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

I wish you could sit down and read with me some of the letters that are beginning to come in from our old subscribers in France.

What stories they have to tell!

Many of these old-TiMERS have just been freed from concentration camps; others spent long months as prisoners in Germany. One lost everything she possessed when she was "bombed and burnt out of

Saint Nazaire by the Germans." Another tells how "we were chased from our place in Normandy in June 1940 and reached this village with our last drop of gas. Here we have been ever since, except for the four months I spent in an internment camp." Still another who served on the Maginot Line was taken prisoner by the Germans but finally escaped to fight with the Maquis and work with the French underground.

A French civilian, H.D.. tells how the last issue of TIME to reach him somehow got through to occupied France, "where the German officers quartered in my home read it with great interest but never figured out that it was verboten literature; the Hun is as stupid as ever." Still another Frenchman writes that "during the Battle of Normandy bombardments and air fights raged all around my house, and it was a miracle that we were saved. It was a great sight when the Americans came." An old lady writes: "I was evacuated and found myself on the highways with little money to buy smiles (which nowadays cost a great deal).

I have known breadless and meatless months, but though eighty years old I never lost courage. . . ."

These personal stories from our own subscribers give an added poignancy to our understanding of just what the war has meant to your fellow TIME-readers across the Atlantic. But letter after letter also carries a message to our editors that is as sobering as it is challenging.

"After all these months of German lies and propaganda TIME comes as a breath of fresh air," one such letter continues.

"All through the occupation we never forgot your magazine," another goes on to say.

And an American married to a Frenchman adds: "For years TIME was a precious bond bringing my homeland into clear focus each week. Five years of war make me value such a bond more than ever."

Letters like these make us doubly conscious of our responsibility for helping English-speaking people all over the world get the news quickly, clearly, understandingly.

For a long time now TIME has been perhaps the biggest single importer into the U.S. of a better understanding of what is going on in other lands. And now that we are printing TIME each week on every continent--in Mexico City, in Bogota, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Honolulu, Manila, Sidney, Calcutta, Teheran, Cairo, Rome, Stockholm and soon Paris--we hope we are also taking our place as perhaps the most trusted exporter to other lands of a better understanding of America and the part America is trying to play on the world scene.

In the vastly complicated ONE WORLD that is emerging from the war, the need for this sort of understanding among thinking people, alike at home and abroad, may well prove the greatest need of all.

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