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

When the news came through that the Allies had opened another front in Europe, they were making bets here in the office that TIME'S Foreign News Editor John Osborne, last reported in Florence, would somehow manage to get in on General Wilson's new show. (He did--on D-day Osborne flew from Italy in a 6-25, had a front-row seat for the pre-invasion bombings--was last reported far inland with our advancing armies.)

And when our troops stormed the beaches, four more TIME & LIFE men were on the scene.

Will Lang, veteran of Tunisia, of Salerno, of the Anzio beachhead, went in with the first wave of American infantry (at "a very tough spot," Osborne reported) . . . Reg Ingraham, our naval expert, covered the landings from a warship offshore, then pushed on to Toulon with General Patch's Seventh Army . . . Carl My dans came from Italy to join General de Lattre's fighters in the march on Marseilles (to the best of our knowledge, My dans was the only correspondent with the French forces) . . . and Photographer George Silk flew in from Italy in a British glider which tore itself almost to bits Silk on an antiglider post, bounced right across a road, crashed head-on into a ditch at 50 miles an hour (Silk was badly banged up, counts himself lucky to have come out of the wreck alive).

In fact, TIME men are all over France these days. In the central sector alone, Bill White is heading for Germany with the British armies . . . Jack Belden, fully recovered from the wound he got at Salerno, is back in the thick of things with General Patton's men . . . and Chief Military Correspondent Charles Wertenbaker, Photographer Bob Capa and Correspondent Bill Walton are at the new headquarters TIME has set up at the Hotel Scribe in Paris ("Wert" and Capa jeeped into the city right behind General Leclerc's armored car--believe they were the first Americans to were reach Paris).

Meanwhile, 1,500 air miles north and east across smoking, panicky Germany, John Hersey, author of the best-selling "Into the Valley" and "A Bell for Adano," is newly arrived in Moscow to take up his latest assignment succeeding Dick Lauterbach, who is returning to New York after nine months in Russia. (When the Red Armies start rolling over the "holy soil" of Germany, Hersey will tell you how the Muscovites savor this well-earned vengeance.)

So now that the war in Europe is driving toward its tremendous climax, there are more of TIME'S newsmen out in the war-zones-than at any time since the war began. And there are other frontline correspondents back home--to make sure the news of these last terrific months has the on-the-spot sound and smell and feel that made another magazine call one recent TIME story "about as near as you can get, in an armchair, to being in the midst of battle."

Shuttling our editors overseas and our correspondents back home in these days of dangerous, difficult travel is a fulltime, headachy job here at TIME, and Jack Manthorp, who holds it, has been run ragged these past few months putting through dozens of passports and visas --getting our correspondents accredited to the Army or Navy-buying their uniforms, taking out their insurance, seeing that they get the right shots against as many diseases.

This week Manthorp himself is on the travel list--off on a well-earned vacation.

Cordially,

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.