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

"You don't learn much about the Army and Navy by sitting here in New York and talking out of your hat," one of TIME's Army & Navy writers said to me the other day. The next morning I learned he was off for Alaska.

There are few important Army, Navy, Marine or Air Corps posts that one or another of our Army & Navy reporters has not visited for you in the past three years--in the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, Australia or the Hawaiians. They have looped in gliders at Twentynine Palms, sweated in tanks at Fort Knox, Ky., slid in the snow with the ski troopers on Mt. Rainier. They have visited scores of aircraft factories, tank arsenals and munitions plants--spent hours and even days in the testing laboratories and on the firing ranges --sailed on some of our biggest war ships.

This get-out-and-see-it-for-yourself rule dates back to the very beginning of the Army & Navy section, which we launched just after France fell (the first story we ran there was headed "If Britain Should Lose"). In those days magazines and newspapers (with a few outstanding exceptions) carried practically no informed Army and Navy news at all. Almost the only place Americans could learn about their armed forces was in publications like the Infantry Journal--so our pioneering writers had a double job at the start: they had to develop news sources where none existed before and they had to teach our readers the very ABCs of modern fighting.

Right now this department is keeping six reporters and two researchers on the move for you. Two of these writers are Reg Ingraham and Jim Shepley, who work out of Washington--another is John Walker, who saw the German invasion of Poland and was one of the first U.S. journalists to learn first-hand what a blitzkrieg means--another is James McConaughy Jr., just back from a swing around the Army camps in the Southwest--still another is Robert Sherrod, who spent six months last year with General MacArthur's men in Australia and New Guinea. But the most important member of this team is TIME's Army & Navy editor and aviation specialist--Roy Alexander.

Alexander has been a pilot himself for more than 20 years now --rose to be Major in the 110th Observation Squadron, National Guard. But Alexander is a journalist first and a flyer second. He worked 15 years with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, before he came to TIME (he applied for his job here by flying an Army plane into New York in the morning, meeting TIME's editor at two o'clock, flying back to St. Louis that night).

Since we started the Army & Navy section Alexander has personally visited close to a hundred Army and Navy posts, ranging all the way from Pearl Harbor to Britain, where he spent two months last fall, hopping from airfield to airfield, bunking with the American flyers, renewing his acquaintance with Air Forcemen like Generals Doolittle, Eaker and Spaatz.

And now that the real bombing of Germany is developing into the greatest United Nations offensive of all, I am mighty glad we have an aviation authority of Alexander's stature helping to call the shots for you in TIME.

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