Stockpile for D-Day

So great was the quantity of U.S.-made instruments of war piling up in England for the invasion that some Englishmen remarked: it was a wonder that the island did not sink under the weight.

In the hills near one country town, where mammoth green tanks snort around an ancient castle, and groves of trees hide hundreds of howitzers, U.S. newsmen gazed last week at a cool $4,000,000,000 worth of materiel.

New, raw buildings were crammed with motor parts, tires, thousands of tons of food. The wood from opened crates, carefully salvaged for fuel and for building barracks furniture, covered a ten-acre field. Everywhere swarmed the unsung workers of the Army's rear-area establishment: quartermasters, engineers, ordnancemen, specialists of a hundred sorts.

The Vinegar Valley. Serving this single great depot, carting inflowing supplies to their proper storage, is the SS & VV ("Sling Something & Vinegar Valley") Railway, 17 miles of track built by U.S. soldiers.

Working on the SS & VV are men from 25 different U.S. railroads. On SS & VV sidings stand 50 olive-green boxcars waiting to be loaded with guns and stores, transported across the Channel and hauled over the railroads of the Continent.

Typical of the detailed preparations are the printing presses rumbling in a converted stable not far from the "Vinegar Valley" depot. There U.S. soldiers are turning out maps for invasion armies.

The Master's Horn. That valley is only one concentration point in England's countryside. A lovely forest, part of a lord's estate, covers a mammoth ammunition dump of 80,000 tons of aerial bombs, shells of all calibers. In steel huts are 33,000,000 rounds of one type of shell. The master and his family, who live in this volcanic world with calm aplomb, have turned over most of the manor house to U.S. officers. Relations between manor and mess are happy, especially so since the day U.S. troops pumped out the manor house's flooded basement and discovered my lord's lost hunting horn. In still another English depot, covering

7,800,000 sq. ft., is such engineering equipment as ten-and 14-ton road rollers, nine-ton bulldozers, pneumatic air compressors, concrete mixers, oxygen and acetylene generating plants, 100,000 telephone poles, hundreds of miles of wire, landing mats, huts, railroad ties, wheelbarrows--all ready and at hand for Dday.

Flood from the West. Made-in-America supplies were still rolling into England last week. At one medium-sized port, U.S. troops and British civilian workers swarmed aboard cargo ships, unloaded tanks, jeeps, guns; unloaded and assembled 65-ton diesel locomotives, 300-ton floating cranes; attached wheels and accessory equipment to scores of tank cars.

Port authorities, housed on the second floor of an old red brick schoolhouse, pored over papers, marked information about ship movements and tonnages on the school blackboards. On the ground floor school went on as usual. At recess time, officers closed their windows to shut out the playground noise, went back to planning the logistics of the greatest single over-water military operation soldiers have ever conceived.

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