This is the final story about our TIME & LIFE war correspondents in the Pacific (18 of them right now).

From here on they are peace correspondents -- but how can a man understand the deeper meanings of peace unless he also understands the blood and sweat and sacrifices by which that peace was bought?

Take Teddy White, for example. As dean of the Chungking correspondents, he was bombed from house to house and shelter to shelter all through the worst of the Jap air raids (during one horrible bombing the body of a Chinese woman was blown 20 yards straight through his open window). This week, when he landed with our first airborne troops on the sacred soil of Dai Nippon, he must have been comparing the rubble of Tokyo with the ruins he had seen so often in Chungking and Liuchow and Nanning.

Or take John Walker, who faced Jap mortar fire with the Marines landing in the Palaus and who almost lost his life on Leyte when a Jap bomb killed three men in the same hut with him. This week in Yokosuka harbor he watched the Rising Sun sink and the Stars and Stripes rise on the battleship Nagato, last capital ship of the once-mighty Jap Navy. A bomb had blasted a hole in her main deck "as big as a tennis court" and everywhere there was "the feeling of ruin and decay."

Annalee Jacoby, packing her belongings at the Press Hostel in Chungking to follow a triumphant Chiang Kai-shek into Nanking, must have been reminded of the day four years ago when the Jap bombing of Manila burned her home to the ground and she lost everything but what she was wearing. (After that she spent two bitter months on Bataan and Corregidor -- shared our troops' life in everything but firing guns and flying planes--ducked Jap bombs, tended the wounded, helped the doctors fight malaria without quinine.)

And when Carl Mydans first walked through the streets of Tokyo he must have thought many times of the 21 months of "constant, oozing fear" he and his wife Shelley spent as prisoners of the Japs after their capture in Manila.

There are 14 other TIME & LIFE newsmen covering the Pacific today--headed by Manfred Gottfried, TIME'S first editorial employe (1923), who laid aside his top post as Co-Editor of TIME to become our Chief Pacific Correspondent this year.

I wish I had more space to sketch the special background of war which has seasoned each of our correspondents. Every one of these men knows that covering the news for TIME does not mean just duplicating the headline reports we get from our Associated Press wires.

Rather his job is to dig out the vital background material and usually-overlooked detail that will give TIME'S news depth and feeling--to help our editors make their reports alive and understandable to TIME'S readers.

Many of these editors in the home office are themselves fresh from the fronts #151; and many of the week-to-week cables from our correspondents now in the Pacific are being written into TIME by Bob Sherrod, perhaps the most shot-at correspondent of the whole Pacific war --on New Guinea and Attu, Tarawa and Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Cordially,

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