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

Not all of TIME & LIFE'S 40 war correspondents are newsmen--six of them are newswomen: Mary Welsh, Margaret Bourke-White, Lael Tucker, Peggy Durdin, Shelley Smith Mydans, Annalee Jacoby.

Not every girl can shoulder the responsibility and stand the gaff of a war correspondent's life in these dangerous days--so this week I thought I would introduce you to one of them who can.

Pretty, dark, and only 28 years old, Annalee Whitmore Jacoby has just reached Chungking to become assistant to Teddy White and help him report the news of the war in Asia. But Annalee is no Janie-Come-Lately in the Far East. She went out to China in the fall of 1941, married TIME Correspondent Melville Jacoby in Manila, escaped with him from Corregidor, came home two years ago after he lost his life in a plane accident in Australia.

A top script writer for M.G.M., she had given up her Hollywood career to go to the Far East. She was at her husband's side in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked, lost everything but the sweater and slacks she was wearing when they bombed Manila and burned her home to the ground. On New Year's Eve she made a last-minute getaway to Bataan--caught a little island freighter at midnight as the Manila docks went up in flames.

On beleaguered Bataan and Corregidor, Annalee shared the troops' experience in everything but firing guns and flying planes. She ducked Jap bombs, tended the wounded, helped the doctors fight malaria without quinine--stuck it out with our boys for two bitter months. You may remember Jacoby's on-the-spot reports on how the Japs dished it out and our men took it as some of the most vivid, angry reporting ever to appear in the pages of TIME & LIFE.

With MacArthur's help, Annalee Jacoby made a hairbreadth escape from the Philippines. In bright moonlight the boat slipped through the minefields, past the Cavite shoreline where Jap artillery blazed. Beyond the bay she and her companions laid a tricky course to freedom--moved only by night, holed up during the day. ("There was always a tight feeling in our stomachs, and we sat on deck with our legs and arms crossed as well as our fingers".) She "filed her nails over and over again", twice almost to the quick--once when eight Jap warships steamed parallel to their course, again when a Jap cruiser chased them for miles, raced them into a rain squall that saved them by folding them in blackness. They just made it to a friendly port, for as they pulled dockside a piston cracked; their motors wouldn't have turned another time.

When Annalee got home from Down Under she said what she wanted was "an 18-hour-a-day job--right in the middle of the war if possible." But it isn't always easy to accredit a woman war correspondent--and it wasn't until just this month that we could give Annalee Jacoby her assignment.

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