THE thing that Americans in Africa had fought and worked six months to get was finally achieved.  When it did come, it was an avalanche almost impossible to describe.  The flood of prisoners choked the roads.  There were acres of captured material.

It was a holiday, though everybody kept on working.  We all felt suddenly free inside, as if personal worry, had been lifted.  It was the way we used to feel as children on the farm, when our parents surprised us by saying work was finished and we were going to the state fair for a day.  And when we had looked all day goggle-eyed at more Germans than we had ever expected to see in our lives, we really did feel as if we had been to a fair.

We saw Germans walking alone along highways.  We saw them riding, stacked up in our jeeps, with one lone American driver.  We saw them by hundreds, crammed as in a subway in their own trucks, with their own drivers.  And in the forward areas our fairgrounds of mile after mile contained more Germans than Americans.  Germans were everywhere.  It made me a little light-headed to stand in the center of a crowd, the only American among scores of German soldiers, and not have to feel afraid of them.  Their 88s stood abandoned.  In the fields dead Germans still lay on the grass.  By the roadside scores of tanks and trucks still burned. Dumps flamed, and German command posts lay littered where they had tried to wreck as much as possible before surrendering.