A Letter From The Publisher, Oct. 4, 1943

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

> When our airmen made their big bombing raids on the Japs in the Gilbert Islands September 18-19, William Chickering of TIME went along with the task force.

When our task force blasted Marcus Island only 1,250 miles from Tokyo three weeks before, Charles Edmundson was on the job for you there.

You never saw their first person reports of these raids in TIME (they did not clear in time to catch our issue deadlines)—but still I think knowing about these never-printed stories might make TIME more valuable to you. For it might help you understand better how—from Attu to Salamaua, from Burma to Salerno —we always try to have one of our own men at every probable scene of battle—even if he has to spend silent weeks and sometimes months waiting for the news to break.

For example:

Duncan Norton-Taylor traveled 10,000 miles and waited three months in the South Seas for his chance to go into action with our fleet—but his firsthand story of the naval victories in the Kula Gulf was well worth waiting for.

Will Lang spent many censored and newsless weeks with General Mark Clark’s hidden Fifth Army in Africa waiting for it to jump off on the invasion. At the last minute he gave his place in the attack to Jack Belden—then rushed to the front with a reserve regiment after Belden was wounded during the first landings at Salerno.

Robert Sherrod spent three months in the dreariest hole in northern Australia last year waiting for the Jap invasion to come (one story we’re mighty glad he never did have to cover)—and this spring after his part in the fighting at Attu he shivered for ten more weeks in the Aleutians waiting to go into Kiska with the invasion that found the Japs were gone. (Last week Sherrod took off on still another battlefront assignment.)

And so it goes, with Harry Zinder and Fillmore Calhoun waiting in the Middle East for the British Ninth Army to start its long-looked-for move into the Balkans—with William Fisher and James Shepley in India and Teddy White in Chungking, waiting for Lord Louis Mountbatten to take the offensive in the East—with William Walton and Wilmott Ragsdale, waiting in Britain to cross the channel with the American and British Armies when the day comes for a Western Front in Europe.

So many tremendous events brewing on so many different fronts that we could hardly feel we were doing the job our subscribers expect of TIME if we did not have our men on the scene for you wherever United Nations forces are fighting or getting ready to fight.

They also serve who only stand and wait — and more often than not this cat-at-every-mousehole policy eventually pays dividends in the kind of vivid, human stories we hope you have come to count on in TIME.