Manfred Gottfried, chief of our foreign correspondents, recently finished another trip around the world. He had flown to England in October, hopped over to Frankfurt, then on to other European capitals before heading for New Delhi. From India he worked his way along the still free perimeter of Asia (Indonesia, Malaya, Indo-China, Siam, Hong Kong, Japan) and finally to the battlefield in Korea.

With 22 TIME correspondents spotted between London and Tokyo, he talked over conditions in the countries they cover, discussed future events likely to become news stories, and made plans to have a man on the spot when something happens. For his own background--and planning--Gottfried interviewed many military and political leaders, among them the British Commissioner-General for Southeast Asia, the Sultan of Jogjakarta, and General MacArthur.

Gottfried sees for himself what the world is doing, so that he can assign correspondents to crucial places and so that he can help them with their major job, which is not mere reporting of spot news but telling of the men and forces which make the events significant.

Since the war, when he covered the Japanese surrender and spent several months in Japan and China, Gottfried has gone to Europe each year, made one trip to South America, and two around the world. His recent visit to Asia, his third since the war, took him to two of the most interesting places in the Far East--Hanoi and Hungnam.

In Hanoi, Gottfried teamed up with Eric Gibbs, London Bureau chief then on temporary assignment in Indo-China, to tour the front north of Hanoi in a battered old command car. They wanted to see the thin French defenses that hold back the Reds from all of Indo-China and Siam. Every couple of miles they passed small forts which, except for being brick, looked like something out of American frontier days. Troops had made up for the shortage of barbed wire by slanting up rows of sharpened bamboo sticks--which are quite effective until someone puts a match to them.

When Gibbs and Gottfried got to Da-Phuc, outermost fort on the road from the north, they found a French captain commanding final construction work of defenses he had designed. Proud of his plan, the captain showed them how he had sunk the fort in the top of a knoll so that the fireports opened only six inches above the ground. Trenches connecting its four buried corner bastions were arched over with brickwork. The lightly armed soldiers figured that if the fort were overrun, they could continue fighting from the tunnels.

(The captain's plan later worked well enough when four Red battalions poured over Da-Phuc at night. At least part of the garrison held out underground until reinforcements arrived next morning.)

Soon after viewing the French fortifications--the only real protection against the Red advance on Southeast Asia--Gottfried arrived at Hungnam, where he saw the orderly evacuation of tanks, supplies, filing cabinets, and 100,000 civilian Koreans.

As he watched Marines and G.I.s stand off the enemy's best efforts to crack the Hungnam perimeter, Gottfried thought of the worried defenders at Hanoi. "They know," he said, "that once Red China commits an army of its own -- rather than just guerrillas it has trained and armed -- it can crush French resistance. Then Indo-China becomes another Korea. So may Formosa, Hong Kong, Siam, Burma-- as the Red Chinese army gets around to them. In fact, there is every sign in Asia that this war will go on until Red China conquers all the Koreas in sight or is itself defeated."

Cordially yours,

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