Days to Come

Despite some few preparations, peace had caught the U.S. unprepared. On the morning after Japanese capitulation and the riotous celebrations that followed, many a citizen realized how inadequate his imagination had been in picturing the days to come. Peace was here, and for the time being little else mattered. Eventually, it would again be possible to lead a normal life, after picking up and mending the strands that had been broken some five years before. But,, in the meantime . . .

The job of dealing with the Japs would not be the clear-cut task which many had imagined. It would be long and annoying, filled with quarrels and setbacks, and perhaps even more bloodshed.

The job of world politics, which the U.S. would now have to play to the hilt, would not be easy. Peace had merely sharpened the questions which had lain dormant in the smoke of battle. The political problems of the Far East, thrown into focus by internal strife in China (see FOREIGN NEWS), suddenly seemed to rear higher than the old problems of Europe. But Europe's woes were still there, too, stirred by hunger and unrest.

At home, there was an easing of tensions and restrictions. For a while the U.S. people could luxuriate in the old dictum that the customer is almost always right.

The wheels of peacetime industry began to whir. Now, the millions of people who had been displaced by the needs of war would have to settle down again. Unemployment was more than a fear, or an overworked word out of the dim '30s; it was a fact. By Christmas, some estimated, there might be 5,000,000 out of jobs.

Peace, in the sense that the shooting had stopped, was here. But the war and its problems were not over. None realized it more poignantly than those whose sons and husbands would not come home for another year or more.

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