--to answer a question subscribers have asked again and again about TIME'S news from overseas

Whenever TIME runs a story like the one on page 25 about the British Commandos, many a subscriber asks how TIME'S editors in this country can write with such an intimate, immediate and detailed knowledge of events and personalities thousands of miles away.

Part of the answer, of course, lies in the worldwide staff of some 300 TIME and LIFE correspondents, whose special job it is to round out the AP reports with thousands of words of close-up information seldom found in the newspapers. In London alone the TIME and LIFE office employs 33 persons--by far the largest staff maintained by any U.S. publisher.

But a second explanation lies in TIME'S unique system of writer-shuttling, under which TIME'S editors are constantly going overseas to get the first-hand feel of the news--and TIME'S correspondents are constantly shuttling home to take a turn as editors and give TIME'S writing the freshness and authenticity of their on-the-spot experiences.

Last week, for instance, just as the editors started to work on this issue, Senior Editor Wertenbaker, head of the Foreign News and World Battlefronts sections, stepped off the Atlantic Clipper from England--where he had spent five weeks renewing his first-hand knowledge of what Britain and Britain's leaders are thinking and doing.

He talked about the Commandos with their leader, Lord Louis Mountbatten--interviewed men who had been in the Commando raids at the Lofoten Islands and St. Nazaire--lunched with Winston Churchill--questioned Anthony Eden, Sir Stafford Cripps, Oliver Lyttelton and many others on the progress of the war.

Puff-eyed from lack of sleep, Wertenbaker went straight from LaGuardia field into a session with Dave Hulburd, Chief of Correspondents, spent all next day with TIME'S Foreign News and World Battlefronts editors working the things he had learned into this week's TIME.

Companion example of this shuttle system is Walter Graebner, who has headed the London Bureau since 1939--all through the days of Dunkirk and the dark months of the Battle of Britain.

Graebner is just going back to the newsfront (to Russia this time) after a six months' hitch in New York giving TIME'S news from England the on-the-spot feel that only a man who knows all the leaders of Britain could give it.

And while Graebner is away, his place in London is being filled by Stephen Laird, who wrote Foreign News in New York last year, but before that held down the volcanic job of TIME'S Berlin correspondent. Other writers home from the news fronts include Fillmore Calhoun, who was also in the London office, then headed TIME'S Rome Bureau until Il Duce kicked him out . . .

John Osborne, who recently flew to Britain, spent five months there, then came back with a convoy to get the true feel of the Battle of the Atlantic . . .

John Hersey, who speaks Chinese almost as well as English and knows what it's like to be bombed in Chungking . . . Sherry Mangan, who held down the Paris office all through the fall of France, then spent a year in the Buenos Aires office.

In short, there is seldom a week when TIME'S writing staff in New York does not include at least one man just back from the news fronts of the world to see what is happening for himself. In this way TIME'S Foreign News and World Battlefronts departments constantly brush up their personal news understanding and replenish the background out of which they write.

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