Innocent Voyage

On a cold winter's dawn this week the grey and battered troopship Argentina hove into New York harbor after a nightmare voyage across the Atlantic. The passengers were 451 British wives of American G.I.s, and their 175 children. Nine days before, they had left Southampton alternately singing There'll Always Be an England and God Bless America.

The Argentina had struck the worst storm of the North Atlantic winter. At times the wind reached 70 miles an hour. One day, 85% of the brides were sick. Children, left alone by mothers unable to care for them, screamed in their cabins. Babies were tossed out of cribs.

When they landed, many of the brides had more worries. Would America be different? Will American women resent us?

Tigers & Drugstores. One child who had stood the trip well and who had no apprehensions at all was four-year-old Claire Fiedler, ready to rejoin her sailor father in Chicago. Associated Pressman Relman Morin interviewed Claire, set his report down in deadpan questions & answers:

"What are you going to do in Chicago?"

"Kill tigers."

"There aren't any tigers in Chicago."

"There are so. My daddy said there are.

And they eat up all the cows, so you have to kill them. . . . There's a cow on this boat, did you know that?"

"No. Are you sure?"

"Yes, that's why Trudy and I have milk every day. We're going to have milk every day in Chicago, too. And we won't have to have any tickets. ... My daddy says that every day a fifty hundred cows come to Chicago and everybody can have one."

"Where do you get the cows?"

"At the drugstore. ... My daddy says you get everything there."

"And are you going to school in Chicago?"

"Oh, yes, in Chicago-New York."

"Chicago and New York are different places, Claire."

"My daddy says they're just the same, except that Chicago is better."

"Then why do you think you'll go. to school in New York?"

"Because they have more Indians and cowboys there and they all shoot everybody else."

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