Look at the World

The nation's eyes were on the coast of France: what happened in the poppy fields and in the ancient towns of Normandy was the first concern of all, by night & day. But the people's look at the war went farther, far beyond Normandy. For months the U.S., as a nation of tablecloth strategists, had been preoccupied with the coming of Dday. But as soon as it had happened, "Second Front" at once became as archaic a phrase as "defense bonds." For the invasion of France made not a Second but a Seventh Front.

Working on their own H-hour, the nation's publishers flooded bookstores with shelves of new map books. Mostly these were the new-style maps, with breath-taking views of the world, maps on which the U.S. appeared like a stretched-out tigerskin rug, on which Australia might be as compressed as a frankfurter, or on which Winnipeg or Imphal suddenly showed up as the center of the world. These were maps of global war, on which menacing arrows pointed unerringly at vital targets; maps of the air age, in which distances were measured not in miles but in flying time.

And the U.S. people, anxious to see exactly where Son John or Cousin Bill is stationed, rushed to buy maps. They needed the maps in their homework. For while cables and radio brought news of the invasion in staggering quantity, an even greater amount of a different kind of news was pouring into the U.S. in the millions of letters from servicemen on all fronts.

P:A New Yorker, who had never been more than 50 miles out of Manhattan, wrote his sister that he had taken an apartment in Naples--wrote it as casually as if he had rented a new room on Riverside Drive.

P:A Utahan on Guadalcanal sent news that onetime battlefields on conquered islands were now baseball diamonds; the sound of American voices yelling "Kill the ump!" echoed through the palm trees where Japs had once hidden. P:A New Jersey Marine wrote to his girl from the Solomons: "I am sending you a white Navy blanket from the ship's store, because it is the loveliest thing I've seen since I've been overseas."

Missourians heard strange news from their sons and brothers in Alaska. There the Army camps are overrun with dogs --mongrels and curs of all descriptions --called "Bombproof" and "Propwash," dogs raised by the soldiers and pampered beyond the dreams of any U.S. pet. In Alaska, too, there was an echo of Prohibition. Bored G.I.s invented a new drink, dubbed it "Aleutian Solution." Contents: one part "torpedo juice" or medical alcohol, two parts grapefruit juice. CJ A Californian in the farthest South

Pacific, with a gourmet's enthusiastic attention to detail, described a new dish called "millionaires' salad," -- a culinary triumph consisting solely of palm hearts soaked in vinegar.

P:The Kansas City Star printed a note from a Kansan in New Delhi: "I read an article saying that American scientists are developing a new breed of sheep with short legs. They also are trying to develop turkeys with smaller bodies to provide small pieces for small families. I am sure these scientists have never been where they had to eat mutton cooked British style. . . . Legislation should be passed to prevent these scientists from further experiments. They should spend their time developing a turkey with four legs and two breasts so that the boys can enjoy themselves after they come home. . . ." P:Outside Bombay, U.S. soldiers asked the aging Mahatma Gandhi to sign their "short-snorter" bills. The proud little Hindu, only one month out of British incarceration, refused to sign an Indian bank note. But when the soldiers handed him Chinese money, he gladly squiggled his signature.

P:A New Englander sent a cheerful note from Tripoli. Here, in a city which, except for some bombed buildings, looks untouched by war, he sat down on a restaurant balcony to a dinner of antipasto, spaghetti with meat sauce, steak and fruit tart. He washed it down with a bottle of sweet, heady wine while the organ-grinder played 0 Sole Mio on the sidewalk below.

P:From U.S. soldiers in Panama there were not only letters but silk stockings and perfume. For the G.I.s, who look upon Panama as the jumping-off place, had made good use of the unrationed stocks in the luxury-rich Panamanian stores.

P:A Louisianian wrote to the New Orleans Times-Picayune from the South Pacific: "I always thought good old Louisiana was hot, but I've found a place that's worse. Most of the boys from up North call this place Louisiana No. 2."

But for all these soldiers, and their millions of buddies on troop transports, in Italian barber shops, in transport planes going over the Hump, in the dreary routine of guarded life in enemy prison camps, the invasion was a shot in the arm. Their eyes, too, were on the Normandy coast.

In a hospital near Cairo a dysentery patient, when he heard the news, jumped out of bed, demanded a discharge so he could get back in the war. In the quiet Caribbean islands, "jungle-jolly" soldiers dreamed of a new world at home, free of second louies who kept telling them that they were doing as much as the boys at the front. For all U.S. sol- diers everywhere the invasion spelt HOME in big, bright letters, like the neon signs on the corner saloons.

-Richard Edes Harrison's Look at the World-- Alfred A. Knopf ($3.50); OWI's A War Atlas for Americans--Simon & Schuster ($2.50); Fairfield Osborn's The Pacific World--W. W. Norton & Co. ($3); David Greenhood's Down to Earth-- Holiday House ($4); Erwin Raisz's Atlas of Global Geography--Harper & Bros. ($3.50); Nicholas Spykman's The Geography of the Peace --Harcourt, Brace & Co. ($2.75); Irving Fisher & 0. M. Miller's World Maps and Globes-- Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($2.50).

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