You get a new appreciation of America's power in the Pacific these days when you talk with TIME'S Gilbert Cant.

Cant first went out to the Pacific in the summer of 1943 when Guadalcanal was newly -won and Munda, Salamaua and Lae were the next stops on the road to Tokyo -- and he remembers those months as "one foxhole after an other -- everywhere the skies were filled with Japs."

Now Cant has just flown home from an eye-popping tour of the whole Pacific front. He covered 27,210 miles of land and water, visited every important newsspot from Pearl Harbor to Manila, from Iwo Jima to New Zealand (see map) -- and "not once did I see a single Jap plane in the air. There are plenty of them on the ground, though --on Saipan and Guam and Iwo Jima our airfields are walled with their wreckage. At Clark Field on Luzon there's so much Zero metal laying around that our men use it for signposts -- and you can bet it did my heart good to see all those U.S. squadron numbers painted over the Rising Sun on the wingtips."

Two years ago Cant flew with the men of our Thirteenth Air Force when they took off from Guadalcanal through Zero-infested skies to soften up Bougainville for the landings (the 424th Bombardment Squadron made him an honorary member after that job). When he flew with them again on this trip the 6-17 was not even armed as they went over to blast Jap targets on Min danao with "the best precision bombing I have ever seen."

Up at the front on Luzon he met other old friends -- joined the men of our 43rd Division as they cleaned the Japs out of the caves northeast of Manila. ("The 43rd has come a long way since I was with it last, sloshing our way through foot-deep mud in the jungles of New Georgia -- and I don't mean just geographically. At Munda we half starved on the cookie unit of C rations ; but on Luzon, even at a for ward observation post as near the Jap lines as you could get, we drank hot coffee, ate home-fried potatoes and shell eggs sunny side up.")

Gilbert Cant has been TIME'S expert on sea warfare for many months now (he is the author of two important books you may have read: The War at Sea and America's Navy in World War II). And one of his most important reasons for making this latest trip was to renew the firsthand knowledge out of which he writes this sort of news for you in TIME.

At Fleet Headquarters on Guam, for example, he talked with Admiral Nimitz about the future of our hard-won island bases -- and 2,800 miles across the Pacific at Pearl Harbor he was the first correspondent to view the tortuced carrier Franklin and get the eyewitness stories of the men who had saved her.

There are two other veterans of the Pacific war writing TIME'S Battlefronts news for you these days -- men who, like Cant, know what it is like to be shot at, bombed, strafed.

One of them is John Walker, who landed on Leyte with General MacArthur, miraculously escaped unhurt when a Jap bomb killed three men in the same hut with him. The other is Robert Sherrod, probably the most shot-at reporter of the whole Pacific war, who followed the fighting for TIME from New Guinea to Attu to Tarawa and Saipan -- most recently landed with our Marines at both Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

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