distinguished himself by getting as close to the combat and the people fighting it as possible. Correspondent Don Whitehead, who would go on to win two Pulitzer Prizes declared that Belden had inspired him. In his book, Beachhead Don, Whitehead recalls noticing the Belden would disappear from time to time from the company of the other reporters. When Whitehead asked where he had been, Belden replied that he had been at the front with the troops. Chastened, Whitehead says, "I decided I would use the Belden approach to reporting and get as close as I possibly could to the fighting." After the Africa campaign, Belden landed with the invading troops in Sicily and Salerno. In 1943, Belden's leg was shattered by machine-gun fire during the Salerno invasion. After recovering in the U.S., he returned to Europe and covered the invasion of France and the end of the War in Europe. Eric Sevareid, in his autobiography Not So Wild a Dream, recounts crossing paths with Belden in the final weeks before the Nazi surrender. A collection of short essays, Still Time to Die, (1944) includes his reportage from battlefields in Asia, North Africa and Europe. The book China Shakes The World Belden's best remembered work was his last, which joins Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China, Graham Peck's Two Kinds of Time, and Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby's Thunder Out of China as classics which shaped Western understanding of the Chinese Revolution. When Belden returned to the United States in 1947, a magazine editor shouted that he wasn't going to print "any of this goddam lefty stuff." But Belden returned to China to report on the Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. Belden avoided Mao's Yan'an: "that cave village had become a tourist center with every foreign correspondent in China hopping over to have a quick look... I had no desire to get mixed up in that circus, fearing that it might be very hard for me to get in close contact with the people, the war or their revolution." Belden felt Mao Zedong represented the party apparatchik or the intellectual, and saw in the villages that the Communists were not trying to establish a "utopian democracy." The first part of the book is based on eye-witness, participant reporting which leads the reader to the conclusion that the Communist dominated Border Region Government had the allegiance of