"Thank God ..."

By noon on Monday almost every man, woman and child in the U.S. was sure the war in Europe was over. But most felt that they had already lived through a sort of V-E week, and across the great Main Street of America there was only a little cheering. In Des Moines a housewife telephoned a newspaper: "Shall I go ahead and bake a pie for tomorrow?" In Emporia, Kans., as in most of the nation's towns and villages, it was another Monday and another washday. But on this Monday, Emporia got the news that four more of its sons had been killed in battle.

In Manhattan, the most effervescent U.S. city, the carnival sights and sounds bubbled spontaneously, then subsided, then fizzed again. For a while on Monday, torn paper and ticker tape by the ton fluttered from skyscrapers, and the streets turned white. Half a million people clotted Times Square, sober and undemonstrative, waiting for somebody to start the fun. Nobody did.

The people milled for five hours, until in late afternoon Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's voice barked over a loudspeaker: "Go home ... or return to your jobs." Most of the people drifted away. The flags on the buildings, half-staffed for Franklin Roosevelt's death, fluttered limply.

At LaGuardia Field a chaplain led a dozen wounded soldiers in prayer alongside the transport plane that had brought them from torn Europe. In New York harbor a police launch sped to investigate a rumor that had swept through the Wall Street crowds: a German submarine had surfaced, flying a white flag. What the harbor police found: a Navy vessel, with the sailors' Monday wash out to dry.

"Well Done." The night was quiet, like the quiet of the night before the Fourth of July. In Atlanta there were more people in the churches than at the Atlanta v. Little Rock ball game. There was more noise in one six-run inning for the home team than there was in all the rest of the town.

In Sloppy Joe's bar on Kansas City's 12th Street, big, black-haired Joe Mario, the bartender, served three soldiers, then sat down and wrote a letter to a soldier in Germany: "Dear Brother: A job well done. . . . There will be no celebrating for me till you come home. . . . Then we will put it on good. I have waited for this day a long time. Till we meet again. God bless you and all the world."

Tuesday was different. The country was at the radio. The people began to get the self-conscious feeling that they were witnessing history. In Manhattan, as if someone had pulled a giant lever, the windows went up and paper tumbled in torrents, soon after the President's first words were heard. For minutes, a diapason of booming whistles from the grey ships in the North River seemed to drown out everything. Then, as if they might burst unless they let it off, people began to shout.

But the undertone was sober and reflective. New York's tabloid Daily News caught the feeling: instead of an editorial for V-E day it printed the Te Deum Laudamus. Most of the advertisements in Manhattan's press were expressions of thanksgiving. The churches were crowded early.

Across the country the scene varied, but the theme was the same: "Thank God."

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