The First Big Payment

The first warm breezes, traveling north, carried the familiar small sounds of spring: the honk of wild geese, the liquid whistle of red-winged blackbirds. But they were drowned in greater sounds: factory whistles, rivet hammers, the sound of tractors, axes, exhausts. Greenup time was only a pastel shade among the primary colors of the revolutionized American landscape. There was no winter's slumber to awaken from, this year.

Unnoticed Change. The nation was full of confounding bustle. The U.S. was wholly in motion for the first time. Every night was like Saturday night. People filled the Broadways and Main Streets, crowded streetcars, buses, factories, restaurants, post offices, stood in line at bars, theaters, nightclubs, bowling alleys. In their tin hats, they worked together in San Francisco shipyards: ex-college professors, white-collar workers, women, Chinese, Italians, Negroes, WAAC uniforms marched two abreast down the narrow sidewalks of Des Moines; WAVE uniforms swished neatly up & down Stillwater, Okla. Soldiers packed the nation's hotels, spilled over into boardinghouses, slept in railroad stations, pool halls, sometimes tramped the streets all night.

The U.S. had greatly changed, was changing immeasurably more. Whatever the U.S. had been, this was not that land. The change could not be gauged or checked or anywhere seen as a whole--it was both wide and deep. Every citizen could see his life and his town's life changing around him, but who could see the whole physical change of the nation'?

Unnoticed Adjustment. A major process in the change had been the U.S. adjustment to the war. Once the heartbeat's needle had fluctuated violently at every little victory or defeat; a picture, a story, a speech, a bulletin was enough to drive the country to its knees or raise it to strutting tiptoes. Now the national pulse was quieter; the people had partly steeled themselves, had partly grown accustomed to the changes & chances of war news. Only the most violent of shocks now could shake or elate the nation.

Once the U.S. people had asked themselves great questions every week. Where is the Fleet? they had asked, not long after Pearl Harbor. How about the second front? they had asked all last summer. Now they worried about more personal matters: drafting fathers and drafting farmers, about ration points, coupons, regulations. Now they wondered why the Americans were not moving faster in Tunisia; once they had known very well the U.S. had, in effect, no Army at all, and Tunisia was a far-off name on an unknown map. The people had even got used to the scrappy little casualty lists.

The nation had not suffered as the British had--here the transition had been by little jerks and tugs and nudges, not by a cataclysmic and continued onslaught of bombs and fire and death. The U.S. saw its returned heroes, excellently groomed, limping a little, surrounded by silk-stockinged chorus girls; the British saw their maimed husbands and sons crutching through the streets, smiling chins up, surrounded by cotton-stockinged nurses.

Trial Ahead. Some anxious citizens hoped the U.S. was storing strength for the ordeal ahead. Japan, stronger every day behind its vast perimeter of defenses, could base the hope of victory on one belief alone: that when the time came the U.S. would flinch at paying the price of a fight to the finish. That price would be high if the U.S. attacked Japan this year. However high, it might be only a fraction of the price, next year. Time was on Japan's side.

Yet Hitler must be beaten first, said strategy. Every passing day meant that victory over Hitler this year was that much less likely.

Not Easy, Not Cheap. Looking at the pictures of British wounded which came from London last week, the U.S. could see, if it would, the price it was going to have to pay. Editorialized the New York Times: "This is the spring [our soldiers] have been waiting for. They must face it, and so must we. And the summer that, comes after it.

"The attack will not be easy or cheap. It will test this generation of youth as none has ever been tested. It will test the faith of those who must remain at home: those to whom the telegrams come, those mentioned in the casualty lists as next of kin.

"Spring and summer . . . will be made up of nights and days of anxiety and, for some, of anguish.

"Now we know the faith that was latent in [our young men], their strength to carry burdens, their unassuming valor and fortitude. . . . This spring they will use them in battle. The blossoming time of 1943 will not soon be forgotten. It will be a legend reverently told and listened to in the winter of their generation. They will be fighting so that springs in time to come may not be like this one."

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