During the crisis stage of the battle for Suchow last month, Fred Gruin, TIME Inc.'s Nanking bureau chief, was faced with the prospect of either getting a correspondent and a photographer to the front for an eyewitness account of the fighting or confessing to his editors in New York that he did not know the score. Both the Nationalists and the Communists were claiming the victory.

At first, it looked as if the only way to get to Suchow was on foot. The Communists had cut the railroad line; no civilian airlines were operating; automobile travel was out; the National Defense Ministry had told correspondents to wait awhile. Gruin looked out of the office window and got his cue. Across the street lived affable, English-speaking General Chou Chih-jou, commander in chief of the Chinese air force. Gruin sent a note to the General, who was lunching at home, asking for an airlift for his men. Ten minutes later the General phoned to ask if they could leave that afternoon.

Gruin had TIME Correspondent Robert Doyle on hand, but the LIFE photographer-reporter team of Jack Birns and Roy Rowan, who had scored a beat with their eyewitness report of Mukden's last hours, were in Shanghai. The General agreed to a next morning departure. Birns and Rowan boarded a civilian cargo plane at Shanghai, but a ground haze delayed the landing at Nanking until 10 a.m., almost three hours after General Chou's transport plane was to leave for the Suchow battlefront. Gruin spent the interval conning the Chinese airmen into waiting for the overdue plane. At length, the TIME-LIFE team got off for Suchow and their report back to Gruin not only established the fact that the Communists were winning the battle but also helped decide the immediate future of TIME Inc.'s China coverage.

Although he was neck-deep in a detailed reporting job for TIME'S forthcoming cover story on Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (TIME, Dec. 6), Gruin made arrangements to evacuate his family from Shanghai (they are now on their way back to the U.S.). After a trip to Britain's Hong Kong to file some copy and get some rest, Doyle cabled: "Since my wife and I came to China unencumbered with household goods, we can watch with a relaxed eye the pell-mell evacuation of Shanghai by those with loads of furniture and the ever present tung-hsi (things) that you collect out here. We have pared our operating essentials (clothes, household equipment, etc.) to a minimum and sent some of our things south against the possibility of looting in Shanghai should the city's fall become imminent. A neighboring correspondent and his wife, who plan to stay, got a new Ford automobile the other day as a gift from an evacuating Chinese family who couldn't take the car along with them. Then they got a grand piano in the same fashion. Now they're dazedly talking about the ill wind of evacuation."

To TIME Inc.'s correspondents, it was a familiar pattern repeating itself: the crisis-coverage of war and all that that means in the way of disrupted transport and communications (a reporter's lifeline), and the increasing difficulty of getting the facts on which to base stories. Last week Gruin was busy assembling rations, arranging transportation, getting letters to front-line Chinese army commanders, etc. in preparation for a trip to Pengpu, the crucial new front below Suchow, with TIME Inc.'s Tokyo bureau chief, Carl Mydans.

As for the future, Doyle, who has traveled "thousands of miles" keeping up with the news since the fall of Mukden, cabled: "Perhaps the hardest thing of all is the old familiar impossibility of making long-range plans. If the Communists take over most of China, we want to be on hand to report what is happening--if the Communists would let us report it. There are so many ifs that all you can do is stand by and be prepared to shift fast. Meanwhile, there's plenty to keep us busy here."

Cordially yours,

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