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

Have you a boy in the Navy in the South Pacific? Or a friend with the Army in the Solomons? Or with the Marines on Kwajalein?

This week that boy is two full weeks closer to the news from home--for we have just extended the radius of our Pacific Edition 4,000 miles beyond Honolulu by printing part of it in miniature size. This "Pacific Pony" weighs less than an ounce, travels by first-class mail--and the Army and the Navy are so interested in its morale-building value that they are distributing it to our task forces and all our advanced bases in the fastest possible way.

So all over the Pacific--on Tarawa, on Eniwetok, on Midway, on Guadalcanal and Bougainville; at Noumea and Espiritu Santo and wherever our fleets may be--our soldiers, sailors and marines are now reading TIME each week while that same issue is still fresh on the newsstands here at home. For example:

From somewhere in the Marshalls TIME Correspondent "Pepper" Martin cables: "Yesterday I ran into a ship's officer reading the current issue. 'Just arrived,' he grinned. 'And that's what I call service.'

"Tonight at dinner an officer who flew in from an advance base laughed heartily when I (a TIME correspondent) asked permission to read the copy he received yesterday hundreds of miles forward from his base (I had to explain that TIME copies rarely catch up with TIME'S own people out here). Everywhere I go officers of every grade enthusiastically greet the new edition as a great morale sustainer."

And Battlefronts Editor Bob Sherrod has just shown me a letter from a Marine Corps friend on Kwajalein telling us how he got his copy of the first Pacific Pony only one day after the date of issue.

But what a headache that first issue was! The machine to fold the Ponies to fit in a letter envelope was delayed at sea and arrived 36 hours late, so all the copies had to be folded by hand. Our postage meter didn't show up in time either--so all the envelopes likewise had to be sealed and stamped by hand.

When we figured the weight we failed to allow quite enough for the dampness of Hawaii, so it turned out that each copy had absorbed just enough moisture to require 6-c- postage instead of 3-c-. There weren't anywhere near enough 6-c- stamps in the Islands, so most of the copies needed two hand stampings instead of one. And the boys who pasted the labels on the envelopes let the moisture soak through to the flaps, so 20,000 stamped and addressed envelopes stuck tight shut before the copies went in.

Fortunately, the next issue went off like clockwork.

We are still printing the full-size, two-and-a-half ounce Pacific Edition for our soldiers and sailors in the Hawaiian Islands proper, sending copies from Oahu to the other islands by commercial plane. But there are no commercial planes to Kwajalein or Guadalcanal -- and that is why we had to print the special less-than-an-ounce Pony for our boys nearest the Japs.

The new edition would have been an impossible undertaking without the devoted night and day work of the men and women on our Honolulu staff. It would also have been impossible without splendid cooperation from both the Army and the Navy.

Cordially,

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