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

"I don't so much mind taking my chances on land," TIME'S William H. Chickering wrote from Guadalcanal last week, "but in a landing boat, all snuggled together in a large, helpless mass for the Japs to shoot at--oh, brother!"

Chickering must have made quite a target these past few weeks, for he is about the biggest correspondent between Attu and Port Moresby (210 pounds, six feet four) and he has been in the thick of the fighting ever since he went back to the Pacific front for us early in September.

When our air men bombed the Japs in the Gilbert Islands, for example, he went in with the task force. When our troops paved the way for the attack on Bougainville with their surprise invasion of the Treasury Islands, he was in the first landing wave. ("That deal turned my hair snow white.") And when our Marines landed on Bougainville itself November 1, Chickering was once again on the job--watched from the bridge of his transport as our men swarmed ashore ("They made you proud to be an American")--was permitted to join them right after they had won their beachhead.

"We lunged for the shore as nervous as bulls entering the bullring," he later cabled the Chief of our News Bureau. "It was still an unhealthy area, and intermittently all day we were scurrying for cover as grenades burst a jew paces away or a stream of bullets parted the leaves overhead. About noon word was passed to prepare for a bombing attack. We dived for cover and I found myself waist-deep in water in a swampy pit. Whenever we took cover Jap snipers popped out and bullets would whine through our entire area. About three o'clock there was an especially sharp burst, and a visiting correspondent who had landed late and could not understand why we were nervous beat us to the bottom of our foxhole. When the firing finally died away he remarked ruefully, 'Through these portals pass the fastest correspondents in the world.'

"Correspondents are supposed to be an intrepid lot," Chickering cabled after the Treasury landing, "and at first I was afraid I might jeopardize the reputation of my fellows--for as our landing boat started away from the transport I crouched trembling behind the engine house like the Cowardly Lion. Before long I found I was not the only one feeling that way. Leathery men beside me clenched their guns with sweaty hands, gritted their teeth and stared with frantic concentration at the shoulders of the men ahead. I tried a feeble wink at one of them. He winked back; then, crouching lower until he was almost in the attitude in which he was born, he prayed unashamedly."

All over the Pacific TIME correspondents like Chickering are sharing the life and dangers of our fighting men. There is Bob Sherrod, who dive-bombed through the ack-ack to within 1,000 feet of the Japs when our Navy airmen mauled Wake. In New Guinea there is Mervyn Weston, who flew in with the paratroopers who sealed the fate of Salamaua and Lae. And this week Australian Newshawk George H. Johnson is on his way back to the Pacific after a hitch in this country writing his much-talked-about book, The Toughest Fighting in the World. (He was with our forces all through the siege of Buna-Gona, where men were "shot, stabbed, bayoneted and blown apart without ever seeing the enemy hidden a few feet away.")

The tempo of the war in the Pacific gets faster and faster with each passing day now--so this week I thought you would like to know how TIME is covering this front for you.

Cordially,

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