A Letter From The Publisher, Oct. 12, 1942

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

Not all the cables from our correspondents overseas are about battles and bloodshed and sudden death. Sometimes they are just human, personal stories—like this cable from the editor who is now on duty aboard a carrier with the American task force in the Pacific. He was permitted to fly on a special mission to a forward base—and there he ran into another TIME editor who left us eight months before Pearl Harbor to become a Naval flyer.

“I saw him standing in a clump of banyan trees and I didn’t recognize him at first. He was wearing a big pith helmet and I hadn’t calculated on his having a red beard. He stepped out on the road and said, ‘Hi, John,’ and I said, ‘What say, Al,’—a little more excitedly than we would when we met in the corridors of the TIME & LIFE Building in New York.

“He looked at the box of soap I’d brought ashore, along with the July issues of TIME and LIFE—the latest we had available. ‘Soap,’ he said. ‘Magazines.’ He said it the way he used to say ‘blonde’ and ‘old fashioned’ sometimes.

“We stood there in the jungle mud pouring out questions about nothing, and it was quite a while before I could ask: ‘How’d you make out in the last battle?’ He said, ‘You mean against the Ryuzyo? Oh, our group just went in and bombed her, that’s all.’

“I asked if he’d had a hit. ‘No, dammit,’ he said, ‘when we took off there was a twenty-knot wind blowing, but when I got over the Ryuzyo I figured it had dropped to fifteen knots, so I pushed over and dove, allowing for that much. Well, it had really dropped to only five knots, so I missed the Jap carrier by about twenty feet.’ As you know, twenty feet is practically aboard and a hit from that close can do plenty of damage. So I guess it’s safe to say he contributed more than his share to the crippling of the Ryuzyo.

“I asked if there were many Zeros around. ‘Some,’ he said. I found out later he’d had one on his tail all during the bombing of the Ryuzyo. He banked to the right around the Ryuzyo’s bow—pulled out safely in a mess of gunfire. He was so cool about pulling out way lower than his running mates that their noses are out of joint until the next action, when they vow they will show him up.

“Al lives for the time being in a tent in the jungle with a neat little sand path running to the tents of the other fliers. His only amusements are bull sessions and an occasional hike to the tiny plantation store miles away. But he’s fit as a fiddle—and all Navy. He wanted to know about everything at the office, who’s writing what, how’s everybody.

“It was time for me to take off, so we ran across the primitive flying field to the already warming plane in which I was acting radioman. He laid his topee carefully on a palm stump so the slipstream wouldn’t blow it off and climbed up on the wing beside my cockpit. ‘So long!’ he yelled above the roar of the motor. ‘See you in Honolulu sometime.’ Then he climbed down and stood for a few seconds with his head hanging in that quizzical way of his, his eyes looking up. Suddenly he clambered up on the wing again and shouted through the wind, ‘Gee, John, I wish we could sit down and talk for a long time about all this!’ ”

Just about the nicest thing about being with TIME is that we have so many swell people working for and with us.

Cordially,