The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945
Page 36
As great as was Britain’s need the material gain by today’s transaction was matched in British minds by the intangible implications of the most open indication yet of Anglo-American cooperation for defense against the Nazi threats.
The Times, London, will point out editorially tomorrow that such cooperation between a belligerent and a neutral is “a new departure” but one that is dictated by the necessities of modern war. The editorial goes on to say:
“The tragic fate of some of the smaller peoples of Europe might have been averted if they had not been restrained from planning for their own safety by the punctilio of neutrality that has become an anachronism in a world containing Hitler and Mussolini.”
President Roosevelt’s announcement in Congress and the publication of a White Paper here containing the exchange of notes on the subject between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the Marquess of Lothian, the British Ambassador, gave a fairly complete picture of what had taken place, but fuller details will be given in the House of Commons Thursday when Prime Minister Churchill reports on the progress of the war since the full force of Germany’s air power was hurled against Britain, either as a prelude to an invasion, or, as some observers believe, to force a decision in the air.
THREE PURPOSES SERVED
Meanwhile it was pointed out here that the agreement served three principal purposes: First, it provides timely reinforcement of the British Navy in the task of maintaining control of the Atlantic. Second, it contributes to the security of the United States. Third, it strengthens the defenses of the entire Western Hemisphere.
While today’s announcement dispels all doubt that the transfer of the destroyers was connected with the British granting to the United States air and naval bases for hemisphere defense, it was said here that the negotiations started out as parallel talks that converged as they proceeded. The United States sent out feelers for naval bases at about the time the British sought to obtain over-age destroyers. Both bargainers were eager for what the other had to sell; but values and prices are matters over which experts might debate for years. Thus, it was said, it was decided to swap two valuable considerations as though equal in value, as perhaps they are.
However, before the deal was made, the governments of the members of the British Commonwealth of Nations affected were consulted and assured that no change in sovereignty was contemplated. A ninety-nine-year term for the leases was decided upon because twenty five years was regarded as too short for the scope of building and investment planned by the United States, while a 999-year lease might have implied surrender of sovereignty.
SEPTEMBER 6, 1940
INDO-CHINA GIVES IN TO TOKYO ON TROOPS
Basic Deal Between Vichy and Japan Is Said to Permit Landings at Haiphong
HONG KONG, Sept. 5 (AP)—A preliminary, basic agreement giving Japan right-of-way in French Indo-China for a back-door attack on China in an effort to wind up the three-year-old war was reported tonight by authoritative neutral quarters at Hanoi, Indo-China.
This concession of a “limited” right to land Japanese troops and supplies at Haiphong was said to have been reached between Tokyo and the Vichy Government of France. It was still subject to negotiation of details at Hanoi.
This was the latest and apparently best-informed version of the crisis in the most populous segment of defeated France’s troubled empire.
INVASION THREAT FADES
The threat of a full-fledged, forcible invasion of Indo-China—the essence of a reported Japanese ultimatum of Monday—appeared to have passed. One explanation was that Maj. Gen. Issaku Nishihara, Japanese negotiator in chief, had overstepped himself.
Confronted with a French warning of armed resistance to any invasion and a declaration that acquiescence would be incompatible with Vichy’s instructions, General Nishihara, under pressure from Tokyo, was said to have re-entered conversations with French colonial officials.
However won, the right to ship troops to the Yunnan border of Indo-China would open up for Japan a great new avenue of attack on the forces, resources and communications of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Central Chinese Government. Invasion of Yunnan Province would put a serious crimp in Chinese resistance because of the war industries centered there, and the Japanese would be able to cut the Burma road if Britain ever decided to reopen it.
Thus, a military foothold in Indo-China might serve the double purpose of bringing the “China incident”—as the Japanese call the war—to a close and carry Japan closer to her self-proclaimed destiny of dominance in “Greater East Asia.”
SEPTEMBER 8, 1940
WAR’S KEY QUESTION: ‘CAN BRITAIN HOLD OUT?’
Men and Machines Are Meeting Test, and Morale of the People Is High
By JAMES B. RESTON
Wireless to The New York Times.
LONDON, Sept. 7—Can Britain hold out? For how long can she withstand this relentless battering from the air? Can these able and heroic people, outnumbered and outequipped, prevail against the mighty German air force and beat this air force at its own game?
These are the pre-eminent questions in the Western World today and the answers to them lie mainly with the men and the machines of the Royal Air Force.
There are in this country 2,000,000 men under arms. In an armed conflict, despite the loss of equipment that was made and the lack of equipment that was not made, they will give a good account of themselves. Similarly, the nation can count on its incomparable Navy, now standing at alert awaiting invasion, blockading the Continent of Europe and the protecting empire. But Britain will live or die with its men in the Air Force.
In the past month, during the greatest aerial battles in the history of warfare, the British have proved they have men and machines capable of meeting whatever planes and formations the Germans have sent over. What we know now is that Britain’s “first team” is all right. Their training is excellent, their anticipation of the enemy has been a little uncanny and their fighting, particularly the Spitfires, superb.
QUESTION OF RESERVES
But the great question now is that of reserves. Rockne tactics work in this business, too. How good is Britain’s second team, and third and fourth? Are the reserves coming up just as good and are they coming fast enough to meet the big push?
These are the questions which must be answered.
Look first at the question of machines. Since the mass raids started on Aug. 11 the Germans have lost, not counting today’s score, 1,269 planes to the British loss of 376.
This admittedly is the official British figure and since these figures are the foundation for this argument a word should be said about them.
Because of the great discrepancy between British and German claims objective American reporters here have gone to the greatest difficulty to check and recheck British statements. They have observed individual squadrons for weeks at a time, watching them go out to meet the raiders, counting them coming back. They have checked them with records secured by the air attachés of neutral countries who have special facilities for gathering accurate information and they have talked with American pilots who are flying in these battles and who see the detailed secret reports of losses of each squadron each week.
The overwhelming impression created by this doublechecking is that the British figures are accurate.
In the first week of the mass raids the British lost 115 Spitfires and Hurricanes to Germany’s 492 planes. In the second week of Aug. 17 to 24 they lost 51 to Germany’s 243. In the third week they lost 104 to 291, and in the last six days they lost 106 to Germany’s 243.
British Ministers have been maintaining for months now that their production of planes outnumbered their losses. There is no reason to doubt their statements. In fact, they are supported by evidence gained elsewhere.
King George VI and Queen Elizabeth inspecting the bomb damage to Buckingham Palace after a heavy Nazi air raid during the Battle of Britain.
SUPPLY OF PILOTS
The question of supply of firs
t-class pilots is another more complicated story. For weeks British officials have been telling neutral correspondents that British production of both well-trained pilots and planes is now greater than Germany’s. This view is always a little puzzling when one sees a dozen Spitfires fighting 200 Germans. If the British didn’t need fighter pilots they would not be appealing to the United States for them, but at the same time they do not seem to worry very much about fighting against great odds.
To Americans judging this gigantic air battle from headlines it must seem that every pilot of the R.A.F. must certainly be working night and day, and getting a little tired from the strain. Certainly there are individual cases of men who have had to take a rest, but pilots and officers of the R.A.F. appear almost casual about their jobs.
The other day this correspondent picked up a pilot who had made a forced landing near Dover. He had just come out of a battle in which he and the pilots of eleven other Spitfires had engaged sixty-three bombers and 200 fighters. These figures are almost unbelievable but it is a fact that this fellow who had been in the R.A.F. since 1929 acted like a substitute halfback straining to get back into the game. His only interest was being driven to the nearest town to catch a train back to his base.
It would be foolish to deny that the British would like to have a few thousand more pilots to throw into battle when it really gets hot but right now, as in the case of the planes, pilots seem to be coming along quicker than the Germans can shoot them down and the record of the substitutes is every bit as good.
SPIRIT OF PEOPLE
One simply cannot convey the spirit of these people. Adversity only angers and strengthens them. They are tough in a way we Americans seldom understand. That curious gentility among their men folk confuses us. We underestimate them.
Can Britain hold out? The British people can hold out to the end in this epic of human endurance. If the pace keeps as it is now, Britain will hold out in men, machines and morale, not for weeks, but for months. But if the pace is stepped up far beyond the present, it is, of course, impossible to predict what will happen.
SEPTEMBER 9, 1940
LONDON’S EAST-END HEAVIEST SUFFERER
Raging Fires Make Thousands Homeless, But Spirit of the British Seems Unshaken
Special Cable to The New York Times.
LONDON, Sept. 8—Thousands of dwellers in London’s East End—which looked today as if it had been struck simultaneously by a tornado and an earthquake—have been rendered homeless. They are being sheltered, under government auspices, in hotels, schools and other public buildings. Central London, which only a year ago was being evacuated, was tonight the reception area for refugees from one of its poorest and most congested areas.
Through the bar of one of this great city’s big hotels tonight there passed a melancholy procession of old women and children, carrying pillows, bound for underground ballrooms to spend the night. Upon their faces was written tragedy, suffering and fear.
They look exactly like the people that this correspondent has seen fleeing from those inexorable floods that sometimes devastated the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi in the United States. And that is what this blitzkrieg of the air is like—some hideous upheaval of nature in which man is helpless to resist or protect himself from lightning or high water.
Perhaps that accounts for the calm fatalism that seems to pervade the people here. They are living through hell and behaving like angels.
Firemen played the most spectacular part in last night’s garish show. All branches of the civilian defense units, however, did their bit with quiet efficiency in this war in which armies wait idly for a chance to strike at one another while old men, women and children suffer the major casualties.
That is what “total war” really means, and it is a pity that some of those Americans who talked flippantly last Winter about the “phoney war” that the British were fighting could not see some of the scenes that this correspondent witnessed this afternoon, because they showed simultaneously what the Nazi bombers can give and what the little folk of Britain can take.
CHIEF AREAS OF ATTACK
For at least ten miles this correspondent drove through the area that the Germans had selected for their principal attack. Up one side of the Thames and down another were the grim and sometimes grisly marks of war. Here and there was a house of half a block in ruins, with rescue workers digging for bodies and survivors.
For miles there was hardly a window intact. Block after block, where delayed-action bombs lay buried beneath the pavement, was roped off and patrolled by the police who shooed off sight-seers. Children darted in and out of tenement house doorways at the edge of these abandoned residential sections, while cats and dogs foraged among garbage pails left unemptied.
The sorriest part of it is that for every military objective hit, grief and tragedy struck a score of humble homes. Churches, hospitals and old people’s homes, it seemed to this correspondent touring London’s stricken areas this afternoon, appeared to have a fatal attraction for German bombs. And this was a completely unescorted trip, undertaken—guided by the senses of smell and sound—without any guidance from official sources.
Londoners with their furniture and belongings during the Blitz.
HOUSE FRONTS BLOWN AWAY
At edges of the sections that felt the fullest fury of the German attack broken windows indicated that somewhere near by a bomb had fallen. Demolished homes gaped like the spaces where teeth had been pulled out here and there. At other places there were great craters in the streets and the buildings there had the fronts torn off. There were exposed to gaping crowds of sightseers the bedrooms and living rooms of these humble homes, which are the castles of the still free men who dwell in them.
Nothing is more tragic than an “open house,” which stands like a stage set after the curtain has been lifted by bombs, with its cherished household belongings and pictures hurled into topsy-turvy disarray, unless it be the sight of those helpless and homeless ones who poured into central London tonight, carrying babies and pillows, clutching prized belongings and unconsciously casting their eyes to the sky each time a bomb went off, as they went to the cellars of hotels and other buildings. They will try to sleep on boards or concrete, with the nightmare of what they have undergone still before their waking eyes.
SEPTEMBER 12, 1940
CHURCHILL WARNS INVASION IS NEAR
Special Cable to The New York Times.
LONDON, Sept. 11—A crisis that ranks in Britain’s history with the day of the Spanish armada’s approach, or that on which Napoleon turned away from invasion by way of Boulogne is approaching. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who is directing this last-ditch struggle, returned to his old role of reporter this afternoon to tell his people and the whole world so in plain and confident language.
From Hamburg, from German-occupied Brest and from conquered Norway’s harbors the invading forces are gathering and ships and self-propelled barges are being concentrated for the assault upon the shores on this island on the heels of the murderous attack from the skies to which this capital has been subjected, the Prime Minister said.
He addressed his words to a people fighting mad and determined to carry on until the last bit of masonry in their proud city has been reduced to dust together with the kind of European civilization they are dying to defend.
It was with the threat of invasion that Mr. Churchill dealt chiefly in his broadcast. Not mincing words, he asked every Briton to do his duty and asserted that in the end Britain’s cause would come out from the smoke of battle with the Union Jack flying as the royal standard flew for a time this afternoon above Buckingham Palace, its walls shot away.
Not only was the Prime Minister sure that his people would not flinch, but he defiantly and bitterly assailed Adolf Hitler and Nazism as wicked, evil things that must be stamped out before free men could be at peace again. It was Mr. Churchill’s voice, his words, his thoughts, his every word that echoed the inchoate hatred that the indiscriminat
e bombings of London’s civilian population have instilled in British hearts.
“A VERY IMPORTANT WEEK”
The imminence of Britain’s danger was emphasized by Mr. Churchill when he said that next week must be regarded as “a very important week.” Then he told what he had learned of German plans for following up the air attack upon London with an invading force. Whether Herr Hitler would try an invasion in the few remaining days of good weather or, indeed, would attempt that hazardous task at all, the Prime Minister said, no man could guess, but that such an attempt was being prepared with typical German thoroughness and attention to detail was certain.
It might, he said, be undertaken at any time upon England, upon Scotland, or upon Ireland, or, for that matter, upon all three at once. Britain, he affirmed, was ready to repel any such seaborne attack as the people of London had withstood the cruelest, most trying bombardment from the air to which any people had yet been subjected.
SEPTEMBER 15, 1940
MANY AMERICANS FEAR NAZI INVASION
Many Americans believe that Germany will attempt an invasion of the United States if England is defeated, and large numbers of citizens similarly are convinced that fifth-columnists are already active here, a survey of rank-and-file voters throughout the nation has disclosed, according to the American Institute of Public Opinion, directed by Dr. George Gallup.
“Even military experts are in disagreement,” Dr. Gallup reports, “as to Adolf Hitler’s most likely course in the event of a victory over England. But the survey shows that more than four laymen in every ten now share the apprehension of United States Ambassador William E. Bullitt and others who have recently predicted a possible Nazi attack on this country.