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Show 756 The National Geographic Magazine U. S. Army Signal Corps. Official In Krefeld, Post Office and Telephone Signs Represent Services Suspended by the Allies This west-of-the-Rhine steel town was a favorite RAF target (damage, left). America's Ninth Army found 120.000 survivors living in 21 huge shelters. Horst Wessel street sign comes down; it commemorates the author of a Nazi song. Up goes Francis Scott Key sign in honor of the Star-Spangled Banner's composer. So much for supply. The other big problem of the liberated countries has been hinted. It arises from the fact that there are in all Europe perhaps 25,000,000 persons who by reason of bomb damage, forced labor, or the tides of battle are out of their homes. Already the Allied Armies have encountered and contended with several million of them. From the time Todt* workers first came into our lines out of the hills of the Cherbourg peninsula until the last of the fighting in Alsace, questions of feeding, transporting, and housing the hundreds of thousands of homeless have plagued the Armies. Whenever we advanced, more were "uncovered," living in basements, straggling through woods in parties of five and ten, or bunched in barracks behind wire where the Germans had left them. It will be difficult for those in America to realize how civilians act in combat. They don't run; they stroll down the road to talk it over with their cousin, or wander out to forage for food (page 752). Women carry milk through small-arms fire, farmers stick at their plows amid artillery shelling. I have seen French women even wheel their babies in perambulators down roads that were under fire. All these are commonplace manifestations of the peculiar civilian tenacity in sticking to home. A technical distinction is made at SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces) between refugees and displaced persons. Refugees are nationals of the country in which they are uncovered. They usually present a relatively simple problem. Displaced persons are the foreigners hundreds, * Fritz Todt, German military engineer, was responsible for building Germany's network of highspeed highways and the Siegfried defense line. Before his death in 1942, he is credited with having constructed a series of submarine bases along the French coast. |