The Chinese Reds are making the truce table in Korea a place of threats, warnings and a sounding board for anti-U.N. propaganda. Some think this foreshadows a renewal of full-scale warfare --the enemy is now at peak strength and anything can happen.

TIME'S correspondents in Korea are ready for anything. For more than two years now, they have been shuttling in, out, over and through that embattled peninsula to keep you posted on the war and the events that led up to it. Members of the Tokyo bureau, who have been covering the war, have also been sending stories on Japan's regained sovereignty, the prisoner-of-war camp incidents, the May Day riots, and Korean politics. Says Bureau Chief Dwight Martin: "The biggest problem is trying to figure out from one day to the next which way the cat is going to jump --Koje, Pusan, Seoul, Panmunjom, Japan, or at the front."

Figuring out "which way the cat will jump" is always an important part of the newsgathering business. The nine men pictured here, during two years of war in Korea, often demonstrated their ability to be a jump or two ahead of the cat.

Several weeks before the war started, Frank Gibney, then a Tokyo correspondent cabled these lines to TIME:

One night last week a U.S. Information Service film unit went to the schoolyard in the farming village of Manpori . . . After the show was over, an old farmer . . . stood up to thank the Americans. "You have left your great cities to come here," he said. "We are happy that the men from America are with us--and we hope that they will stay." All over South Korea a newly proud people were anxiously hoping the same thing. Remembering the Russians north of the 38th parallel, another Korean said, half apologetically: "We know that many American leaders think Korea should be given up. We have trusted and hoped in you. Will you fail us?"

About four weeks after he had sent that cable, Gibney, injured when a bridge was blown up by the South Koreans, was writing a different kind of dispatch from Korea. He told of the North Koreans' smash across the 38th parallel, and described the pell-mell retreat of civilians from the capital.

Correspondent James Bell joined Gibney at the front at the end of July. Accompanying a Marine assault force in the Naktong area, Bell captured the horror and heroism of war in his story, The Battle of No Name Ridge (TIME, Aug. 28, 1950). In September, Bell was a member of a team of five TIME Inc. reporters and photographers who covered the Inchon landings. Gibney had landed earlier on Wolmi Island, and watched the Inchon assault "about one city block away." Shortly afterward, Gibney returned to the U.S. and was replaced by Martin.

During the next two months, Hugh Moffett, the new Tokyo bureau chief, and Curtis Prendergast joined TIME'S team of war correspondents. Prendergast had been in Seoul when the war began, attached to the American Embassy as a member of the foreign service. He packed his wife and children off to Japan, and remained in Korea with the State Department until August 1950, when he returned with his family to the U.S. to look for a new job. "I walked in to TIME," Prendergast recalls, "got hired, and was sent back to Korea immediately."

Tom Lambert, now in TIME'S Bonn bureau, was hired as a correspondent by Manfred Gottfried, chief of TIME correspondents, in a sooty barracks building in Hungnam, just before Christmas in 1950. The first assignment Moffett gave him, when he reported for work three weeks later, was to take a week's vacation. Lambert didn't like the idea and, instead, went to work immediately.

Correspondent R. C. MaCoy arrived in Tokyo a year ago, spent six months in Korea as an interlude between two lively assignments in Latin America (TIME, Feb. 4). Last November, Bud Hutton joined the Tokyo staff. Hutton, who claims to be virtually indestructible in wars, flew 23 missions as a gunner before D-day in World War II, later made a parachute jump at the Rhine ("I got jarred around a little bit, that's all"), and came out unscathed when his jeep was forced off the road by a truck in Korea.

Others have been less fortunate. Correspondent Wilson Fielder rushed to Korea from his base at Hong Kong when the war broke out. He started by covering naval operations, and wrote Last Train from Vladivostok, the memorable story of a landing party which mined a railroad tunnel (TIME, July 24, 1950). The next week Fielder joined the land forces at Taejon and was killed in action. Since then four of TIME'S correspondents have been injured in Korea. The risks of covering a war come high.

Cordially yours,

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