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

You asked us to tell you the truth --even when the truth is a grim thing.

And one of the biggest reasons why TIME has stationed its own correspondents on every fighting front is to help us bring you the truth behind the often glamorized stories of the battles American boys are fighting all over the world.

So this week I think you might like to know the extraordinary impression the truthfulness of two recent books by TIME & LIFE correspondents has made on the press of the nation.

One of the books is Robert Sherrod's Tarawa: The Story of a Battle.

John Chamberlain called it "the first real book-length introduction to what war can mean to a peace-loving people." Lewis Gannett said its pages are "the most graphic, factual, frightened and frightening picture of frontline battle I have yet seen in print." Joseph Henry Jackson of the San Francisco Chronicle found it "one of the most truthful accounts of action in this war--and one of the most vivid pieces of writing on record." "About as near as you can get, in an armchair, to being in the midst of battle," said The Nation. And Foster Hailey wrote in the New York Times that Tarawa is "a superlative job of reporting, obviously written at white heat while the sounds of Betio still rang in Sherrod's ears and the smell of it still hung in his nostrils."

Of course these tributes to the realism of Sherrod's reporting are hardly surprising, for he actually did write large parts of Tarawa while under fire with our Marines on that bloody beachhead--crouching behind the seawall and putting down on paper from minute to minute everything he saw and heard and felt, determined that the least he could do for the men battling around him was to record for all time a true picture of how they dared and died. All through the first day on that "island of 5,000 dead" he expected he too would soon be one of those to die--and Raider Chief Evans Carlson wrote us later to express his "very genuine admiration" for Sherrod's "courage, fortitude and superb aplomb."

The other revealing book by a TIME & LIFE correspondent (and one that has climbed close to the top of the best-seller lists) is A Bell for Adano, John Hersey's story of what he learned as one of three correspondents who covered the occupation of Sicily for TIME & LIFE.

"An important contribution to the war" is the citation given by the Council on Books in Wartime. "Incredibly honest--a triumph of free speech," says the Dallas Morning Times. "Hersey has circumvented censorship by putting his observations into fiction form. One of the most inspiring books of the season," writes the Portland Oregonian. The Army Times calls A Bell for Adano "a tough book, slashing and cutting at a system personified by one of the Army's most publicized generals." And the Atlanta Constitution says: "It makes you proud to be an American," but "it may well be the basis of a Congressional investigation."

Quite a few of our correspondents have written books out of their firsthand knowledge of the fighting fronts and the diplomatic fronts, but Hersey is the first of our newsmen to weave his war experiences into a novel. Gannett calls it the first "good American war novel--beautiful and rarely moving." And of course ail of us here are proud that the critics are so unanimous that Hersey is "one of the most gifted young Americans now writing"--and that his first novel is not only "one of the finest about the war, but without question the finest about America's part in it."

Cordially,

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.