Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941

by William L. Shirer

  A big conference in the Chancellery tonight between Hitler and the High Command. My spies noticed Keitel, von Brauchitsch, Jodl, Göring, Raeder, and all the other big military shots going in. They are to decide about the invasion of Britain. The censors won’t let us mention the business.

  BERLIN, August 8

  The Wilhelmstrasse told us today that Germany declines all responsibility for any food shortages which may occur in the territories occupied by the German army. The Germans are hoping that America will feed the people in the occupied lands. They would like to see Hoover do the job.

  BERLIN, August 10

  French sailors loyal to de Gaulle will be treated as pirates and shown no mercy if captured, the Foreign Office announced officially today.

  BERLIN, August 11

  For some days now workmen have been busy erecting new stands in the Pariserplatz outside my hotel. Today they painted them and installed two huge golden eagles. At each end they also are building gigantic replicas of the Iron Cross. Now the talk in party circles is that Hitler is so certain of the end of the war—either by conquest of Britain or by a “negotiated” peace with Britain—that he has ordered these stands to be ready before the end of the month for the big victory parade through the Brandenburger Tor.

  Funk, speaking at Königsberg this morning, warmly praised Lindbergh for having remarked: “If the rich become too rich and the poor too poor, then something must be done.”

  “That’s just what I said some time ago,” remarked Funk.

  LATER.—Today has seen along the coast of England the greatest air battle of the war. German figures of British losses have been rising all evening. First the Luftwaffe announced 73 British planes shot down against 14 German; then 79 to 14; finally at midnight 89 to 17. Actually, when I counted up the German figures as given out from time to time during the afternoon and evening, they totalled 111 for British losses. The Luftwaffe is lying so fast it isn’t consistent even by its own account.

  BERLIN, August 13

  Today was the third big day of Germany’s massive air attack on Britain. Yesterday’s score as given by the Luftwaffe was 71 to 17. Tonight’s score for the third day is given as 69 to 13. On each day the British figures, as given out from London, have been just about the reverse. I suspect London’s figures are more truthful. Tomorrow I’m flying to the Channel with half a dozen other correspondents. We don’t know whether we’re being taken up to see Hitler launch his invasion of Britain or merely to watch the air attacks.

  IN A GERMAN ARMY TRANSPORT PLANE BETWEEN BERLIN AND GHENT, August 14

  Last night we had our first air-raid alarm for a long time. It came at two a.m. just after I’d returned from broadcasting. Tess, who has been in Berlin for a few days, and I stayed up to see the fireworks, but there were none.

  We take off at Staachen at ten forty-five a.m., flying low at about five hundred feet so as to be easily recognizable by German anti-aircraft crews. They shoot down altogether too many of their own planes…. Now Antwerp to the north and the pilot is coming down.

  … One bad moment. Two fighters dive on us from out of the clouds and we think they may be Spitfires. (The other day they got a German general flying from Paris to Brussels.) But they’re Messerschmitts and veer off. Now the pilot is trying to find his field—no small job because of the way the fields here are camouflaged….

  GHENT, BELGIUM, August 14

  The camouflage of this field worth noting. From the air I noticed it looked just like any other place in the landscape, with paths cutting across it irregularly as though it were farm land. Each war plane on the ground has its own temporary hangar made of mats plastered with grass. Tent poles support the mats. Along the back and both sides of this tent of mats, sandbags are piled to protect the plane from splinters. So skilfully are these hangars constructed that I doubt if you could distinguish one from above a thousand feet. The field itself is not large, but the Germans are feverishly enlarging it. Gangs of Belgian workers are busy tearing down adjacent buildings—villas of the local gentry. An example, incidentally, of how Belgians are made to aid Germany’s war on Belgium’s ally, Britain. One neat way the Germans hide their planes, I notice, is to build pockets—little clearings—some distance away from the field. Narrow lanes from the main airfield lead to them. Along the sides of these pockets are rows of planes hidden under the trees. From the air it would be hard to spot these pockets and you might bomb the airfield heavily without touching any of these planes.

  Ghent has a certain romantic interest for me because I remember my grade-school histories’ telling of the signing of the peace treaty concluding our War of 1812 on Christmas Eve here. A Flemish town would be a picturesque place around Christmas Eve, if we can believe the early Flemish painters. Here were the American and British delegates leisurely coming to an agreement to end a war which neither side wanted. Christmas was in the air, snow in the narrow, winding streets, skaters on the canals, and there was much hearty eating and drinking. Christmas Eve was an appropriate moment to conclude the peace. But there was no radio, no cable line across the Atlantic then, and America only learned of the peace three months later. In the meantime Jackson had fought at New Orleans.

  We sit around in the gaudy salon of a sugar merchant’s villa which the German flyers have taken over. We are waiting for cars to take us to the “front.” Someone forgot to order them in advance. Dr. Froelich, from the Propaganda Ministry, whom we call “the oaf,” a big, lumbering, slow-thinking, good-natured German with a Harvard degree and an American wife, can never bring himself to make a decision. We wait and the German flyers serve drinks from the sugar merchant’s fine cellar. The cars do not come, so we take a bus in to see the town. Ghent is not so romantic as I had imagined. It is a grey, bleak, lowlands industrial town. Many German soldiers in the street, buying up the last wares in the shops with their paper marks. We drop in and chat with a local shopkeeper. He says the soldiers behave themselves fairly well, but are looting the town by their purchases. When present stocks are gone, they cannot be replaced.

  OSTEND, BELGIUM, August 14

  Our cars finally came at seven p.m. and we made off for Ostend, skirting round Bruges, a fairytale town in which I had spent my first night on the Continent exactly fifteen years ago. Driving into Ostend, I kept my eyes open for the barges and ships that are to take the German army of invasion over to England, but we saw very few craft of any kind. None in the harbour, and only a few barges in the canals behind the town. The Germans selected for us a hotel called the Piccadilly.

  LATER. August 15, 6 a.m.—Sat up all night. When the Germans had gone to bed, the proprietor and his wife and his exceedingly attractive black-haired, black-eyed daughter of about seventeen brought out some fine vintages and we made an evening of it. Some local Belgians joined us and we (Fred Oechsner, Dick Boyer, and I) had much good talk. It was touching how the Belgians kept hoping the British bombers would come over. They did not seem to mind if the British bumped them off if only the RAF got the Germans too. One Belgian woman, whose bitterness was very pleasant to me, explained that most of the damage in Ostend, the majority of whose houses are pretty well smashed up, was the work of German artillery, which kept on firing into the town long after the British had left. Some time before dawn we went for a walk along the beach. There was a slight mist which softened the moonlight and made even the battered ruins of the houses along the sea-front take on a pattern of some beauty. The smell of the salt water and the pounding of the waves made you feel good. The Belgians kept cursing the British for not coming over.

  CALAIS, August 15 (noon)

  Driving down along the coast, I was struck by the defensive measures of the Germans. A line of trenches, dug-outs, and machine-gun nests, strongly manned, stretched along the sand dunes a hundred yards from the water’s edge all the way down to Dunkirk. There were many anti-aircraft guns and about a quarter of a mile to the rear countless batteries of artillery. I had not thought before of the possibility of the British doi
ng any attacking. We do not see any evidence at any place along the coast of German preparations for an invasion. No large concentrations of troops or tanks or barges. But of course they may be there, and we just didn’t see them.

  About ten miles from Dunkirk, we suddenly come upon the sickly sweet smell of dead horse and human flesh. Apparently they have not yet had time to fish the bodies out of the numerous canals. Dunkirk itself has been cleaned up, and those who were there two months ago scarcely recognize it. The sentry does not allow us into the part of town around the main port, possibly because we might learn something of the invasion forces. In and around Dunkirk, acres of ground are covered with the trucks and matériel de guerre left by the British Expeditionary Force. German mechanics are at work trying to get the trucks, at least, to run. Others are stripping off the rubber tires, which are of a quality unknown in Germany. In the town long lines of French civilians stand before the soup kitchens for a hand-out of food. Surprising that there are still civilians in this town after the murderous bombing and shelling it got. We all underestimate the power of human beings to endure.

  We drive to the beach from which a quarter of a million British troops made their get-away. What surprises me after the German boasts about all the transports and other ships they sank off that beach (in one day, we were told in Berlin, the Luftwaffe had sunk fifty ships) is that along a twenty-mile stretch you see the wrecks of only two freighters. Besides these there are the remains of two destroyers, one of which, I believe, was bombed long before the withdrawal from Dunkirk, and a torpedo boat. Five small vessels in all. And any boat sunk within a great distance of the beach would be visible because of the shallowness of the water here. When a bomb does hit a ship, though, it pretty well finishes it. The destroyer nearest us—about two hundred yards off shore—had received a direct hit just in front of the bridge. A huge chunk some twenty feet wide had been torn off the craft down to the water-line.

  LATER.—While we are still at lunch here in Calais, we hear the first wave of German bombers roaring over to England. They fly so high you can hardly see them—at least twelve thousand feet. I count twenty-three bombers, and above them is a swarm of Messerschmitt fighters. The weather is clearing. It’s going to be a nice day—for the pilots. About three p.m. we set off in cars along the coast to Cap Gris-Nez. Passing through the harbour, I note that here too there is no concentration of ships, barges, or even the little motor torpedo-boats. Only three of the latter tied up at a quay. Can it be that the Germans have been bluffing about their invasion of Britain? We drive out along the coast road. Now the German planes are humming over, there a squadron of twenty-seven bombers, here fifty Messerschmitt fighters coming in to meet them. They all turn and swing out to sea towards Dover, flying very high. It is soon evident that the British do not come out—at least very far—to meet them. We watch for the British over the Channel. Not a single Spitfire shows.

  We speed on up the coast towards Cap Gris-Nez, where Gertrude Ederle and later a fat Egyptian and a host of others used to camp out in the days—how long ago they seem!—when the world was interested in boys and girls swimming the Channel. The air is now full of the sight and roar of planes, bombers and fighters, all German. A swarm of Heinkel bombers (we have not seen a single Stuka yet) limp back from the direction of Dover. Three or four are having a hard time of it, and one, nearly out of control, just manages to make a piece of land back of the cliffs. Messerschmitt 109’s and 110’s—the latter twin-motored—dash about at 350 miles per hour like a lot of nervous hens protecting their young. They remain in the air until all the bombers are safely down, then climb and make off for England. We have stopped our cars to watch. One of our officers swears the Heinkel was hit by a Spitfire and that the British fighter was brought down, but this is his imagination, for he saw no more than did we. This sort of thing will happen all afternoon. We resume our drive. Peasants sit on binders cutting the brown-ripe wheat. We crane our necks excitedly to watch the murderous machines in the sky. The peasants do not crane their necks, do not look up. They watch the wheat. You could think: who’s being civilized now? We pass a big railroad naval gun which has been firing on Dover. It is neatly camouflaged by netting on which the Germans have tied sheaves of grain. All along the coast gangs of French labourers have been put to work by the Germans, building artillery emplacements. Finally we turn towards the sea down the road that leads to Cap Gris-Nez. Many new gun emplacements here and searchlights, all perfectly camouflaged by nets. How much more attention the Germans seem to pay to the art of camouflage than the Allies! Soldiers are busy camouflaging the entire defence works at Cap Gris-Nez, which the French, incidentally, have left intact and never bothered to screen. Gangs of men are digging up sod from a near-by pasture and putting it over the gravel around the gun emplacements and the look-out pits. It makes a lot of difference because the white gravel makes an easily distinguished landmark against the green fields.

  We spend the rest of the afternoon idling on the grass at the edge of the cliff at Cap Gris-Nez. The German bombers and fighters keep thundering over towards Dover. Through field-glasses you can see plainly the Dover cliffs and occasionally even spot an English sausage balloon protecting the harbour. The German bombers, I note, go over in good formation very high, usually about fifteen thousand feet, and return much lower and in bad formation or singly. We keep on the watch for a dog-fight, or for a formation of Spitfires to light on the returning German bombers. It’s a vain watch. We do not see a British plane all afternoon. Over the Channel today the Germans have absolute supremacy. Hugging our side of the coast are German patrol boats, mostly small torpedo craft. They would make easy targets for British planes if any ever ventured over. The sea is as calm as glass, and German seaplanes with big red crosses painted on their wings keep lighting and taking off. Their job is to pick up airmen shot down in the Channel. About six p.m. we see sixty big bombers—Heinkels and Junker-82’s—protected by a hundred Messerschmitts, winging high overhead towards Dover. In three or four minutes we can hear plainly the British anti-aircraft guns around Dover going into action against them. Judging by the deep roar, the British have a number of heavy flak guns. There is another kind of thud, deeper, and one of our officers thinks this comes from the bombs falling. In an hour what looks to us like the same bombing squadron returns. We can count only eighteen bombers of the original sixty. Have the British accounted for the rest? It is difficult to tell, because we know the Germans often have orders to return to different fields from those they started from. One reason for doing this apparently is to ensure that the German flyers will not know what their losses are.

  Boyer and I keep hoping some Spitfires will show up. But now the sun is turning low. The sea is like glass. The skies quiet. The afternoon on the cliff has seemed more like a bucolic picnic than a day on the front line of the air war. The same unequal struggle that we saw in Belgium and northern France. Not a British plane over, not a bomb dropped. The little Jap sneaks up to the gun emplacements to snap some photographs until a sentinel grabs him. The rest of us rouse ourselves lazily from the grass and hurl pebbles over the cliff into the sea. It is time to return to Calais and sup. One of our officers comes running down from the gun emplacement and says excitedly that three Spitfires have been shot down this afternoon over the French coast. This is surprising. We ask to be shown.

  The first Spitfire they show us on the way back has been there so long that German mechanics have had time to remove the Rolls-Royce motor and the instrument board. It is already rusting. We point this out. Our officer offers to show us another. It is near the beach of a little village half-way back to Calais. The motor is still on and the instrument board, but a young lieutenant from a near-by anti-aircraft battery takes me aside and ventures the interesting information that this particular Spitfire was shot down weeks ago and that only this very afternoon had he succeeded in dragging it out of the sea at low tide. When our officer offers to show us his third Spitfire, we say we are hungry and suggest we return
to Calais.

  LATER.—The thing I’ll never forget about these coastal towns in Belgium and France is the way the Belgians and French pray every night for the British bombers to come over, though often when their prayers are answered it means their death and often they cheer the bomb which kills them. It is three a.m. now and the German flak has been firing at top speed since eleven thirty p.m. when we heard the first thud of a British bomb tonight down by the harbour. Fortunately the British seem to be aiming accurately at the harbour and nothing has fallen near enough to us here in the town to cause much worry. There is no air-raid alarm. The sound of the anti-aircraft and the bursting of the bombs is your only signal. No one goes to the cellar. When the Germans have cleared out, we sit in the back room with the French proprietor, his family, and two waiters and drink vin rouge to each new British bomb that crashes. To bed now, and fear there are bugs in this room.

  CALAIS, August 16

  There were bugs. At breakfast everyone scratching and complaining he got no sleep. You can sleep through the night bombings but not the night attacks by fleas and bedbugs. We eat a hasty breakfast and are off for Boulogne at eight thirty a.m.

  BOULOGNE, August 16

  How wonderfully the Germans have camouflaged their temporary airfields! We drove by at least three between Calais and Boulogne. They have established them not in pastures, as I had expected, but in wheat-fields. The shocks of wheat are left in the field, with only narrow lanes left free across the field for the planes to take off from and land on. Each plane is hidden under a hangar made of rope netting over which sheaves of wheat have been tied. As at Ghent, the sides and back of each hangar are protected by sandbags. In one big wheat-field there must have been a hundred of these little hangars. Workshops and oil dumps were also housed under the same kind of netting. The “pocket” system which I saw at Ghent is also used. The planes, when they have landed, taxi down a lane or a road to a near-by “pocket” that may be some distance from the field proper. Here the planes are either hidden under netting or backed up into a wood.