Tokyo until we got clearance from the Air Force.

Q:

Who told you this?

Cerf:

The Government.

Q:

The Government found out that the book had been written and...

Cerf:

Oh, they knew that the book had been written. It had





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