A Letter From The Publisher, Jun. 29, 1942

To answer some of the questions subscribers are asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, organizes and writes its news

TIME'S Wilmott Ragsdale wasn't sure you could do a loop in an Army glider until he went up in one at the new glider school at Twentynine Palms, California —suddenly felt his safety belt tighten and saw the desert above him.

He wasn't sure how you get down, either —until his pilot banked the wings almost vertical, fell off into swooping circles and came out at 90 m.p.h., 400 feet above the ground.

Probably you didn't know any more about these things than he did—so I think you will be especially interested in TIME'S story on Page 48—and in knowing a bit more about Ragsdale and his part in making the story so clear and real.

Ragsdale works out of TIME'S Washington office, but because of his rough and tumble travel experiences he is apt to be ordered anywhere. Educated at the University of Washington and at the Sorbonne, he has been a professional fighter, a logger, an oil driller, an extra in the Ballet Russe, a stevedore in Alaska, a publicity man for a symphony orchestra —and he sailed in the fo'c'sle to South America, the Caribbean, Europe and the Orient.

He originally got into the news business to make enough money to marry a girl he met in Paris —worked for the Wall Street Journal before he came to TIME.

Right now Correspondent Ragsdale is making a swing through practically all the specialized training camps of the West. He spent three days at the glider Air Academy at Twentynine Palms —going up with the students, getting the dope on equipment, organization, training. He jolted around with the Army's new tank destroyer corps at Camp Hood in Killeen, Texas, where they had to move a cemetery to get the site they wanted. In the California desert at Indio (very hot in the shade and no shade) he saw our new desert warfare battalions being whipped into shape, heard General Patton applying the lessons our side has learned in Libya. And he got the opposite picture (and also some welcome cool weather) high up among the snowy peaks near Fort Lewis in Washington, where the U.S. Army is training our mountain fighters.

His trip is right in the tradition of TIME'S Army & Navy department —whose editors are themselves no table-top generals. Even before Pearl Harbor one or another of the senior writers in this department had personally visited practically every important Army & Navy post from Honolulu to Newfoundland and Trinidad, 75 posts in all, many of them more than once.

But this week the news held all but one of these editors at their desks —while TIME'S correspondents doubled for them on the scene of action- —Ragsdale out in the Western training camps, John Durant up in Concord, Mass., where teetotaler Yank Levy. Britain's No. 2 mayhem expert, is teaching guerrilla warfare to the State Guard (see p. 46) —and Sam Lyons down at Camp Lee, Va., where the Army is training its quartermaster corps to fight as well as it figures (see p. 46).

Cordially,

P.I. Prentice