See Day

U.S. tourists were mobilizing. Already this year they had stormed the State Department with demands for passports which threatened to come close to the record 203,174 issued in 1930. To map their offensive, the Paris Herald, long the Bible of U.S. expatriatism, was ready this week with the first tourists' guide to postwar Europe.

The volume was lush with enticing descriptions of all the standard prewar meccas and war had added a clutch of new see-worthy sights to attract the tourist eye and dollar. In Normandy, as of yore, there were "hotels to suit all means and tastes," and now there was also "a comfortable service of motor coaches making daily trips to the landing beaches and battlefields." For those who chose to rough it at Omaha Beach, some abandoned landing barges would make convenient bathhouses (see cut).

Parisian circus menageries, "after wartime dispersal throughout occupied Europe, are back in slightly thinner, but no less entertaining, form." And for the tired businessman from Kankakee, the famed beauties at the Folies Bergere "will be acting with even more abandon now that warm weather is here. Last winter their nude bodies were often blue with cold, and electricians had to work overtime devising lights that would give the proper hue to the frigid form divine."

"Britain," says the Herald guide frankly, "is very dollar-conscious," but there is a limit to the sacrifices some Britons would make for the sake of the almighty greenback. In London's West End last week, a hotel manager turned down one party of 20 wealthy U.S. tourists because a travel agency planned to use a bus to bring them from the boat train. "Sorry," he announced, "but we simply can't have people arriving here in charabancs." There were other Europeans even quicker to pull in the welcome mat. "In Venice," says the guide book, "you may hear nationalists in barrooms chanting, 'Andate via, gli stranieri!' But then, the monolingual U.S. tourist might never suspect that those musical words mean, 'Go away, foreigners!' "

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