The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945

by The New York Times

  NOVEMBER 3, 1939

  FINNS IN MOSCOW WITH FINAL OFFER

  By G. E. R. GEDYE

  Wireless to The New York Times.

  MOSCOW, Nov. 2—The Finnish delegation returned to Moscow this morning—headed by Dr. Juho K. Paasikivi and composed as before, with the addition of R. Hakkarainen, Finnish Chief of Protocol. The members were met at the railroad station at 10:30 A. M. by Vladimir Barkoff, Soviet Chief of Protocol, and the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish Ministers.

  It was decided that there would be no meeting with Joseph Stalin and Premier Vyacheslaff Molotoff today as the delegation was busy preparing a translation of final documents. The Finns this evening attended as spectators, accompanied by Mr. Barkoff, the session of the Supreme Soviet, which was devoted to a reception of the White Russian delegation from the former Polish White Russian region.

  Information from Helsinki indicates that the Finns are bringing with them their final offer, and apparently they are now willing to meet the Soviet Union to a considerable extent concerning demands for the cession of territory that Moscow claims is essential for the defense of Leningrad.

  FINNS NOT WHOLLY YIELDING

  It is believed Finland is willing to cede Hogland and other islands off Kronstadt and further to meet the Soviet Union on the question of the cession of territory in the extreme north of Finland. What the Finns apparently feel unable to do—virtually destroy their independence—is to lease the port of Hangoe to the Soviet Government for the establishment of a Soviet base there. Rather than do this the Finns would prefer to fight.

  [A Moscow broadcast intercepted in London this morning said that Finnish Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko in his speech Wednesday had “delivered an open threat of war against the Soviet Union,” according to a United Press dispatch. The broadcast also said that comments in Finnish newspapers on Premier Molotoff’s address to the Supreme Soviet were of a “hostile nature.”]

  Despite the alarming character of passages in Premier Molotoff’s speech to the Supreme Soviet, in regard to Finland, the Finns seem to believe the Soviet Union will recognize the extent of their concessions as generous and conclude a peaceful agreement rather than proceed to extremes.

  NOVEMBER 12, 1939

  THE REAL THREAT: NOT BOMBS, BUT IDEAS

  By LIN YUTANG

  In the progress of human civilization the arts of living and the arts of killing—artcraft and warcraft—have always existed side by side. No history of any nation shows that a period of peace without domestic or foreign wars ever existed for more than 300 years. This seems to derive from the fact that man is both a fighting and a peaceful animal. In him the fighting instinct and the instinct for peaceful living—which I call the carnivorous and the herbivorous instincts—are strangely mixed.

  This is not to imply a state of human imperfection; it may be questioned whether the kind of civilization wherein man is so thoroughly tamed and domesticated that there is no more fight left in him would be worth having at all. Life is, or should be, accompanied by struggle, or else the racial fiber degenerates, which happens within the amazingly short period of a few generations in a well-provided family.

  NOVEMBER 22, 1939

  GANDHI WARNS BRITISH ON INDIA’S WAR ROLE

  ‘Complete Freedom’ for India Is Demanded as Price

  BOMBAY, India, Nov. 21 (AP)—Mohandas K. Gandhi told Britain bluntly today that the resignation of eight of India’s eleven provincial governments meant they could not participate in the war against Germany unless they obtained in return “complete freedom” for India.

  The little leader of millions of Indians asserted that this was their “emphatic” answer to the British White Paper of Oct. 17 deferring discussion of India’s status until after the war.

  His statement was made as he met at Allahabad with a committee of the Congress party [Nationalists] to discuss the country’s attitude toward the European conflict.

  The Moslem League, second largest political party in India, has endorsed the British stand despite the protest resignations of the eight provincial governments dominated by the Congress party.

  Two weeks after Britain declared war on Germany India committed herself officially to fight on the British side and M. Gandhi and his followers have criticized the Germans.

  But the 70-year-old leader asserted today that the issue in his demands for a pledge of Indian independence is “purely a moral one, for owing to her material and military control, Britain is able to regulate garrisons and drain India’s wealth at will.”

  The gist of the contention of the working committee of the Congress party with whom Gandhi conferred today is:

  “If Britain fights for the maintenance and extension of democracy she must necessarily end imperialism in her own possessions and establish full democracy in India and the Indian people must have the right of self-determination to frame their own constitution through a constituent assembly.”

  I am not trying to condone war, but am merely pointing out our biological heritage. In the world of nature the warring instinct and the instinct to live are different aspects of the same thing. Those primeval biological instincts go deeper than any temporary ideologies or political creeds. In the biological world merciless wars have always existed side by side with the most persistent displays of love for the young and all those manifestations of courtship which produce beauty and which we know as the charm and fragrance of the flower, the caroling of the lark and the song of the cricket.

  It is somewhat disheartening to the student of nature that the most ruthless war is going on above ground and under ground day and night in what is apparently a peaceful forest, or to reflect that the kingfisher sitting on a branch so peacefully in a sunset has just returned from murder of an innocent minnow. It is also a source of comfort to know that nature’s instinct to live is always overpowering and managed to stage a most impressive comeback after a natural disaster. Anybody who visited the coasts of the Long Island Sound last Spring and saw the green trees and peaceful landscape after the disastrous hurricane of the Autumn before cannot help being impressed by nature’s persistent urge to live.

  Today, once more, Europe is ravaged by war. To every observer war seemed inevitable after Munich, because peace was so much like war that, to the average Frenchman or Englishman a temporary peace seemed infinitely more devastating. To add to the confusion the fighting man still parades as a lover of peace, and aggressors accuse their victims as “warmongers.” Hitler, returning red-handed from the murder of Poland, offered that same “outstretched hand” to Europe and asked innocently, “Why should there be war?” And Japan, plunging into a continental slaughter, claims only the desire to set up a “new order.” Peace and war are worse confounded than ever.

  What is the meaning of all this? Has man’s instinct for peaceful living been temporarily inhibited, overshadowed and perhaps destroyed by the warring instinct? And will civilization—meaning the arts, the religions, the common faiths of mankind, the modern conquests of science and the arts of living—will this modern civilization be destroyed? Let us take up the second proposition first.

  Many people are horrified by the thoughts of Paris or London demolished by air bombing, and many foremost thinkers of today are rather inclined to believe that modern civilization as we know it will be destroyed. I beg profoundly to differ.

  Knowing that the warring instinct is but another aspect of the instinct for living, and believing that no man going to battle has ever renounced the desire to live. I think the instinct for living is the stronger of the two and hence cannot be destroyed. Since that instinct cannot be destroyed, civilization, too, or the arts of living, cannot be destroyed. What do we mean when we say that by this war modern civilization will be destroyed?

  Physically the arts and sciences may receive a temporary setback, but I wager that after the war hens will still lay eggs and men will still not have forgotten how to make omelettes. Sheep will still grow wool and English mills will still turn out tweeds and homesp
uns. The physical features of a city may be altered under the most ruthless bombing, and conceivably some old manuscripts or even the Magna Carta, in the British Museum, may be lost or go up in flames. Some English poets and French scientists may be killed by shrapnel and some valuable laboratory equipment, or even all of Oxford, may be wiped out.

  Still, the underground Bodleian Library cannot be destroyed. Still, the scientific method will survive: it is inconceivable that all treatises and textbooks of science will disappear. Gramophone records and Chopin’s music will still be there, because the love for music will still be there. The quality of manhood may suffer perceptibly from the slaughter of the flower of the nation. But so long as a nation is not completely annihilated, and no nation can be annihilated with the worst aerial bombings, modern civilization and all the heritage of the arts and the sciences will be carried on. After war and destruction the generous instinct for peaceful living, the creative forces of human ingenuity will restore Europe in an amazingly short period.

  This leads to the subtler, nonphysical aspects of the question and the positive side of human living. Modern civilization would be destroyed if the things we take for granted—freedom of belief, the rights and liberties of the individual, democracy and that now tottering faith in the common man—if these things were destroyed. Without war a totalitarian State which deprives men of these gifts of civilization and sets men as spies upon their fellow-men has already begun to destroy civilization. With a nation not so easily regimented, where the spirit of man still remains free, that civilization cannot be destroyed by a war.

  It is, in fact, entirely possible for civilization to destroy itself by subordinating the instinct for peaceful living to the other instinct for killing. Civilization can be destroyed unless these simple values of human life are more jealously guarded and the simple liberties and privileges of living are more consciously appreciated. There is every sign of the danger that in contemporary thinking and contemporary life such common privileges of living are increasingly giving way to the claims of the State-monster. The citizen of a totalitarian State in Europe has already lost certain privileges and liberties of thinking and living which the savages of Africa have always enjoyed and are still enjoying.

  In fact, we have already traveled a long way from civilization as ordinarily understood. All nature loafs. Then civilization came, offering man certain comforts of living in exchange for certain restrictions of liberty, generally called a sense of duty. No horse has a sense of duty, and every carrier-pigeon flies home just because he likes it. But man was put to work.

  First he was told to work for a living. Next he was told to war for a living in defense of his right to work. And now we are told to put guns before butter and regard it as a nobler form of death to die with one’s army boots on than with one’s boots off in bed. We are going back to nature without the natural liberties of nature. Man has ration cards and a sense of duty. A million automatons, completely trained and regimented to think in one direction, either curse or praise the Soviet Union as their master tells them to do.

  And so what threatens civilization today is not war itself or the destructions of war but the changing conceptions of life values entailed by certain types of political doctrines. These doctrines directly impinge upon man’s ordinary, natural privileges of living and subordinate them to the needs of national killing. The importance of killing supersedes the importance of living, from the totalitarian standpoint.

  It cannot be denied that from the point of view of the State, organized for war and conquest, totalitarianism has everything to be said for it, but from the standpoint of the individual as the ultimate aim served by civilization, and for the purpose of enjoying the ordinary blessings of living, it has nothing to be said on its side. It is neither the machine nor war that is destroying modern civilization but the tendency to surrender the rights of the individual to the State which is such a powerful factor in contemporary thinking.

  DECEMBER 1, 1939

  SOVIET INVADERS SEIZE ARCTIC AREA

  Wireless to The New York Times.

  COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Dec. 1—Finland fought all day yesterday against the land, sea and air forces of Soviet Russia, which started an invasion of the neighboring country in the morning.

  The Russians set cities and towns afire with aerial bombs, shelled ports from land and sea along the Gulf of Finland and captured the whole Finnish section of the Rybachi peninsula, including the port of Petsamo, in the far north on the Arctic Ocean.

  Helsinki, Viborg, Kotka and Hang-oe were among the many cities bombed. The dead were in the hundreds, with many wounded. The scenes in Helsinki were frightful; workers were still digging in the ruins in the heart of the city during the night.

  [The Finnish High Command announced in the first war communiqué that the defending forces had halted the Russian attacks in stiff fighting, according to a United Press dispatch from Helsinki early this morning. A Soviet announcement early today said Russian forces had penetrated Finland 6¼ to about 10 miles, according to a United Press dispatch from Moscow.]

  WAR BEGUN AT DAWN

  Shortly after 9 A. M. yesterday the people of Finland realized that war with Russia was a fact. Not until then did it become known that at daybreak Russian forces had attacked three principal points on the Finnish-Soviet border north of Lake Ladoga, Finnish troops guarding the Karelian Isthmus between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland, and points on the Rybachi Peninsula on the Arctic Ocean.

  Simultaneously Russian bombers swept over Finland, dropping incendiary bombs and high explosives on the main points and upon cities, and also whirling leaflets upon the Finnish people, telling them that Russia does not want war with the Finns but that they must get rid of “false leaders,” naming Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko, Field Marshal Baron Carl Gustav Manner-heim, commander of the Finnish armed forces, and the whole government of Premier Aimo Cajander.

  The Russian Baltic fleet took part in the invasion by bombarding the Karelian coast and further engaged in the occupation of the disputed islands in the Gulf of Finland—Seiskari, Tytarsaari and Hogland. Finally, the Russian fleet attacked Hangoe, strategic base west of Helsinki. In the extreme north the Russians invaded the Rybachi Peninsula and occupied the whole territory, including the port of Petsamo, in a few hours.

  North of Lake Ladoga the Russian attack started near Suojaervi, beginning with artillery fire, and more than fifty shells fell upon Finnish territory in a short time. The chief Russian land attack was concentrated upon the Karelian Isthmus. At 9:15 A. M. heavy batteries near Leningrad opened fire against the border cities of Rajakoki, Vammelsuu and Terijoki, with units of the Russian Baltic fleet taking part in the bombardments.

  The Russians later occupied Hyrsylae in the Suojaervi district.

  Russian aerial squadrons struck yesterday morning at big power plants at Imatra Falls, near Viborg. At noon the industrial center of Enso, with Finland’s biggest cellulose factories, was bombed, and a school and a hospital were hit. Many were killed or wounded. Details were not immediately obtainable.

  Shortly after noon Russian planes bombed Viborg, chief eastern city of Finland, and Kotka, shipping center and a regular port of call of American Scantic Line vessels. Some buildings in Viborg were set afire. Details of the losses in the two cities were not made known.

  A rescue squad at work in the burning ruins of houses in Helsinki following a Russian bombing raid in 1939.

  DECEMBER 1, 1939

  FIGHTING IN WEST IS AT A STANDSTILL

  French, for First Time Since War Began, Report Complete Quiet Along the Front

  FINLAND HOLDS ATTENTION

  Wireless to The New York Times.

  PARIS, Nov. 30—With the Soviet aggression against Finland there is again an eastern front. Though at present it has no direct connection with the western theatre of the war this fact, nevertheless, dominates the entire military situation today. The development is so pregnant with possibilities that it may well mark a turning point.
/>
  Authorized circles here are reticent in view of the scanty and contradictory reports at hand. The recurring question today is: What new military combinations may develop and what new fronts?”

  On the Western Front in the last twenty-four hours it has been the old story—bad weather, intermittent shelling and much patrolling. The visibility is so bad that for the first time since the war began the French air headquarters reported, “Activity: Nil.”

  In these conditions all reconnaissance work was left to ground patrols. On the outskirts of the Haardt forest the French ambushed an enemy patrol that lost four prisoners.

  The major part of the artillery fire occurred in the sector near the Moselle River where German working parties were much harassed while strengthening their positions.

  Today’s French communiqués follow:

  “No. 175 [morning]. Nothing to report.”

  “No. 176 [evening]. Customary activity on the part of our patrols.

  “One of our torpedo boats successfully attacked an enemy submarine.”

  DECEMBER 2, 1939

  PRESIDENT IS STERN

  Invasion Denounced In His Strongest Words Since War Began

  By BERTRAM D. HULEN

  Special to The New York Times.

  WASHINGTON, Dec. 1—The Russian Government was taken sternly to task by President Roosevelt today in a statement condemning severely the invasion of Finland and the bombing of civilians.

  Read by the President at his press conference this morning, as official reports were being received of continued Soviet bombings, the statement fore-shadowed a prompt declaration of a moral embargo against the export of United States airplanes to Russia.