To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

As I read the cover story in last week's TIME, I couldn't help wondering how we ever found out what General Patton wrote in his last letter to his wife--how we knew about the sail boat he has tied up against future leisure (it's called The When and If)--how we knew about his fighting the battles of Manassas and Gettysburg over again on the spot with his young son. More important, I wondered how we knew so intimately just how General Patton felt about the way the fighting had been going in Tunisia.

Perhaps you too have often wondered how TIME manages to fill its stories with so many little facts which are of no particular importance in themselves, but which add up to something quite significant.

I found, for example, five long cables from TIME'S Foreign News Editor, Charles Wertenbaker, filed from Gafsa within sound of the German guns. I found a long dispatch from correspondent Will Lang, who is also at the Tunisian front, and another from Jack Belden, who was with General Montgomery's men when they broke through the Mareth Line.

I found that Elizabeth Watkins in our Washington office had had a long talk with Mrs. Patton; and that other correspondents had talked with two of Patton's classmates at West Point--with fellow officers who had served with him in his Cavalry days--with the non-com who was with him when he was wounded in France.

F. E. Wylie, our Louisville correspondent, gathered a fascinating dossier on General Patton at the Armored Force School at Fort Knox--a dossier which began: "The best unprinted stories about General Patton probably are those which are not very printable." And from Washington our War Department reporter, Jim Shepley, sent another 16 pages--much of it off-the-record information which cannot be published yet.

Here in New York, researcher Margaret Quimby correlated all this material and ran down 101 other points. For example, I saw one very interesting three-page report of hers on the Civil War battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga--which found its way into three published lines. (And of course the file held dozens of reports from the AP--a service which goes to no other magazine except ours.)

But what interested me most was a windfall of evidence showing that our editors had realized for a long time back that General Patton was a man to watch and had been watching him. For example, there was a 5,000-word report from Bill Howland, our Atlanta correspondent, telling all about General Patton's colorful days at Fort Benning. (This was dated October 28, 1941 and filed away for future use. Another long report was filed nearly a year ago by correspondent Wilmott Ragsdale, on how General Patton was whipping our new desert warfare battalions into shape in the California desert.

Finally, I found that our Army & Navy editor, Roy Alexander, and writer, Robert Sherrod, have both been on maneuvers with General Patton--first in Tennessee in 1940, later in Louisiana and again in North Carolina. They had grown to know him quite well and had all sorts of anecdotes to contribute.

All this adds up to a pretty fair example of how TIME'S group journalism functions and how much traveling and interviewing and researching lies behind our published reports.

The cover story on General Patton totaled only 2,812 words. But some day I hope someone will have time to turn all this research into a full-length biography--for behind those 2812 words there is more than enough material for a 300-page book.

Cordially,

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