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Almost too late A.P.'s famed Larry Allen last week decided to learn to swim-"enough at least," said he, "so that I can paddle out of reach of propellers and suction when battleships go down under me."

Furloughed to the U.S. after 20 months with the British Mediterranean Fleet, Correspondent Allen still carried grim memories of his lucky rescue, after 45 minutes in the water, from the torpedoed British Galatea (TIME, Dec. 29). He corrected first reports that he had been hospitalized afterwards in Alexandria--he had only gone to bed in a hotel. But he still suffers from severe headaches in consequence of shock and swallowing oil scum.

Given a month's leave, he tried in Cairo to bum a ride to the U.S. with William C. Bullitt aboard a bomber. Bullitt said there was no room. But not for nothing had Correspondent Allen been able to talk the British into letting him become the Fleet's first correspondent. He followed Bullitt in a commercial plane across Africa. The next two days and three nights Hitchhiker Allen rode in the empty bomb compartment of Bullitt's plane.

Most blessed of U.S. sights on his return: lights at night, the bellicose war spirit (he had been away since July 1938), newspapers containing news. "After foreign papers," says Allen, "you sort of forget there are papers with news in the headlines." He expects to employ his furlough eating "all the hot dogs and T-bone steaks I can find."

Predicting a long war--"a minimum three years, a maximum five"--Correspondent Allen said he would rejoin the Mediterranean fleet after his Miami vacation. "You take your life in your hands every time you go out on a ship," he says. "But there's one consolation: if you come out of it, you've got a front-page story."

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