Richard C. Hottelet, the longtime U.N. correspondent for CBS News who provided memorable eyewitness accounts of the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge during World War II and was among the last surviving reporters mentored by the celebrated newsman Edward R. Murrow, died Dec. 17 at his home in Wilton, Conn. He was 97. His granddaughter Maria Hottelet Foley confirmed his death but did not cite a cause.

Hottelet was part of the team of London-based war correspondents known as "Murrow's Boys" for their close association with the European news director of CBS News.

Considered one of the finest news teams ever assembled, the group included Eric Sevareid, William L. Shirer, Howard K. Smith, Winston Burdett, Charles Collingwood and Larry LeSueur. They were credited with inventing broadcast journalism - providing vividly reported news accounts of world events.

Hottelet was an accidental journalist, the American-born son of German immigrants who returned to his parents' native land just before the start of World War II. He was studying in Berlin when he joined the old United Press wire service to earn pocket money, but his resourcefulness and the deepening world crisis transformed Hottelet into one of the more prominent journalists reporting from Germany at the time.

He was a consistent irritant to the Nazis and courted arrest several times while reporting on the deportation of Jews, Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson wrote in their book "The Murrow Boys." He was arrested in March 1941 on espionage charges and spent four months in solitary confinement while being interrogated. He and another American were released in exchange for two Germans detained as spies in the United States.

Hottelet was hired by Murrow in time to cover the Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944. Hottelet boarded a bomber that attacked Utah Beach six minutes before the Allied operation commenced and later was with American troops during the Battle of the Bulge. Later, he parachuted to safety when his plane was hit with flak while covering the airborne crossing of the Rhine.

After the war, Hottelet broadcast from Moscow and Bonn and briefly hosted an early-morning TV newscast. He served as CBS' United Nations correspondent from 1960 until retiring from the network in 1985.

Richard Curt Hottelet was born Sept. 22, 1917, in New York. After his father lost his import-export business during the Great Depression, the family was forced into a series of increasingly humble dwellings. "Dick" Hottelet graduated from Brooklyn College in 1937 and moved to Germany at his father's urging to live with cousins who were financially better off. In 1942, he married Ann Delafield, who had been an employee of the British embassy in Berlin. She died in 2013. The Hottelets were predeceased by their children, Antonia Guzman and Richard Peter Hottelet. Survivors include four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.