Signs of Peace

In the sparkling sunlight, Britons looked up at the endless parade of planes bearing war to Germany. In every heart the hope was high that here, at length, was Winston Churchill's "last big heave" to end the war.

There were other signs of coming peace. On a Midlands country road, gaffers gaped at shiny new cars under test for postwar motorists. In a Warwickshire ammunition-box factory, civilian gas stoves began coming off the assembly lines at the rate of 100 a week. The Government's new prefabricated houses were mushrooming all over bombed Britain.

From the Ministry of Supply came an unostentatious announcement that 19 Government-owned war factories, employing 50,000 workers, had been released for civilian production. Simultaneously came news that one of Britain's leading automobile makers, Standard of Coventry, whose trademark is a Union Jack, had been freed from war output a month ago. Dunlop of Speke (manufacturer of rubber products) had been similarly released last fortnight.

The switchover will swell each week. War contracts must be completed first, but plants may reconvert before the end of the war with Germany. For roofless Britons, patiently trudging to work in their shiny trousers and shabby dresses, home-front production will give priorities to clothing, building material, household equipment. Cars, tires, refrigerators, electrical gear, machinery will get preference for the vital export markets.

First of the Allies to declare war, Britain is intent on being first to turn back its industry to peace. Its vast, humming workshops have multiplied manyfold since 1940, when, in all England, there was but one drop hammer--a prewar, German-made model--capable of forging the life-&-death Spitfire crankshafts. (The man in charge of operating that precious hammer, 49-year-old William Forster, received the British Empire Medal in 1943; but only last week, when the story was told in Parliament, did Britons find out why.) Already, those desperate days seemed far away.

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