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For Times readers Hanson Baldwin writes scholarly, precise essays, translating war developments into smooth, easily understood terms. Religiously he shies from using technical phraseology. Perhaps his best work: a brilliant series he wrote after a trip to the Southwest Pacific last summer. Another outstanding Baldwin series: the one in December 1942 in which he deftly exploded the popular theory that the United Nations have vastly more manpower available than the Axis, and made clear the need for an 11,000,000-man U.S. Army. Baldwin is also now in North Africa.
> Drew Middleton, newest addition to the Times foreign staff, is a brisk, cou rageous, 29-year-old New Yorker, who joined the Associated Press in 1937, shortly after leaving Syracuse University. He started with the A. P. as a sportswriter, was sent to England in 1939 to cover Euro pean sports. He spent his 26th birthday "somewhere behind the Maginot Line" in France, scurried back to England when France fell. He covered the Battle of Britain in late 1940.
Middleton did only passably well under the A.P.'s somewhat stuffy wraps until, last summer, he covered the Allied Commando raid on Dieppe. His dispatch on that assault was excellent reporting.
Raymond Daniell, the capable chief of the Times's London bureau and a topflight reporter himself, liked that dispatch. He also faced a shortage of hands. Drew Middleton became a Timesman. He went at once to North Africa, wrote part of the time from the front, part of the time from Algiers. From both areas his dispatches were clearly the best U.S. reporting, showing an understanding of international politics as well as of battle. He was the first to make sense of the Giraud-De Gaulle situation, and is an expert in not writing up American patrol skirmishes as the "biggest battle" of the war. Recently, for a rest, he returned to London.
And Others. Brooks Atkinson, longtime quiet, polished Times drama critic, is in Chungking to learn the ropes. He has much the same sort of assignment that Matthews has in India. One of his stories, costing $45 in cable tolls, told of the difficulties of taking a bath in China's capital; another described a St. Louisan who has been in Chungking 20 years and who makes "a kidney disintegrator labeled Chungking Gin, Grade D!'" Robert Trumbull, best-seller author (The Raft), is in Hawaii. Tillman Durdin and Harry Summers write from Australia. Ralph Parker, a Briton, is in Moscow; his dispatches are filled with Anglicisms that would confound U.S. readers, so they have to be unscrambled in London before being sent on.
These are the kind of men that make the Times foreign coverage great. When historians, years hence, come to render their verdicts on World War II, they will find in the color-rich, fact-filled rag-paper files irrefutable evidence that the New York Times is the nation's Great Recorder.
*An early crack in the Times's cold crust showed in 1937, when it printed verbatim excerpts from Ernest Hemingway's N.A.N.A. reports of the Spanish Civil War. t More correspondents than any other U.S. publication. TIME has 22, the Christian Science Monitor, 20; the Chicago Daily News, n; the New York Herald Tribune, 12.