Prelude to D-Day

Last week in England scruffy backyard elms sported pale new picot edgings. In blackened window-box geraniums, housewives found new leaves. The signs called the turn on spring.

At a London soccer game Princess Elizabeth smiled but, next to her, General Sir Bernard Montgomery glowered. Royalty, as usual, was holding its chin up, but the mood of Britons was not spririglike. Churchill had said what they thought: "The task is heavy, the toil is long, the trial will be severe." Bombs on London were a thumping reminder of how severe the trial had already become.

London morale dropped, not greatly but perceptibly. Citizens growled because the government refused to open newly built deep shelters. They recalled 1940 when shelter seekers brushed police aside and forcibly took possession of subway stations.

Workers on the 17-mile crisscross tracks exasperatingly dubbed SS&VV RR (Sling Something and Vinegar Valley Railroad), which serve a dump storing $4 billion worth of U.S. ordnance, were busier than they had ever been. At another similarly large British dump there was a similar bustle. The U.S. Army borrowed the British design for bridges, the British borrowed the U.S. K-ration but substituted condensed tea for coffee.

In his redecorated office General Dwight D. Eisenhower quietly did his paper work. On the London streets newly spruced U.S. military police, in white leggings, white webbing belts, white gloves, white helmets, cringed under the derisive G.I. appellation -- "snowdrop."

British and U.S. troops practiced assault landings along England's coast, splashing ashore under live gunfire. Brick courtyards of country houses echoed the boots of Texas, Devonshire, Yorkshire, Boston.

Thousands of other small, sharp vignettes of approaching action constituted the English scene. All through that scene threaded the sometimes tactless-tongued, sometimes careless, always curious U.S. soldier. The hedged lanes, the pleasant parks, the thatched pubs teemed with G.I. Joes.

For the American soldier, England is a stopping place on the long road home through Fortress Europe. The drugstore cowboy has a native instinct for the busiest corner. When he can he makes for London. There he and his buddies fill the subways, the busses, the cabs, the theaters, the pubs and hotel bars. In astonishing numbers they go to gawk through the iron fence at Buckingham Palace in the hope of seeing the King. Says a cockney, also gawking: "He's a decent bloke, you know. Works hard. I wouldn't have his job." Says G.I. Joe: "Yeah, not much chance for promotion."

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