Half War, Half Peace

U. S. AT WAR

Wetting his finger and holding it to the U.S. breeze, New York's aging, ailing Senator Robert F. Wagner, a shrewd weatherman of public opinion, thought the wind last week favored a revised and expanded Social Security bill. Promptly, he introduced one in Congress.

Wrinkling his emotional nose, Columnist Samuel Grafton wrote: "There isn't any meat; that's war. There isn't any curfew; that's peace. The price of steel scrap is going down; that's peace. Try and get sugar; that's war."

All across the U.S. there were signs of this curious transition period: half war and half peace. The Army cut back its plane production program by 17,000 planes, saving $4 billions, and temporarily throwing thousands out of work. The next day, fire bombs from 500 Superforts set flames that roared and crackled through Tokyo, licking the edge of the Emperor's palace.

Racing & Death. Churchill Downs reopened, getting ready for the Derby--a real one this time, with horses instead of turtles (TIME, May 14). Whiskey production would soon be resumed for one month. Anti-Nazi movies became a drug on the market. Yet daily, and for some weeks to come, the European casualty lists and the red-starred telegrams would still arrive.

The unfailing topic of conversation everywhere was the continued food scarcity. No one was starving, or even close to it. Yet makeshift meals were the order of the day. Even spaghetti was hard to get. In a Manhattan restaurant (Schrafft's) the dinner menu one night offered a choice of two vegetable plates.

The New Yorker hurriedly unloaded the last of its anecdotes on the maid shortage. Soon A-card holders would get more gasoline; by the end of the year there would even be a few new cars. The battle for Okinawa, begun three weeks before the final collapse of the Ruhr pocket, flared hotter than ever.

On one day, 7,000 happy G.I.s came home from Europe, by plane and ship, carrying barracks bags and German sabers, whooping, shouting and kneeling to kiss the U.S. earth. Yet the draft went on--with men over 30 now exempt. And this week, as the fourth wartime Memorial Day passed, U.S. casualties in World War II passed 1,000,000.

The U.S. people had never experienced a time quite like this.

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