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

Will Lang of TIME was one of the seven American newsmen who waded ashore with the American troops when they made their surprise landing just below Rome, joined a battalion moving up for the first attack at dawn--as he had often done before.

Lang got his baptism of fire in Italy the second day of Salerno, when he found himself the only correspondent with an American regiment that was completely surrounded and cut off from the coast by superior German forces.

"As the sun slowly set over the hills men sat at their posts waiting. Some scraped around among the remains of the rations, ate without tasting. Some lay down beside the wounded as if asleep, but their eyes were open wide. Our guns were fixed, but everyone felt that the German guns were moving to new positions all around us. 'It's gonna be a long night,' someone said."

Three weeks later Lang was the first American correspondent to enter gutted Naples--just ten minutes behind the advance British reconnaissance cars. (It's a habit with him--last spring Lang and four companions rode into Tunis twelve hours ahead of the Army, pulled up at Nazi headquarters before the last Germans had cleared out.)

A week after the capture of Naples. Lang came very near being killed in the bombing explosion that wrecked the post office. "I had just seated myself next door when it happened," he cabled. "A sudden overwhelming roar, then shattered glass tinkling all around us. It was dark; huge masses of black smoke blotted the light from the room. A wild dissonant chorus of pain pierced up from the Via Cesare Battista. There were some 30 bodies and parts of bodies strewn in death's strange shapes over the street. And there were many others. . . ."

After Naples, Lang was with our men all through the bitter fighting along the Volturno. As the German barrage crept yard by yard along the river bank "three times soldiers I had talked with less than three minutes before were injured by artillery fire"--and he was in Bari last December when the Luftwaffe sank 17 Allied ships in "the costliest sneak attack since Pearl Harbor."

"George Rodger of LIFE and I were moving closer toward the harbor when the whole area lighted to a white blinding intensity," Lang cabled. "Then a great weight hit me and I found myself flat on the pavement. I saw a huge rolling mass of flame a thousand feet in the air: a tanker had blown up 300 yards from us. Tied up just before us was another tanker; it could blow up any moment. 'Let's get out of here!' I shouted, and we climbed to the top of a nearby building and looked over the fiery panorama. Through the smoke we counted eight ships already burning fiercely. The entire center of the harbor was covered with burning oil and thousands of tongues of flame licked up through the smoke. Occasionally we could hear faint cries of help come over the water. 'There are a lot of poor wretches dying out there,' Rodger said. . . ."

Before the landing at Nettuno, Lang had spent long weeks with the Fifth Army fighters scrabbling their way foot by foot through the mountains to Cassino. ("By his cheerful sharing of all dangers and hardships he has come to be considered a member of the 'All-American' Division," Commanding General M. B. Ridgway wrote.) And true to form, in the first attack from the beachhead below Rome, dawn found Lang being spattered with mud from exploding German shells right up in the very front lines.

Cordially,

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