Dear Time-Reader

The material for this week's cover story on K. C. Wu, governor of threatened Formosa, has been drawn from many sources, including firsthand guidance from John Osborne, TIME-LIFE senior correspondent in the Far East. Osborne took off for the Far East a month before the Korean war began. It was a new experience for a seasoned correspondent whose geographical beat during the last 20 years has been mainly Europe and the Americas.

A former reporter for the Associated Press and newspapers in Washington and the South, Osborne joined TIME in 1938 as a National Affairs writer. After the war began, he covered the growth of the U.S. defense establishment and, in 1941, went to Europe as a war correspondent. Two years 'later he became World Battlefronts and Foreign News editor, then a senior editor and, when the war was over, was made senior editor of TIME'S new International department. In 1946 he went to London as head of TIME Inc.'s news bureau, returning in 1948 to be Foreign News editor of LIFE and, later, co-director of its editorial page.

In the Far East Osborne has moved from the Philippines to Hong Kong to Formosa to Tokyo. TIME has run three of his reports from this area as by-line stories. They were: an account of the chronic rebellion of the Communist-led Huks in the Philippines (July 3); an indictment of U.S. policy toward the Chinese Nationalists and Formosa (July 17); a report on Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek s views on issues of major interest to the U.S. (July 24). In addition to weekly copy and guidance for TIME Inc.'s editors, Osborne has also sent along some incidental personal impressions of the scene he is viewing for the first time. Some of them follow:

"It's nice for an American traveling in these parts for the first time to find so many friends--personal friends and friends of my country. I think it's these little discoveries in friendship that I will remember longest. Some of them:

"In many years of off-&-on contact with various armies I have never been more cordially received and better treated by any service than I was by the Philippine ground forces. From the commander in chief down to company officers and soldiers encountered on a week's tour of Luzon's Hukland, I felt that I was with friends who on occasion could be very useful friends of my country (as many of them were in the last war).

"One little fact about Asia came home to me on this Huk trip only after several days of puzzled awareness that something was missing. Even in battalion commanders' quarters there were no bathroom mirrors, no place to shave. I realized very late in the game that my pleasant hosts almost never have to shave.

"There was a time during my stay in Formosa when I thought of murdering those active gentlemen, the buglers of Taipei. I stayed in a hostel near a Chinese army post. Naturally, the post has buglers. Chinese buglers are not to be compared with any others of my experience. They do not content themselves with blowing reveille in the morning and going away. At either five or six a.m., depending on local whim, they bugle their first notes of hail to the new morning. They do this in pairs, generally consisting of one accomplished bugler and one tyro. They then proceed, for precisely an hour, to bugle a nicely calculated discord with the tyro burbling and burping perhaps half a beat behind the master bugler. You get used to it and after awhile you come to think of them as friends, too --not the ones you take into eternity, but as friends all the same.

"On Formosa the Chinese soldier is best seen at General Sun Li-jen's famous training center near the southern end of the island. General Sun is all that has been said of him -- a blocky, fiery, forceful man, trained at V.M.I. and devoted to America as well as Nationalist China. General Sun told me among other things to please ask my New York offices not to suspend his subscriptions to TIME and LIFE. He has sent in his renewals but is afraid that his subscriptions will run out before they arrive in America."

Cordially yours,

James A. Linen

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