A. E. F. Gets a Chief

A lean, bespectacled man will take off for Chungking next week from the U.S.; he can say nothing of his mission, for he is to lead the second A.E.F., advance guard in the Battle of the Pacific. At the beginning of this year, Chiang Kaishek, anticipating American aid (TIME, June 30), had requested that the U.S. send him a personal adviser and liaison man. The man would have all the mysterious dignities and influences of the legendary Australian, William Henry Donald, for a generation adviser to the Chinese great. (Donald left last year, is rumored on his way back.) Franklin Roosevelt selected his friend, Owen Lattimore.

Harvard-trained Lattimore, little known to the public, is an expert's expert on Central Asia. One of the few living Americans who speak, read and write Mongolian, master of fluent Chinese (talkative Mr. Donald never spoke Chinese, disliked Chinese food) and a half-dozen Asiatic dialects, Expert Lattimore's career is a colorful one. Now only 40, he has by turns been a businessman, newspaperman, explorer, and scholar at Johns Hopkins. For years he lived in the desert in native yurts, native fashion. Last week, with Russia at war and Japan eying inner Asia acquisitively, Mr. Lattimore's appointment and the help he will direct bore new significance.

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