A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

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

These past few weeks our war correspondent on the Caspian front has been getting a lot of attention in the papers because his story of the war in Greece has climbed high on the best seller list. The story is Signed with Their Honour, his name is James Aldridge--and perhaps this week you would like me to tell you something more about him.

Aldridge has probably seen action with more armies on more fronts than any other correspondent in World War II. He has campaigned with the British, Australians, Finns, Norwegians, Greeks--in land, sea and air battles from Narvik to Crete--and so he knew what he was talking about when he cabled TIME that the Red soldiers are "actually better disciplined and more deadly serious about this war than the troops of any other nation--think, breathe, eat and sleep it--do not even enjoy a stay away from it. Their very camels seem to lean forward into the wind with a special urgency."

Right now Aldridge is assigned to Teheran in Persia at Russia's back door--with a beat that might call for his jumping almost a thousand miles west to Aleppo or south to the Indian Ocean. Last month he took a 560-mile trip north to the Caspian and the Soviet border--along the dusty, rutted highway that is now Russia's "Burma Road." Near the Lake of Urmia, at Tabriz, he saw U.S. sergeants more than 12,000 miles from home helping Soviet workmen assemble army trucks--later talked with Red Army officers and men moving around the southern curve of the Caspian up to the front lines.

Back in Teheran, Aldridge was at the airport when Wendell Willkie and TIME correspondent Hart Preston flew in. He had a long talk with the globe-girdling Middle Westerner at the U.S. Embassy--sent us three cables filled with color and facts to document TIME'S stories on Willkie's stay in the Middle East.

Born in Australia only 24 years ago, Aldridge speaks German, French, Swedish, English, and enough Russian to get along--has packed more war experiences into his short life than just about any other correspondent I know of.

He has covered fighting in Finland all the way from 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle to the great battles on the ice at Lake Ladoga 600 miles to the south. He was bombed by the Nazis in Norway until his teeth chattered--sizzled with the Aussies in the sands of Libya--flew with British bombers from Greek fields when they raided the Italians at Brindisi. After that he covered the Greek campaign from the fighting in the Albanian mountains to the tragic evacuation of the Australians and the British from the Greek ports. Hell-bent for more, he was on his way to report the Allied occupation of Syria when a truck got out of control and did something no bomb or bullet had been able to do--invalided him home to Australia.

When he got better, Aldridge flew to the U.S. He returned to the wars last March--but not until he had spent six months in our New York offices--working his remarkable on-the-spot knowledge of the war's fighting fronts into TIME'S Foreign News and World Battlefronts coverage.

Cordially,

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