Weller's War

by George Weller

  As they used to say of fascism in Italy, the trains ran on time.

  THE DURABLE QUISLINGS OF GREECE

  1945

  In Greek tragedy heroes suffer for inscrutable reasons. Earlier deeds of passion pursue them—unatoned crimes not their own, not disclosed even to them until the play approaches a close. The United States, having been for two years the heaviest paying spectator in the marble seats of the pit, now enters the murky Greek tragedy as a participant. The action onstage is bloody and confused. Why are the Greeks still at war? we ask. From the Greek and British actors already on the scene we get a babble of answers. Few of them understand the chain of betrayal and treason they have blindly set forth. Nor do we.

  Greece, like other conquered countries, had a quisling movement, organized by the Germans to fight the Allied underground. In other countries, after victory came, each chief quisling sank to death before a firing squad or dropped twitching out of sight through a gallows' trap. The bookkeeping of treason was wiped clean. Each nation was ready for a new start.

  In Greece, alone in Europe, not one puppet was executed. Of all those Greek constabulary officers who hung Hitler's photograph in their headquarters (where I saw it first in 1934), who organized raids on partisans' villages, who rounded up hostages and handed them to Nazi firing squads, who betrayed American and British officers dropped behind the lines, not one has paid with his life.

  And where today are the “security battalions” of civilian puppets who ranged the countryside in Reichswehr trucks, sometimes under German guard, to wipe out villages whose crime was that they fed and sheltered the Allied underground? Such quislings served at Distomo, when the Nazis massacred that village. Only a handful among thousands are in jail. Many of Hitler's mercenaries are still “fighting communism,” only now they wear lend-lease battle dress. Yes, they're in the army.

  Where to trade or be safer than in uniform? Yet for a nation to absorb treason into its military is not easy. It is like swallowing live frogs. The outraged stomach protests. The wrigglers keep coming up again; traitors are hard to digest. That is why it is impossible for one American reporter to forget the day when an enlistment of quislings into the army first suggested itself to the Greek command.

  The islet of Kranai, when Homer sang, was the sweet bower where Paris spent his first night with Helen before embarking with her for Troy. Today it is a tiny, treeless shovelful of rocks about as big as four city blocks and twice as ugly. In nearby Gytheion, connected to Kranai by a short causeway, thirty-two unarmed “communist” prisoners were slaughtered recently almost at the moment President Truman was expounding his new doctrine. The day I saw Kranai, however, it was alive with Hitler's Greeks, captive and broken. Clefts in the rocks were covered with old blankets from which greasy, frightened men popped their heads in a froglike way. I had jeeped south through the Peloponnesus for two days from Athens, in company with a British staff officer, to see these men.

  The quislings were guarded and fed by a British armored car detachment. They were getting five-minute hearings from an easy-going Greek magistrate. Even the guerrilla members of the makeshift cabinet in Athens agreed it was impossible to prosecute so many thousands. So nine out of ten traitors were being pardoned. Only the highest officers, direct vehicles of Nazi orders, were held for court martial.

  “Why don't you let the acquitted walk off the island?” the staff officer asked the young major.

  “We've told them they're free,” answered the local commander. “But they're afraid to go home to their villages. The people hate them. They're afraid of being assassinated. They won't go home unless I give each an escort of two men. Of course we haven't men enough for that.”

  “Of course not,” said the staff officer sympathetically. Out of humaneness, or perhaps political myopia, he seemed to find nothing improper about providing an escort service for his late enemies. It was impractical, that was all, because of lack of men. A new thought struck him. “Are these troops clean?” he inquired curiously. “Do they obey orders?”

  “Very clean. Very obedient. If they could, they'd like to join us.”

  “Would they really?” The staff officer was unmistakably interested. “What sort of soldiers would they make, do you think?”

  “Well, sir, you can't say they've had the worst training in the world. Fritz usually knows what he's doing, doesn't he?”

  A delegation of bearded men approached, asking to be heard. “We have a petition,” they said. “We would like to join the new Greek army.”

  I thought that this sticky bid would be refused immediately, but I was wrong. We took the offer back to Athens. Other similar offers were coming in from other camps of traitors in Greece. For the time being they were tabled.

  When Greece was liberated it had no army. About 11,000 Greek regulars who had rebelled in Egypt against returning to the dictatorship of King George II were penned by the British in concentration camps from Palestine to Eritrea. The remaining 5000—loyal royalists—were brought back to Greece as a corps d'elite, called the “Rimini Brigade” for its brief service on the Italian front, and equipped with American firepower.

  Lt. General Ronald Scobie first ordered the guerrillas, who had fought three years in the mountains, to surrender Athens to the British. He then gave Athens to the Rimini Brigade. When Scobie, acting for Churchill, next ordered the guerrillas to disarm, they refused. The civil war began. The British defeated the guerrillas, with the Rimini Brigade mopping up behind lend-lease Sherman tanks and British paratroopers. Still there was only one extra battalion in the Greek army.

  Then recruiting began among the ruins. The British goal was 32 battalions. Guerrillas were barred from the new army, but quislings were welcome. For the British they were still, as they had been for the Nazis, “anti-communists.”

  Today the frogs are safe. About 130 guerrillas have fallen before firing squads, but not one quisling. It is raining cool American dollars, and the frogs in the army are jumping with happiness. It took a long time, but finally they finish up, as they always intended, on the winning side.

  *British-born Samuel Insull (1859-1938) began as personal secretary to Thomas Edison and cofounded General Electric. Weller's first assignment as stringer for the New York Times was to interview Insull, who was hoping to avoid extradition after his holding companies collapsed. He was eventually tried in Chicago and acquitted.

  *United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

  XVIII

  Across the Middle East

  From Greece—unable to get into either Bulgaria or Rumania to cover the trials of collaborationists—Weller embarked on a six-week swing through the Middle East: Turkey, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, then India (where a friend, veteran radio correspondent Lowell Thomas, stayed with him). Hal O'Flaherty had taken over from Binder as CDN foreign editor. Weller wrote to him on June 2, along with a list of twenty-five stories cabled or mailed:

  “I went by truck the whole length of the Persian lend-lease highway. There were a lot of remarks loose in Tehran about correspondents who never got out in the roadcamps, so I made, thus, the whole trip from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf … I now have met almost all the principal persons American and Arab of the Middle East. For about a fortnight I have been in New Delhi battling with the problem of getting facilities and cards and permits. I think that I have this licked and shall move north soon.”

  Clearly he was much taken in Baghdad with the young King Feisal II, nearly ten, who would be executed by a firing squad thirteen years later. The boy's predilection for American comic books—and difficulty in acquiring them—spurred Weller to cable his superiors in Chicago to purchase complete sets of Superman and Buck Rogers for 1944-1945 and send them to the king as a gift.

  I have also included one of many soldiers' verses that Weller collected through the war. This gem comes from the Americans' Persian Gulf Command.

  HAIFA SIDEWALKS STRUNG WITH WIRE

  A
T CURFEW TIME

  Haifa, Palestine—March 9, 1945

  There may be towns so small the police take in the sidewalks at curfew. But at Haifa, where the pipeline from the Mosul oilfields empties into tankers, the police at curfew block certain sidewalks with barbed wire. Barricades are strung at key places to discourage both Jewish and Arab terrorist factions.

  By such precautions the British preserve their two most vital securities in the eastern Mediterranean: a general security, which ensures them the upper hand in all areas strategically connected with the route to India; and internal securities, which ensure against either the Arabs or Jews gaining mastery over Palestine.

  These barricades, however, represent security only on a tactical or localized level. Much more important, in a country where a mountain range divides the cities of the coastal plain from the Jordan Valley, is the system whereby railroads and highways are held. For any dissidents—whether from the Stern Gang of Jewish terrorists, or their momentarily quiet Arab counterparts—to challenge the British hold would involve cutting these roads.

  Britain's answer is that specialized fortress, a “police station.” The term here refers to a building almost always located in open country, with no other buildings nearby, near where the mountain highway crosses a crucial pass and above some curb where all vehicles must slow down; close enough to the highway to dominate it, but far enough away to prevent surprise attack. The station looks like something from Beau Geste or a flashback from India's northwest frontier. Pale yellow, it is a long building with narrow windows. The walls are thick. The tower sweeps all the valley roads. At the corners are specialized embrasures just big enough for muzzles.

  There are about sixty in all Palestine, virtually invulnerable to any force not possessing artillery or bombers. Since insurrectionist armies rarely have either, the British blue-clad police—whose lower ranks include both Jews and Arabs—masters the situation. Climbing from Lake Galilee toward Nazareth, descending into Haifa's great oil dumps, following the coast to Tel Aviv, then turning into the mountains for Jerusalem, you see everywhere these formidable guardians of Britain's Geneva-authorized mandate.

  Tiberias, however, is like some Adirondack resort. Stacked on piles above Galilee's silken waters, it is one Jewish summer hotel or pension after another. Millions of dollars—mostly American—were poured into Jewish coastal cities, like Haifa and Tel Aviv, and spilled over here into this winter resort, as Manhattan's money spills in summer into the Adirondacks.

  In the fervid, humid land farther down the Jordan Valley lie some of the Jewish agricultural communities, where Zionists expend their labors in Palestine's tough soil. These earnest people are rarely seen in Tiberias' comfortable hotels.

  Not seen there, either, are Palestine's Arabs, who outnumber the Jews about two to one but who are economically in the minority. Their dominant characteristic is poverty.

  ARABS KING EXPLAINS ATTITUDE ON JEWS

  Amman, Transjordania—March 13, 1945

  “Creating a Jewish home in Palestine has only made for disunity,” said Emir Abdullah Ibn al Hussein, king of Transjordania, in an interview today. “I doubt that the United States understands how deeply the Arab world feels on this subject. Whatever solution it is given at the peace table must be looked at with an eye which regards Arab interests as well as those of the Jews and the great powers.”

  Transjordania has elections, a cabinet and a popular parliament with powers to veto laws initiated by the king. Abdullah is a stocky, point-bearded man of 66, with a warm handshake and straightforward manners. Clad in a nun-grey cloak, with a gold ceremonial dagger at his waist, he wears a snowy-white headkerchief held with a white woolen ring, in desert fashion. His exceptionally small feet are clad in black cloth shoes with rubber tips. Asked whether he felt that the Arabs were better off today than after the First World War, Abdullah gave the questioner an unblinking look. “Do you want a straight-from-the-shoulder answer? That kind of answer may cause anger or resentment.”

  Told to fire away, Abdullah said: “The Arabs were better off then because they were in the hands of one man and were a single, united nation. They wanted to return to their ancient fatherland and see one united Arabia. Even under the Turks, they were used to high posts of responsibility, civil, judiciary and military.

  “Then the peace conference imposed mandates and Zionism. King Hussein suffered a blow from the Wahabite king [Ibn Saud], and King Feisal had a mandate forced on him by the French. No one can deny that the British and French mandates brought education. What is the result? You have all kinds of colleges—French, British, even American—and all kinds of culture. There is just one culture missing: our own Arab culture. Men who felt the Arabs were one people have now grown old, and the sense of unity has been lost.

  “Big nations need oil, which happens to be found in Arabia. You dispute in order to get it. Russia is seeking oil in northern Iran and Iraq, and Britain is in Iraq as well as Arabia. Neither these efforts, nor those of self-seeking politicians like those in Syria, can help the Arabs. What the Arabs need is a single unifying leader.”

  Abdullah spoke with a controlled sort of fire.

  “In Palestine the Arabs do not want the Jews, who are already there under the Balfour Declaration, expelled,” he said. “They recognize that the Jews have the same human right to live there as elsewhere on earth. But they must meet the Arabs on equal terms and not dominate them.

  “I am sorry my people always seem to be complaining to those who never hear. But it is good to know, when speaking, when speaking to America, that I am speaking through a liberal press, to a liberal people, which wants only good for all.”

  HITLER FALL TO ADD TO ZIONIST ROW

  Jerusalem—March 16, 1945

  With Hitler tottering, Zionism, Jewry's unique effort to provide itself with a political and geographical home in Palestine, stands at the crossroads.

  Arabs, even before the Hitlerite persecutions, never wanted Europe to send Jews into Palestine in such numbers as to create a dominantly Jewish state. Nor did they want America, with financial and political support, to open the door to possible Jewish control in the Holy Land. With anti-Semitism defeated in Europe (insofar as represented in Hitler and Mussolini), the Arabs see less reason than ever why “anti-Semitism should be brought here with American support.” They say: “Being Semitic ourselves, we especially dislike having your Western intolerances, which do not exist in Arab countries where Jews are in the minority, solved at our expense.”

  Zionists here, especially the leaders of that immigration, resettlement and public utility financing company known as “The Jewish Agency,” are reacting with zeal and vigor against any assertion that anti-Semitism is dead because Hitler is beaten. Zionism, they say, existed before Hitler and is destined to outlive him. In the United States—their chief source of income except for the funds brought by the immigrants themselves—they are opening a drive for about $30,000,000.

  Their hand is strengthened by indignation against twelve years of Hitler's outrages and the facts that money is abundant in the war boom and contributions to Palestine are considered by the U.S. government as deductible charities.

  The severe stone building of the Jewish Agency's main office in Jerusalem is intensely active. Top executives have all left for Britain or the U.S., or are packing. With Arab countries internationally represented for the first time at the San Francisco Security Conference, they are determined to battle with documents as stoutly as terrorists attempt to battle with arms.

  The Zionists are less worried by the actual pressure of the Arabs than that American and Britain will “overestimate” the importance of the pressure. They say the Arab states are talking big, but that disintegrative forces and personal rivalries exist as broke loose in other postwar periods. They claim that Zionism is used by the Arab states as a lever in order to get more advantageous terms from America and Britain for oil, and strategic concessions on the Middle East.

  Zionists, predicting that wi
th Hitler's defeat anti-Semitism will only go underground, say that Europe's Jews today are more eager than ever to go to Palestine. Since American Jews are willing to supply money to make immigration possible, they say that Britain should relax the 1939 provisions permitting one Jew in Palestine to two Arabs, and further extend the almost exhausted entrance certificates. Zionist preparations to break the restrictions are the more determined as evidence increases that few Jews will return to Europe from Palestine.

  Both the Arabs and Jews want Britain to end its mandate and depart, but only when their theses—which are contradictory—are carried out. Since different Britons at different times have promised Palestine to both the Arabs and the Jews, the defeat of Hitler will merely open the way for a bitter struggle.

  YOUNG MAN OF IRAQ

  King Needs His Comic Books

  Baghdad, Iraq—April 19, 1945

  Iraq's King Feisal II, almost ten, is a serious, sweet-mannered kid who finds it easy to win an American's heart.

  In his first interview with an American correspondent, at his downtown palace in Baghdad today, Feisal said the only real care troubling royalty's brow was keeping up his stock of American cartoon books. Iraq's national budget is doing pretty well, but the king's supply of Superman and Buck Rogers comics is lamentably low. If the pistol totin' Western stories can be kept up, all will be well.

  “I can swim about 50 yards—that means dog paddle and breast stroke,” Feisal said modestly. “And in arithmetic, I'm through long division and working on weights and measures.” Gravely, the small thin figure in a grey flannel suit, grey socks and black shoes turned the pages of a carefully penciled copybook, showing exercises with remarkably few errors. His young English athletic instructor, Theodore Sidebottom, stood nearby. Feisal spoke in a faint British accent with pauses of shy silence.