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

Perhaps you noticed last week that Robert Sherrod of TIME was one of the nine correspondents commended by the Army for their conduct during the 20-day fighting on Attu.

"They earned the respect of all the officers and men that they contacted," said Lieut. Colonel Fergusson's official report. "Their stories vere the result of firsthand information secured under fire and not concocted in the safety of some rear area."

And so this week I thought you might be interested in reading something of what Sherrod sent home to News Bureau Chief David Hulburd about a war correspondent's life on Attu.

"This was no taxicab war," he said. "The only way to get to the battle lines was to walk over mountains where a mile an hour was fair speed. Most of the fighting was done on mountain peaks a thousand feet or more straight up. Some reporters did not get to take their shoes off for days, and the icy Aleutian winds numbed an ungloved hand so quickly that taking notes outdoors was all but impossible. The wind was worse than Jap bullets whistling overhead. You get used to bullets.

"There was no way to take a typewriter over the mountains to the front, so to write a story we had to tramp all the way back to the beach, board a ship, then borrow a typewriter. After that we had to walk back an hour or more to G-2 headquarters for censoring.

"We all dressed in one to three sets of long wool underwear, field jacket, parka, sweaters, woolen cap beneath the helmet, two or more pairs of heavy wool socks, shoe pacs or leather boots and raincoats. Yet we always seemed to be cold. More than once we had to sleep on the wet, cold earth in our clothes. That was pretty uncomfortable, but looking at the suffering infantrymen and the supply carriers who had to take loads up steep mountains and the litter carriers who had to.bear the wounded down, we could not feel very put out."

Sherrod was in the front lines with our boys on Buffalo Nose ridge, where one of the bitterest battles of the campaign was fought. He saw U.S. soldiers bayonet Jap snipers out of foxholes, blast Jap machine gunners out of their nests. And he was one of the five correspondents who saw the fighting through to "the weirdest finish in the history of modern warfare"--the way the strange little yellow men committed hara-kiri by blowing themselves to bits with hand grenades.

This is the second time Sherrod has gone off to the wars for TIME: a year ago he spent six critical months in Australia and New Guinea with General MacArthur's men.

Cordially,

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