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

I suppose TIME means more to me these dangerous days because so often I know who gathered what item of first-hand news from where. So perhaps this travel log of how TIME'S Foreign News and World Battlefronts editors are getting out to the places where the news is born will give you in turn an added interest in TIME'S news this summer and fall.

P:William Walton was the only newsman aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Spencer when she sank that German U-boat (TIME, June 7), so today the Battle of the Atlantic has a very personal meaning for him. (He has now landed safely in Britain to work with the American Eighth Air Force there.)

P:John Hersey left at an hour's notice from the Navy Department to join General Eisenhower's men in North Africa. He'd had his bags all packed for three weeks, waiting for the call. (The last time I wrote you about Hersey he was just back from Guadalcanal and the sea fight where they sank the carrier Wasp--and since then you may have read his best-selling story of a skirmish in the Solomons, Into the Valley.)

P:InNorth Africa Hersey takes the place of Senior Foreign News Editor Charles Wertenbaker, who spent three months at the front in Tunisia, followed the Americans to Gafsa, to Maknassy, to El Guettar, to Fondouk and almost to Mateur. He missed the dramatic entry into Tunis only because he had flown home to give you his eye-witness appraisal of just how each American division acquitted itself--as part of our final report on the North African victory.

P:Duncan Norton-Taylor is in Noumea in the Southwest Pacific on assignment to the American Naval Task Forces which we hope will soon be making it too hot for the Japs in their island outposts.

P: Robert Sherrod, who spent seven critical months last year with General MacArthur's men in Australia and New Guinea, has flown off to the front again--this time to the Aleutians. He arrived at U.S. Aleutian Headquarters just in time to cover the final round of the battle for Attu--and report how U.S. soldiers there were prying out the last Jap snipers with bayonets and blasting out the few remaining Jap machine gunners.

P:Wilmott Ragsdale, about whom I last told you when he was looping the loop with our desert glider students at Twentynine Palms and swooping down Mt. Rainier with the ski troopers, is now with the U.S. Army in Britain.

P:Stephen Laird, who was head of our Berlin office in 1940-41 and head of our London office in 1942, soon leaves for England again after eight months in the home office, where his personal acquaintance with the leaders of both Germany and Britain has been most valuable.

This is all a part of TIME'S unique system of writer-shuttling, under which TIME'S editors are constantly going overseas to get the first-hand feel of the news--and TIME'S correspondents are constantly shuttling home to go to work as editors.

Before fall I expect most of these TIME editors will be back at their desks, adding their on-the-spot knowledge of the battlefronts to our handling of the cables from TIME'S scattered correspondents and from the other editors who will in turn go out to take their places with our fighting men.

Cordially,

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