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

When D-day comes, Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia promises that his Partisan armies will take the offensive too, thrusting north into Germany's underside while our men batter at the western beaches.

And so perhaps this week you might like me to tell you something about the only American war correspondent in the Balkans today--Stoyan Pribichevich of TIME & LIFE, chosen by lot to represent not only our magazines but the entire American press.

Stoyan was flown into Yugoslavia early this month, landed ten miles behind the fighting front, was driven in a captured German Volkswagen to Marshal Tito's mountain stronghold (TIME, May 22). He is the first U.S. newsman to meet Tito face to face (they talked in Serbo-Croatian), the first correspondent able to short-circuit an interpreter and talk directly with the guerrillas, the first American reporter to enter Yugoslavia at all since Pulitzer Prize Winner Daniel De Luce got in and out of the country seven months ago.

Stoyan has been our Balkan expert for years. Although he is now a U.S. citizen, he was born in a district of old Austria-Hungary which became part of Yugoslavia after World War I. His father was Yugoslav Minister of the Interior until he was exiled for opposing the late King Alexander's dictatorship--and Stoyan today has one cousin who is a lieutenant colonel on Tito's general staff, another who is an official on the Partisan National Committee.

Stoyan himself joined our staff in 1940, right after he finished World Without End, a history the New York Times called "the best book about the Balkans in a long time." At first he worked as a writer for FORTUNE, but after Yugoslavia was overrun by the Nazis his one wish was to get back to his own country as a TIME correspondent. Until last fall, the closest he could get was Britain, where he worked on the staff of our London office and kept in close touch with the Balkan underground (he is one big reason why TIME has so often been first to bring you news of the dramatic events bubbling up in Yugoslavia--first to focus your attention on the rise of Mihailovich, then first to call the turn on the clash between Mihailovich and Tito).

Early this winter we moved Stoyan one step nearer his goal, sent him to Cairo as a correspondent accredited to the Mediterranean theater. As soon as he reached Egypt he began practicing parachute jumps, to be ready at a moment's notice to be dropped on his native land. In one of these jumps he fractured his left foot, and for a while he was heartbroken at the thought that the accident might cost him the assignment in the Balkans.

Fortunately, it took less than a month to get his foot out of the plaster cast. It must have been a great day for him when the military authorities notified him he would be the one U.S. correspondent to join Tito's forces and eyewitness their counterattack against the Germans at the moment of the Allied invasion across the Channel.

"If I am chosen," he cabled us

shortly before he got the news, "I

may not see you until the end of the European war."

Cordially,

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