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

War Correspondents' uniforms were thicker than usual around TIME'S offices last week. Army & Navy Editor Perry Githens came back from 45 days on a baby flattop. Foreign News Editor Fill Calhoun returned from the Mediterranean theater where he went last August. Bill Chickering got back from the landings on Bougainville and Kwajalein. And Bureau Chief Bill Fisher came home from the Far East for the first time since 1933.

Fisher started with TIME as head of our Manila office, but just three months before the Japs swarmed in to the Philippines we sent him off to start for TIME & LIFE the first permanent news bureau ever opened in India. When he reached New Delhi he found only two other correspondents there--a lady who worked for the Manchester Guardian and an A.P. man who left a few months later. And the U.S. Army was represented by two officers, with whom Fisher had lunch on December 7.

With such a head start, Fisher not around and met most of India's newsmakers months before other correspondents arrived on the scene (there were forty in India by the following spring, and pretty soon our Army was all over the place). Fisher flew with the Air Service Command on one of its first surveys to plan the American airbases which now dot India, and at one time or another he has visited nearly all the provinces of British India and 14 of the native states (at Udaipur the Maharajah put him up in a palace all his own with 16 servants in green livery). He has talked with Gandhi before his arrest in his mud hut at Wardha ("he is Bernard Shaw one minute and St. Francis the next")--with Jawaharlal Nehru at the homes of friends in Delhi ("the most truly simple man I have ever known")--with Moslem Leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah at his marble-lined villa in Bombay ("an Indian George Arliss, complete with monocle").

Fisher started making a career out of the Orient right after leaving Yale, set out for the South Seas as a student ethnologist. For months he lived with Fatoia Tufele, king of a group of islands near Pago-Pago--and he still talks about the two beautiful damsels Fatoia provided to fan him as he sat dining on the hot porch of the king's palace. After that he went to Fiji, Tonga. British Samoa and on to China, where he worked three years on the China Press and the Shanghai Times--did special pieces for Reuters, the New York Times, Asia, Travel and the Christian Science Monitor when he wasn't too busy ducking Jap bombs. In 1936 he made a flying trip to Inner Mongolia, later traveled through Manchukuo and the guerrilla-infested country of Occupied China, visited Japan often--on one of those junkets covered the whole country from Nagasaki to Aomori.

Fisher's trip home is just a part of TIME'S unique system of writer-shuttling, under which our overseas correspondents are constantly coming back to New York to give TIME'S writing the freshness of their on-the-spot experiences -- and TIME'S editors are constantly going overseas to get the firsthand feel of the news.

The same week Fisher landed in New York, for example. Senior Editor Charles Wertenbaker took off for London -- to head up the TIME correspondents who will march and fly and sail with the Allied Invasion Forces from England.

Cordially,

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