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

TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod flew in from Australia last week, covering the 10,000 miles from Sydney in seven days by plane all the way.

Before he left home last winter on the first big troop convoy, Sherrod had to tell his wife there was a good chance he would be taken prisoner just as our correspondents Carl and Shelley Mydans had been before him. He wasn't captured--but lots of other things happened to him.

"Seeing what I saw out there was an eye-opener for anyone who had watched a generation grow up in pacifist isolation" is the nearest he came to putting it in words. "Neither Americans nor any other people pay the ultimate sacrifice by diving their planes into aircraft carriers unless they believe in something." Sherrod got to Australia in its darkest hour, when most of the Anzac troops were still 7,000 miles away fighting in the Middle East, when U.S. aid was hardly more than a promise and the Japs were expected to sweep south from Java at any minute. He left just when our first major attack of the war was being launched in the Solomon Islands--so he was over there all through the seven months when the tide turned. Bob called the turn almost to the day. With the press still filled with alarmist reports he cabled us on April 20 that "last week was the end of the Japs' big chance. Now it looks as though they could not invade Australia if they tried." Some or all of the time that Sherrod was in Australia there were five other representatives of the TIME and LIFE News Bureau there, but Sherrod was No. 1 man--especially after Melville Jacoby was killed with General Harold ("Pursuit") George at MacArthur's headquarters.

With so many other correspondents at hand and with no daily newspaper deadlines to hold him close to the cable office, Sherrod was able to cover more ground and see more people in places where the news was happening than any other war correspondent in the Antipodes. He flew more than 40,000 miles, hedge-hopped from camp to camp and from city to city, lived the life of an Army officer in dozens of dusty airports, flew to the front with American pilots, heard from their own lips their stories of combat as they stepped from bullet-scarred planes.

Sherrod was in Melbourne when Douglas MacArthur got there from Bataan. He talked war plans in Canberra with Australia's Prime Minister John Curtin and most of the Cabinet. He was in battered Pont Moresby for its 73rd bombing--reported the American troops there positively reeked of good health on their diet of canned food and quinine, but there was not even a native woman within miles of the place. Early in May he stationed himself at a secret air base in northeast Australia from which Allied bombers were pounding the Japs to the north. He had his reward for foresight when he was able to file his battle dispatches from the very shores of the Coral Sea.

Sherrod had been with TIME seven years before we sent him to Australia -- first as a roving reporter in the Middle West, then as political reporter in our Washington Bureau, later as a military correspondent covering the Army camps. He liked his job at home fine until America got into the war. Now all he wants is to get back to the front.

"I can't think of anything less interesting than sitting the war out in Washington" is the way he puts it.

"There's too much history being writ ten where men are dying." Cordially,

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