The Snow Blitz

A howling gale from the Arctic icebox collided over Western Europe with warm, moist winds from the Mediterranean. The result: the most savage winter storms of the century.

An Austrian express train bound from Vienna to Paris got so thoroughly lost in the blizzard that it ended up in Munich. A Yugoslav train reached its destination minus its last five cars; they had blown off en route. Even such southern cities as Marseille and Barcelona were blanketed with snow. Temperatures fell so low in Switzerland that the hardy monks and trusty dogs of St. Bernard retreated to the valley from their Alpine monastery. Ten French villages along the English Channel were isolated for days, and inhabitants ran out of bread, meat and coal. Roads in northern France became literally paths of ice, and a man could have skated 100 miles from Boulogne to Beauvais. As rivers and canals froze in The Nether lands, droves of ice skaters turned out, and 50 drowned in a single day. In some places along Europe's Baltic coast, the sea itself was turning to ice.

Britain was hit even more savagely than the Continent. Some 95,000 miles of highways were completely out of service. Eight-foot drifts blocked the main road from London to Portsmouth, and near Weymouth, belated rescuers dug down to a snow-buried car, found two dead and three nearly smothered travelers. Helicopters in Dorset saved 71 trapped bus passengers, including a month-old baby sheltered in a cardboard box. Asian Gur kha troops were called out from army camps to rescue stranded old-age pensioners in Wiltshire.

One result of the weather was London's quietest New Year's Eve in recent memory. Only a few hardy souls gathered in Piccadilly Circus for the traditional singing of Auld Lang Syne. There were 162 arrests, mostly for throwing snowballs at policemen. A Daily Herald columnist discovered another social effect of the snow blitz. In mock horror, he reported that "five total strangers talked to me in the blizzard on the station platform."

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