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

There are a lot more American troops (mostly Air Corps men) in the China-Burma-India theater of war these days than most people realize. So now a special edition of TIME is being printed on the other side of the world for these servicemen who are farthest away from the U.S. and most completely cut off from other sources of news from home.

Every week a 25-lb. package of plastic printing plates flies 12,000 airline miles from Chicago to New Delhi. There the Army puts the plates on the presses of the famous Hindustan Times (published by Devadas Gandhi, the Mahatma's third son). As fast as copies come off the press Army transport planes rush them west to Karachi, south to Agra, east to Calcutta and on to our airfields in Assam. There some of the copies are piled into Army trucks bound for the new Ledo Road that American boys are building across Burma into China. Others are loaded into little Army liaison planes, flown over the jungles and dropped by parachute to servicemen farther out than even the road can reach.

Others go by pouch on the backs of Naga tribesmen to U.S. soldiers at listening posts close to the Jap lines--posts set up to give a few minutes' warning when Jap bombers start coming over.

Still other copies of TIME are part of the vital supplies that unarmed, unescorted transport planes carry across Zero-infested Burma and over 17,000-ft. Himalayan passes to Kunming in China. These copies vault the top of the world and pass over "the worst stretch of country covered by any of the world's farflung war transport operations" to reach General Claire Chennault and his airmen. And every week 50 more copies reach key Chinese leaders via TIME Correspondent Teddy White in Chungking.

Of course the Army morale branch (Special Services) had been sending copies of TIME by air to each unit of our forces in China-Burma-India for many months. But this new TIME-edition (the first U.S. magazine ever published in India) is making it possible for many, many more servicemen to get TIME still more quickly.

The idea of printing TIME in India was first suggested by Teddy White, who had been trying unsuccessfully to find some way of printing TIME in Chungking on Chinese rice paper. We submitted the plan nearly a year ago--offered either to send our own production men to India or to supply the printing plates free if the Army preferred to do the job itself. The Army accepted our latter offer way back last May, but getting paper in India was such a problem that not until last fall did production actually get under way.

"Letters about this new edition have come in from such people as the Gissimo and Mme. Chiang Kaishek, Mme. Sun Yatsen, Finance Minister H. H. Kung, General Wu Techen,

Secretary-General of the Kuomintang and many others," White cabled last week. "Secondhand copies of TIME six months to a year old sell in Chungking for 200 Chinese dollars ($10 U.S. at the official rate of exchange) -- and current copies are practically unobtainable." So it is hardly surprising that "I have been swamped with more requests for the Delhi edition than I can fill. For example, one comes from the headquarters of General Hsueh Yueh, 'The Tiger of Changsha,' whose staffmen want TIME to keep them abreast of world affairs." Cordially,

P.S. The Army has just started printing still another serviceman edition of TIME -- this one in Cairo for our troops in the Middle East.

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