INTERNATIONAL: Those Who Looked at War

U. S. citizens in Europe last week did not live in the same world as U. S. citizens at home. They lived in a world of immediate death and destruction, in a world whose values were quite different from those the U. S. had accepted for two decades past. If their outcries under that emotional tension seemed extreme to stay-at-homes, they were not merely the outcries of a few Europeanized expatriates. For these were people who were kept in Europe by business, who had gone there on errands of mercy, who were there to study history in the making. All appealed, seemingly with one voice, to their fellow citizens at home: “Help the Allies!” Even seasoned U. S. press correspondents, whose professional traditions would not allow them to write such an appeal into their dispatches, fairly shouted it to their friends in private.

Typical reactions of Americans who had been close to World War II:

> Radioed from Paris scholarly Editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong of the U.S. quarterly Foreign Affairs: “Why is this not the moment for an eminent American aviator to make a broadcast devoted wholly to denouncing aviators who kill women and children in village streets and on country roads and appealing for millions of dollars to enable the American Red Cross to help the survivors?*

“Why might not a prince of American automobile manufacturers head a list of million-dollar contributors to show that, though he admires science and efficiency, he hates them when a race of 20th-century barbarians turns them to calculated destruction?

“Our shipping board has hundreds of idle ships. Why should it be afraid to turn them over to the American Red Cross to be marked with Red Cross symbols and engaged in bringing to Europe some of the surplus wheat and cotton that is rotting in the storehouses of the Surplus Commodities Corporation?”

> Into the U. S. poured a stream of letters and cables from U. S. ambulance drivers and nurses in France. Example: Ambulance Driver Elizabeth Adams wrote to her Providence, R. I. parents: “Dearest Family … I have been bombed—oh God —if you knew how it felt to have a plane go over you like a dark, vicious shark and see it drop its bombs. . . . We are often machine-gunned. . . . The planes come down so close. Damn them! … I am frightened, yes—oh God—terrified. … I was almost crazy with fear, but I had a job to do—to get out those kids (220 refugee children)—and I got them out—down 20 kilometres of road by a river and railroad and factories that were being bombed all the way. I made eleven trips back and forth. … I haven’t had my clothes off since last Thursday—God—I need a bath! … I must stop. Oh, I love you all. Please have America help.”

> Onetime U. S. War Flier Charles R. Codman, who flew with the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I, inspected with his wife French military airfields, talked with French pilots fresh in from battle, airmailed the New York Herald Tribune an account whose reprise was: “We need planes. We need 5,000 planes and we need them at once.”

> The ranking U. S. clergyman in Europe, Bishop Frederick Warren Beekman, Dean of the American Cathedral in Paris, short-waved over the official French station Paris Mondial: “What I am going to say, I am not doing at the request of Paris Mondial or any other European agency. . . . No one wants or has asked the United States to send an army to Europe. This is a war of machines—airplanes, tanks, munitions. . . . The one chance . . . to keep the war from our shores, to keep the United States out of the war, is to sell England and France our military airplanes and munitions. That would give these countries an even chance . . . . A word to the Republicans, my own party: this is your chance to save the United States from a war dictatorship. For selling airplanes is not war. But a German victory is war—for America. With Germany victorious, she will be in South America in a year’s time. . . . Our world trade will be ruined, and German arrogance will force us to war. America used to have more than its share of horse sense. For America’s and Democracy’s sake, let her proceed to prove it.”

> U. S. Ambassadors Bill Bullitt and Joe Kennedy, each privately ardent in the anti-Nazi cause, dutifully preserved their official neutrality last week at French and British services on Memorial Day, regularly observed in Allied countries since 1918 to honor the U. S. dead of World War I. Said the Sub-Dean of Westminster Abbey to officially impassive Ambassador Kennedy: “We know your prayers are with this nation and that you stand for the same things we do.” This week the Lord Mayor of London’s Fund for the sick & wounded acknowledged a gift of £1,000 from Joe Kennedy. Total collections to date: £1,553,000.

Four days after the service in Paris, while Ambassador Bullitt was lunching with Air Minister Laurent Eynac, the Germans launched their first real air raid against Paris (see p. 24). When the sirens wailed, the Air Minister and the Ambassador (who has done as much as any Frenchman to keep up French morale) went incredulously out on the balcony. Less than ten minutes later a bomb came through the roof and landed within six feet of Ambassador Bullitt. It was a dud.

> In the U.S. last week short-wave listeners noted sudden improvement in the quality of broadcasts put on the air by the French and British Ministries of Information. For the first time since break of World War II they went in for such human-interest tales as Nazi stations have long used effectively. In the American Hospital at Paris a microphone was carried to the bedside of Francis P. Hamlin, introduced by the French Information Ministry announcer as having left his shipping business in the U. S. to join the American Field Service in France, where he arrived April 16 and was wounded by a Nazi bomb attack while evacuating wounded.

“One night a priest burst into our camp and told us in perfect French that the Germans were in the neighborhood and we had better get out of town. Naturally our first impulse was to believe him—just out of respect to a man of the cloth—but then we noticed that he disappeared immediately, and we soon realized that he was a fifth-column agent . . . . We have observed that the Nazi fifth column is efficiently organized to an unbelievable extent, with the idea of creating panic among civilians, rousing them to evacuate towns in the area where the Nazis want to block the Allied troop movements and the movements of supplies, then strafing the whole lot along the blocked road from their planes, and producing further and more complete blockage of the road by the mass of wreckage and bodies . . . .”

The U. S. Embassy in Paris received this affidavit: “I, Lloyd R. Stark, a native-born American citizen of Mystic, Conn., certify that Germans bombarded Malo-les-Bains, near Dunkirk. This is an open town, actually a seaside resort similar to Narragansett Pier, Watch Hill, Palm Beach and Malibu. I am seriously wounded in a hospital. Have lost all my property, as have many others. Request aid in food and clothing.

“I am of the same family as Admiral Stark and Governor Lloyd C. Stark of Missouri. America must assist France immediately. Request full publicity and aid to homeless and desolate here as result of German savagery.”

-Last week Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh’s name was erased from the rolls of the Lafayette Escadrille, which had made him an honorary member after his New York-Paris flight in 1927.