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Show people on the streets, you are struck by the absence of young men, except in uniform. The crowds are made up of older people. peo-ple. Great Britain has drawn into service every one available. The part that women are playing play-ing in the war effort is most remarkable. re-markable. They are doing every kind of work. They comprise more than 50 per cent of the workers in the war production plants. I saw them lift heavy castings, run drills and lathes and do the same work that men do. Managers of plants told me that they were doing as good a job as the men, and in some respects, were superior super-ior to the men. These women work 9 and 10 hours a day and then go home to their housework. Women are conductors on the buses and handle freight on the trucks. Few of them; however, are seen driving motor cars. Servants have almost disap- BRITAIN SEES IT THROUGH A REPORT By FRANK GANNETT COMPONENTS OF THE GANNETT NEWSPAPERS Frank Gannett, head of the newspaper group which bears his name and the author of this report, recently visited wartime Britain at the invitation invita-tion of the British Government. Govern-ment. He inspected American and British army encampments, encamp-ments, visited airdromes and talked with crews of allied air forces and witnessed departure depar-ture of bombers on demolition missions over Germany. He was in many areas which had felt the full fury of the Nazi Blitz and saw reconstruction which already had taken place. He was received by Prime Minister Churchill and other leaders of the British government and talked with high American and Allied military heads. Much of what he saw and heard cannot be revealed at this time. He came into possession of much work. There was a large open space which had been cleared of rubbish and tidied up, but the windows for some distance had been blown out and now were boarded up. Buildings which had occupied this gaping space had just disappeared. I took a cab, one of the same little old funny cabs that have been in operation for the last decade, dec-ade, driven always by old men. This cab took me down to the districts dis-tricts which had been bombed the hardest in the blitz. Along the route, again and again, one saw great open spaces. These and walls demolished, told the same story of the visit by bombs, but not until we got in Stepany, a section sec-tion occupied by workers of low income near the river and the docks, did we get a real idea of what the Hitler bombing meant. The chief warden of the district escorted me. Here was a vast area of many acres without a building left standing. Rimming it were thousands of houses with only the walls remaining, the Interiors In-teriors having been burned out by the fires caused by the bombs and incendiaries. We here in America don't realize real-ize how hard London and other important cities in the British Isles were hit by Nazi bombs. Up to July 1941, nearly 50,000 bombs had fallen on London, and thousands thous-ands of houses in the city were I damaged or destroyed. In Novem- i-ieareu in jcngianu. in cne notei, the bell boys were 12, 13, and 14 years old so small that I would not permit them to carry my suitcases. suit-cases. They looked like mere babes. Old men and women act as messengers. The one thing that war hasn't affected is the fog. When the fog is thick, one feels safe against any air raids. One night while I was there, the fog was so thick that buses and taxicabs were absolutely ab-solutely stalled and one had to remain re-main wherever the darkness over took him. The underground, as they call the subway, was the only transportation available, and you were lucky if you were, near one of its stations. Everywhere I saw Americans in uniform. They seemed as numerous numer-ous as the British. Next in numbers num-bers were the Canadians. significant muic does not violate security regulations reg-ulations material which he incorporated in a report he wrote after his return to the United States and was published pub-lished serially in Gannett newspapers. Those instalments instal-ments will be published in THE HERALD from time to time. CHAPTER IV HOW BRITONS CARRY ON My first morning in London I walked out on the Strand and was amazed to see the street teeming with people. They were all going at a faster pace than I had ever seen before in England. Soldiers were everywhere, the buses were crowded, and everything was in high tempo. I didn't go very far from the hotel before I saw where German ximbs had cone their devastating ber, 1942, the Minister of Home Security announced that over the whole of Britain nearly 47,000 men, women and children had been killed in raids and more than 54,000 had been seriously injured. Over 2,750,000 houses in England and Scotland had been damaged or destroyed. Think of it! One out of every five houses had felt the effects of bombing. Most 'of this vast destruction occurred oc-curred during the terrible blitz which began late in '40 and continued con-tinued into '41. It lasted 70 days and nights without cessation. But the people carried on. Men left their homes to go to work and wondered' whether their houses and families would be there when they, returned. Often they weren't. Many took to shelters when the alerts were sounded, but between alerts people went on with their jobs, trying to conceal any evi dence they were disturbed or con-i cerned. The bombs destroyed water mains and crippled the fire departments; de-partments; falling walls shut off streets and made it difficult to fight the fires and the devastation devasta-tion was stupendous. I visited one underground shelter shel-ter in which at one time 14,000 people congregated. At that time no arrangements had been made for sanitation or for beds. People lay on the ground or on boxes, and conditions were frightful. Today To-day this shelter has been cleaned up, with modern plumbing installed. in-stalled. Cots in tiers now provide beds in this shelter for 2,200 people. peo-ple. In these times when bombing is not so frequent or so serious as it was in the blitz, 800 or 1,000 go there every night with their blankets blan-kets under their arms, so they may sleep safely, undisturbed. All the shelters now are very well organized or-ganized and conditions good. I wondered what had become of all the people who had occupied these houses that had been the people in London are cheerful. I think they are less depressed in spirit than we are here in America. Amer-ica. They have been four years in the tunnel of darkness, discomfort, discom-fort, distress, amid death. They are tired deep down. They must be tired tired of the scanty food, tired of the alerts, of the bombings, bomb-ings, tired of the blackouts, tired of long hours and four years of toil, anxiety, intense strain without with-out vacation, without a letup of even a few hours at a time. ' They see, at last, light at the end, and they are hopeful of victory in the near future. How they will rejoice when again the lights come on! There is no grumbling, no complaining com-plaining about anything. People have become accustomed to standing stand-ing for hours in long queues. A the block. The fact that is such a queue is a good advertisement queue for a moving picture show may extend around the corner of for the show, for people think it must be well worth seeing. They stand in queues for the buses, and for food, always in an orderly manner, without that pushing, shoving and crowding that we see at home. Of course their clothes are becoming be-coming worn and a bit shabby, for they haven't been able to buy new outfits. All clothing is rationed. I watched the crowd going to the Charing Cross station at 5 o'clock in the afternoon going back to their homes from their work. They seemed to be not an unhappy lot, and again, except for the soldiers you saw little evidence of war. In looking at the throngs of |