November 1939–March 1940
The months following the German victory over Poland were nicknamed the “Phony War” because there was very little military action between the Anglo-French Allies and the German Reich. Years later Cyrus Sulzberger, the lead foreign correspondent for The Times during the 1940s, wrote that the “British and French gave the appearance of being removed from the conflict they had accepted.” The chief action was at sea and The Times gave full coverage to the battle off the Latin American coast, which led on December 18 to the scuttling of the German pocket battleship Graf Spee in Montevideo harbor.
The real fighting took place elsewhere, first in China, where the Japanese Army continued to press forward against crumbling Chinese resistance, but most important of all in the war begun by Stalin’s Soviet Union against the small Scandinavian nation of Finland. This was an act of aggression prompted by the German-Soviet pact of August 1939, which put Finland into the Soviet sphere of influence. Stalin wanted to bolster Soviet security by establishing additional bases on Finnish territory. The Finns naturally refused. War began on November 30, 1939 and, to the astonishment of the wider world, the tiny Finnish Army resisted the Soviet assault. According to The Times, Finnish success partly stemmed from Soviet incompetence, but was chiefly a matter of Finnish tactical skill, with fast ski troops firing their submachine guns as they moved in and out of the snow-covered landscape. Soviet losses were heavy. “The bodies,” wrote one eyewitness, “were frozen as hard as petrified wood.”
In the end Finland had to give in and concede bases and territory to the Soviet giant. But all this time, as The Times headline put it, “Fighting in the West Is at a Standstill.”
In China Japanese Army leaders were trying to patch up a peace with the Chinese warlords to ensure permanent domination of China. The Times was clear that even if Japanese civilians wanted to forge a better relationship with the United States, “The mentality of Japan’s military commanders has not changed.” The crisis in Asia remained at the forefront of much of the reporting during the Phony War. The Times’s concern with the problem of India and the harsh British treatment of Mahatma Gandhi’s independence movement was to be a feature throughout the wartime years. Oppression was also the key to reporting on the German occupation of Poland following defeat of the Polish forces in late September. The main focus was on the treatment of the large Polish Jewish community. Some two million Jews lived in the area of Poland under German control in the annexed territories and the so-called General-Government of Poland, set up under the National Socialist lawyer, Hans Frank. The Times ran articles alerting its readers to the establishment of ghettos for Jews in occupied Poland and the problems of famine faced by a Jewish population that was singled out for deliberate discrimination. In January Dr. Nahum Goldmann addressed the American Jewish Congress in Chicago with the news that as many as one million Jews would die in occupied Poland during 1940. The same month The Times ran a piece under the headline “Jews Lay Torture to Nazis in Poland.”
In the United States attitudes toward the war were divided. Though many Americans sympathized with the Western Allies and disliked Hitlerism, Hitler still came out on top in a poll of college students, asking them who they felt were the world’s most outstanding personalities. The American public had other concerns—the problem of Japanese aggression, the threat of communism—as well as the domestic problems of economic revival following the Great Depression. By March, however, there were signs that the Phony War was approaching an end. “War Seen Entering a New Phase of Violence” ran the headline. And indeed it was.
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.
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
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
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 homespuns. 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.
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.]
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.
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
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.
However, while Mr. Roosevelt in replying to questions left the door open to all possible future courses of action to mark the displeasure of the United States, it was understood that at his regular Friday Cabinet meeting this afternoon a decision was reached to reject any action so drastic as severing diplomatic relations with Russia, at least for the present.
In his statement, the President described the “profound shock to the government and the people of the United States” caused by Russia’s resort to arms, said it was tragic to realize that “wanton disregard for law is still on the march,” and declared that Russia’s action menaces the security of small nations, and “jeopardizes the rights of mankind to self-government.”
He closed with a fervent expression of the warm regard of the government and the people of the United States for Finland.
President Roosevelt in 1939.
The significance of the pointed phrasing was enhanced by the fact that this is the first time since the outbreak of the European war that the President has gone so far in expressing his disapproval of the politics of conquest. Even when Germany overran Poland, he did not issue such a statement, although to the last he pleaded for peace and left no doubt as to his concern over the course of events.
As the President was making his announcements at the press conference the United States legation in Helsinki reported to the State Department that it was evacuating many Americans from the capital to the legation’s emergency quarters at Grankulla in private cars of members of the legation staff.
Still later the United States Minister to Finland, H. F. Arthur Achoenfeld, reported that the Minister of the Interior in a radio speech to the nation at noon said that there was calm throughout the whole country, and that evacuation from Helsinki was proceeding smoothly. He solicited continued public cooperation, praised the soldiers and appealed to the public to follow their example. He said that the Finnish people have chosen independence, and are unanimous, and that history will show whether their choice was right.
Hjalmar Procope, the Finnish Minister here, said today that the new government at Helsinki was truly representative of all political parties in Finland and had the unanimous support of the people, while the Communist-fostered government of Mr. Kuusinien consisted of a few Finnish Communists who lived in Russia.
“The appointment of this Communist government,” he said, “shows the real value and meaning of the statements of Mr. Molotoff [Soviet Premier-Foreign Commissar Vyachesloff M. Molotoff] and other Russian leaders that the aim of the action against Finland is to insure its independence and freedom. This shows that they intend the incorporation of Finland in the Soviet Union and the Bolshevik freedom.”
Special Cable to The New York Times.
LONDON, Dec. 2—Count Edward Raczynski, the Polish Ambassador, handed to Viscount Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, today a strongly worded protest accusing the Germans of robbery and murder in Poland and charging that human life in that country “has become the sport of ferocious and bestial hangmen.”
The text of the protest follows:
Reports reaching us every day during the whole month of September on the matter of the warfare employed by the Germans against Poland have shocked the whole world.
Never before and nowhere else has an enemy treated with such ruthlessness the whole of a defenseless population on whom in cities and even in villages there rained bombs, shells and machine-gun bullets. One would have thought that as soon as the whole country had been subjugated this lust for inflicting misery would have ceased.
However, the contrary has happened. From all parts of the country occupied by Germany where, side by side with the military authorities, who declaim phrases about honor, and the administrative authorities, who talk so willingly and eloquently about culture, order and justice, there rule the Gestapo and Hitler Elite Guard detachments, reports are arriving which fill us with horror.
While the property of the population has become the object of unending robberies and is being seized on the spot from its owners, who together with their families are being evicted from their homes, so the entire population is being driven from vast and ancient Polish areas and human life has become the sport of ferocious and bestial hangmen.
Never before in modern history, not even during periods of the fiercest wars, have such gloomy events occurred as now occur daily in Poland.
In all districts of Western Poland leading citizens in the life of the nation are being shot, one after the other, and their names are whispered throughout the horrified country over their silent graves.
Within the space of a single day there were jailed and deported into the interior of Germany all professors of the ancient University of Cracow. These are only the most glaring of the acts of violence that are being perpetrated amid the incessant general oppression of millions of people.
The Polish Government is preparing an official publication containing a tabulation of the cruelties which have come to its cognizance. Before this White Book is published, however, it considers it its duty to declare without delay that the soil of Poland under German domination has become the soil of martyrdom.
National Socialist savagery is writing a new and ominous page in the history of German cruelty, which by its slaughter of the helpless outdoes the darkest memories of the past.
The spirit of conquest and robbery, which has marked in blood and destruction the march of Germany throughout the centuries, has come to life again and is sowing its seed amid ruin and crime.
The Germans will learn once more that by such acts one gains before the eyes of the world no greatness but contempt, no fame but infamy, no victory but defeat.
Poland will only fortify her will to resist and struggle. The world will raise the arm of justice and God will judge and chastise the criminals.
Three Poles who were hung in a public square in Warsaw, 1940.
HELSINKI, Finland, Dec. 7 (AP)—Finnish troops launched a strong counter-attack today in the Karelian Isthmus in an effort to halt a Red Army surge toward the eastern terminus of their Mannerheim Line.
The Russians bombarded the southern coast of Finland from the sea and renewed their land attacks on the central front.
Contrary to Russian assertions, a Finnish Army spokesman said, the invaders were not yet threatening the Mannerheim Line, a water defense system composed of an irregular chain of lakes extending almost across the narrow isthmus. The line begins at Sakkola on the east and follows a westward course through the town of Muolaa to Kuolema Lake, “The Lake of Death.”
The heaviest fighting was reported along the Taipale River and along the southern edge of Lake Ladoga near Sakkola, which is twenty miles from the frontier, and at Uusikirkko, about twelve and a half miles from the frontier and fifteen miles southeast of the Mannerheim Line’s eastern terminus.
Despite the bad weather the Red Fleet bombarded undisclosed points along the southern coast, but the Finns declared the big guns had caused no damage. They said their famed coastal batteries, designed by Lieut. Gen. V. P. Nenonen, Chief of Finnish Artillery, had beaten off the attacks.
On the front in Central Finland the Finns reported they were holding their own against new Soviet attacks. Soviet fighters were aiming at Tolua Lake on this front.
A government spokesman said army physicians were treating eleven cases of gas poisoning at Salmi, on the northern shore of Lake Ladoga.
An army spokesman said papers taken from captured Russian officers indicated the Soviet forces were aiming at reaching the Atlantic. The prisoners had maps of the Aland Islands and Eastern Sweden on which certain objectives were marked for bombing, the spokesman asserted. He added that the papers indicated Russia had long planned her attack on Finland.
With a rocky, ice-coated No Man’s Land separating the two forces, the Finns were said to be leaving it to the Russians to take the initiative. The severe Winter weather—the temperature was reported at 20 degrees below zero—made both land and aerial activities extremely difficult there. The Russians were said to be awaiting long-overdue provisions and ammunition stocks.
Increasing cold and heavy snowstorms over the country led Finns to hope that the war might settle down to a long-drawn siege in which the Finnish troops might benefit to an even greater extent from their guerrilla type of warfare and in which the Russian troops, already reported to be suffering from inadequate clothing and food, would be handicapped by long lines of communication over trackless, snowbound territory.
Reports from the fighting fronts paid tribute to the effectiveness of the Finnish Army’s anti-tank gun, a portable weapon easily carried by one man and said to be able to halt and cripple the light tanks that the Russians have been using.
Unofficial military quarters estimated that the Red Army had suffered at least 10,000 casualties, including dead and wounded, since the start of the invasion eight days ago. Finnish losses were said to be “amazingly small” by comparison.
DECEMBER 11, 1939
By The Associated Press.
BOSTON, Dec. 10—In his first speech since the start of the European war, Joseph P. Kennedy, Ambassador to Great Britain, strongly urged tonight that the United States “keep out” of the conflict.
“As you love America, don’t let anything that comes out of any country in the world make you believe you can make a situation one whit better by getting into the war,” he said.
“There is no place in this fight for us. It’s going to be bad enough as it is.”
He spoke extemporaneously at a reunion of parishioners of Our Lady of Assumption Church, where he served as an altar boy.
Smiling, but admittedly “not optimistic” concerning the world situation, he later declared in an interview:
“There is no reason—economic, financial or social—to justify the United States entering the war.”
One of the chief influences that might bring such an involvement, he said, was the American people’s “sporting spirit” in “not wanting to see an unfair or immoral thing done,” but he reiterated that “this is not our fight.”
Asked whether there was any possibility of peace in the near future, he replied that it was “anybody’s guess.”
“All want peace but all have their own ideas as to what peace should be,” he asserted. “Under such circumstances, who can say when there will be peace?”
Emphasizing his feeling that the United States should “stay out,” he declared:
“If anybody advocates our entering the war, the American public should demand a specific answer to the question: ‘Why?’”
Joseph P. Kennedy in 1939.
By G. E. R. GEDYE
Wireless to The New York Times.
MOSCOW, Dec. 15—The Soviet Union has accepted with unexpected quiet its expulsion from the League of Nations. Apparently recent exuberance here has been subdued by the general condemnation of the invasion of Finland and by the slowness of the Finnish campaign. However, the only opportunity Soviet citizens have had to learn of Russia’s expulsion was contained in an inconspicuous news item, the heading of which did not allude to that action but said non-committally: “Session of the Council of the League of Nations.” The message that follows, sent by the Tass Agency from Geneva, says briefly:
“The Council of the League acquainted itself with a resolution passed by the Assembly of the League of Nations and issued a decree on the expulsion of the U.S.S.R. from the League of Nations. The delegates of Greece, Yugoslavia and China refrained from voting. The delegates of Iran and Peru were not present at the session.”
The item itself is tucked away in a corner under a long ironic dispatch from Geneva describing the degradation of the League, intended as a genuinely international body, into an auxiliary enterprise of the Anglo-French war bloc.
DECEMBER 18, 1939
By JOHN W. WHITE
Wireless to The New York Times.
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Dec. 17—The South Atlantic Odyssey of Germany’s proud pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee reached a dramatic and tragic end at sunset this evening when her commander, Captain Hans Langsdorff, stood in a launch and pressed an electric button that blew her up and caused her to burst into a roaring and exploding furnace as she sank in the mud in the mouth of the River Plate.
Standing at the salute with Captain Langsdorff in the launch were his officers. Floating near the doomed battleship were barges and launches into which the commander had loaded his crew of young, stern-faced Germans. A mile away stood the German cargo steamer Tacoma, which had followed the Graf Spee out of Montevideo Harbor to pick up the crew.
On board the Tacoma were all the married men of the crew. They had been transferred to the cargo ship a few minutes before the warship’s departure.
The German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee in flames after being scuttled off Montevideo, Uruguay, December 17, 1939.
The captain of the Tacoma was arrested tonight because he took his ship out of the harbor without the customary permission of the port authorities. Members of the German crew aboard the Tacoma will be interned here. The rest of the crew has been taken to Buenos Aires where it is presumed they will deliver themselves to the Argentine authorities.
The crew was taken to Buenos Aires because, if it were returned to the shore here, its members would be interned. They expect Argentina to treat them as survivors of a sunken vessel.
The German Legation published a letter from Captain Langsdorff tonight in which he blamed Uruguay for the loss of his ship on the ground that insufficient time had been allowed to make the vessel seaworthy.
Captain Langsdorff pressed his electric button just as the top rim of the sun sank below the horizon, dyeing the sky a brilliant blood red. A dull, tremendous explosion followed. A great cloud of gray smoke hid the warship for a minute, then a light wind blew it toward the shore.
Overhead floated small, lazy clouds exactly the same color as the smoke. High in the blue sky, the half moon looked down completely unconcerned.
As this correspondent stood on a hotel roof and watched the breathtaking spectacle, it did not seem real. The setting was too perfect. But in three minutes the Graf Spee had settled on the bottom and flames had begun to burst up from her exploding magazines.
The electric button that the commander pressed was on the end of a long electric cable leading to a huge electric time mine that had been planted in the magazine. The effectiveness of that mine was terrific. In ten minutes the flames were roaring from the entire length of the warship, accompanied by constant explosions in the hold.
The Graf Spee burned steadily, and explosions of petroleum and shells continued. Fires later reached the petroleum stores and will probably burn all night. At 9:15 there was an unusual and heavy explosion that sent brightly colored rockets and great balls of flame high into the air in all directions.
As darkness settled down around the remains of the warship, on which Germany had pinned so many hopes, the bright Morse lights of an approaching warship signaled to Captain Langsdorff. Approaching the warship at 9:15, was the Argentine gunboat Libertad, which had come to take Captain Langsdorff and his officers aboard for their journey up the River Plate to Buenos Aires.
The last short chapter of the Spee’s history began at 6:20 P. M. when the warship started moving slowly from her anchorage toward the outer entrance of the harbor with a big red and black Nazi flag flying smartly from the mast behind the funnel and fighting top.
It was a bright, sunny afternoon and virtually the entire population of Montevideo was jammed along the seawalls and docks and on housetops, watching the Graf Spee’s departure. For four days she had been an unwelcome visitor in Montevideo’s pretty harbor and the city had talked or thought of little else. Now the unwelcome visitor was going.
Some of France’s and Britain’s greatest battleships were known to be assembled near the mouth of the River Plate, determined to hunt down and destroy the pocket battleship. For four months she had eluded her enemy and then been caught in a battle and forced to flee into Montevideo for refuge.
Any attempt to get through the Allied blockade seemed certain suicide, yet there were many who thought and said that that was what Captain Langsdorff was determined to do.
Hundreds of thousands of spectators actually held their breath in suspense as the Graf Spee’s nose began to push through the narrow entrance between the two converging breakwaters here. If she turned southward she could be going only to Buenos Aires or to some other Argentine port. If she turned in any other direction undoubtedly she was planning to run for safety or to fight it out. The battle-scarred warship slipped through the harbor entrance and turned southward into the channel leading toward the middle of the river. It was the route to Buenos Aires.
As 8 o’clock approached there had been no movement for so long that spectators were beginning to get impatient. They thought that the Graf Spee would remain at anchor until after dark. They turned their attention to the brilliant sunset behind the gray warship. The stillness of twilight settled down.
Suddenly at 7:55 P. M. that stillness was shattered by a tremendous, deep, dull explosion. It could be heard all over Montevideo. A great cloud of gray smoke burst out of the ship and hid it.
Great sheets of brilliant flames then shot toward the sky and settled down to their task of destroying what had been one of Germany’s proudest naval units.
JANUARY 5, 1940
Special Cable to The New York Times.
LONDON, Jan. 4—People who have to buy meals away from home will be able to go into a restaurant, canteen, coffee stall or club and order ham, bacon, bread and butter and tea without parting with any ration coupons, it became known here yesterday. It had been announced earlier that half a coupon would have to be surrendered for each meal with bacon or ham.
The butter supply to caterers will be calculated on the basis of one-sixth of an ounce with each meal served. The best use of the allowance will be left to the judgment of caterers, and it is not proposed that they shall be required to divide it equally over each meal.
Two-sevenths of an ounce of sugar will be allotted to restaurants for each customer. Half the allowance is intended for cooking requirements and for service at table for sweetening purposes, and the other half for each cup of hot beverage, such as tea, coffee or cocoa.
One caterer thought that one-seventh of an ounce for tea would mean two lumps of sugar for a man who wanted a cup of tea, with perhaps three lumps for a man ordering a pot.
During the World War no butter was allowed for afternoon light tea or cups of hot beverage.
For home consumption the weekly ration of uncooked bacon or ham will be four ounces per head.
Special Cable to The New York Times.
LONDON, Jan. 4—Tales of Jews shot and tortured in Poland, as well as reports of fines amounting to impoverishment imposed by Nazis on Jews in sections of that country occupied by Germany, are reaching Jewish organizations here.
Some of these stories, which reach London through Paris, where Jewish relief headquarters for Poland are established, and through Baltic countries, repeat the familiar pattern of Nazi action when Chancellor Hitler occupied Austria and Czecho-Slovakia. As recounted by the Jewish organizations, some of these stories follow.
In the neighborhood of Lodz, according to one eyewitness, Jews are being treated with unusual harshness. At Zgierz, where there was a wealthy Jewish community, all Jewish textile works and stores have been confiscated and turned over to Nazis. It is said one Jew named Zissman was buried alive for resisting the Nazis and another named Kalynski shot for resisting forced labor.
Polish Jews being marched through a street in Warsaw by Gestapo troops in 1940.
No Jews are allowed on the streets before 10 A. M. and a system of forced labor has been instituted. While at work the Jews are forced to sing their songs and shout “Jews are the cause of the present war.” Both synagogues in the town were burned, it is said.
Jewish sources cite excerpts from reports by the German police in Lodz itself—excerpts, Jews say, that have been printed in the Schlesische Zeitung of Breslau. The police are quoted as saying there have been wholesale executions in Lodz and at least 100 Jews shot. The German police, it is added, reported that 1,000 Jews surrounded a synagogue when the police wanted to search it and hundreds were killed when the police opened fire. The synagogue was burned.
In Sieradz, according to these reports, ten Jews, one a woman, were publicly whipped for not saluting storm troopers. In Kolo several Jews, including a rabbi and some of his students, were reported whipped for stealing. At Radom, the police are said to have reported that 3,600 Jews are awaiting trial for hiding arms.
According to Nazi police reports cited by Jews in London, an officer’s job is simplified by the fact that many Jews commit suicide as soon as the police come to search their homes. There have been many killings because Jews resist with clubs and axes, the police are said to have reported.
According to Jewish reports that do not cite any German sources as authority, Chelm, second city in the province of Lublin, where there were estimated to be 25,000 Jews, has been the scene of repeated outbreaks. All Jews between the ages of 18 and 55 must register with the government and there have been many arrests, it is said here. Two Jewish physicians have been shot, according to information here.
In the Lublin area, according to these same circles, conditions are equally bad. The Germans are said to have announced their intention of making this area a ghetto. According to estimates here, 30,000 Jews have been added to the 35,000 who were there originally. On all these people a collective fine of 620,000 zlotys in gold has been levied as a penalty for the maintenance of a secret wireless station, it is said.
All Jews in the area must wear a large six-pointed star and none is allowed to practice a profession or engage in trade. Synagogues are being used to house incoming Jews and the Jewish theological seminary is said to have been turned into a Storm Trooper barracks and made a center for anti-Semitism. Sixty per cent of the young Jews have fled from Lublin, London hears, and all Jews have been forced into the Jewish quarter.
BERLIN, Jan. 4 (UP)—The Reich Bureau for Settlement announced today that plans were being completed for the settlement of 400,000 German families from the old Reich in conquered Polish territories annexed by Germany.
These re-settlements will be in addition to 50,000 Germans re-settled from the Baltic States and 100,000 from the Russian share of Eastern Poland, who already are being “repatriated.”
JANUARY 7, 1940
By HAROLD DENNY
Wireless to The New York Times.
HELSINKI, Finland, Jan. 6—It is now a little more than a month since Soviet Russia invaded Finland and this model capital saw Soviet planes fly overhead and drop bombs on its streets and houses. Undoubtedly Joseph Stalin’s design was for a “Blitzkrieg,” in Russian “molnyenosnaya voina.” It has not turned out to be one. In more than a month of fighting, in which Stalin has sacrificed many thousands of Russians, the Red Colossus, with a population of 180,000,000 persons and an area of one-sixth the land area of the globe, has only damaged the borders of this small country of fewer than 4,000,000.
The Russians have advanced a few miles on the Karelian isthmus and they are held back below Viipuri (Viborg). Fighting is going on every day on the isthmian front, but to the best of our knowledge here there has only been a loss of men and equipment for the Russians. They have made incursions into the Far North, but these have brought no important military advantage and their offensive there seems to have been frozen up by the intense cold. On the “waist of Finland,” they have just taken one of the severest beatings in history and hardly can attack there seriously again for some time. Further south, but north of Lake Ladoga, the Finns have carried the war into Soviet territory.
The Russians are doing badly in comparison with what might have been expected—and the Finns are doing astoundingly well. But though one finds an air of supreme confidence in all ranks of the Finnish Army, the country is still in deadly danger.
Front-line Finnish officers and men consider that on the basis of performance thus far a Finn is worth ten Russians and they estimate, probably with exaggeration, that casualties have been in the ratio of twenty Russians to one Finn. But if it is a heroic army which still faces the Soviet troops across the frozen wastes in these Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, it is also a tired army. Most of all, the Finns need men for relief.
The bulk of the Finnish troops have been in the line for a month. There are units which have been on active service for thirty days without relief—under great hardship and with little sleep. Yet the Finnish leaders simply cannot let this front-line personnel go back to civilized comfort for a rest; its numbers are too few. They are providing what rest they can by transferring men who have had an overshare of hard fighting to quieter sectors and replacing them with others whose task has been less heavy. But front-line troops need more than that.
Volunteers are now arriving from Sweden. How many we are not told. There will be a place for all who can be sent.
The Finns also need more munitions of every kind, especially airplanes (and they must have pilots also) and artillery. After a month of war, they are holding out at their fronts with remarkable energy and tenacity, but they also are hoping that help will reach them before they are overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
Now, what about the Russians? Why is it that the Red Army, with its million and half of regulars, its many millions of reserves and its great quantities of equipment, has now stalled against a country which is only a patch alongside the Soviet map?
Like several others here now who have had trips to the Finnish-Russian front, I have seen many parades in Moscow, and for the past five or six years the thrilling part of them has been the military spectacle. There were soldiers parading while fleets of bombing planes flew over them, and hundreds of tanks and other war machines rolling past. The troops that marched—we realized they were the pick of the Soviet Union, young men of the Communist party—were outstandingly smart. The tanks, ranging from whippets to gigantic land-battleships, looked unbeatable. The planes covered the whole city.
It never occurred to us that Russia would go to war with Finland or any other small Baltic country; yet it has, and thus far in every essential element it has met defeat.
What are the reasons for this defeat? One, of course, is the Finns’ unexpected power of resistance. Another is the fantastically chaotic distribution system of the Soviet regime. Another is the childish Soviet reverence for anything mechanical. Another is the devastating effect of the 1937 purge in the Red Army and of the whole Soviet structure—in other words, a present shortage of brains.
As for the tanks, they appeared so invincible in the Moscow Red Square and the Russians themselves thought they were. Yet they now seem thoroughly vulnerable to any enemy who is willing to stand his ground. The Finnish fronts are littered with these modern juggernauts, and to open the door of one of them is to encounter grinning skeletons of the crew burned to death.
There can be little doubt that Stalin much underrated the Finns when he ordered the march into their country. And so the first troops the Finns encountered were Russian colonial soldiers, the men of Central Asia. Better troops have since been put in—such poor devils as those who were massacred on the ice of Lake Kyanta just before the New Year.
I have talked to some of these better troops, prisoners of the Finns on the isthmus front. They presented a convincing picture of an unwilling advance against an enemy who they had been told would torture them if they were captured; of action under the threats of officers who could shoot them if they failed to advance.
These men are not like the confident army we saw in Moscow. Their morale is so bad—even if one admits that they are only the poorest troops the Soviets had—and the letters found in their possession composed such a picture of discontent that one wonders how Stalin can put this adventure through without a breakdown.
No one, however, who has known Russia in the past believes it is likely to break down completely, for the simple reason that it has been in a chronic state of breakdown for years and yet nothing has happened. The Finns know this better than any people in the world outside Russia.
By HAROLD CALLENDER
Wireless to The New York Times.
LONDON, Jan. 13—Soon after dismissing Leslie Hore-Belisha as War Secretary, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in a speech this week hinted that he intended to remain the head of the government until the war ended.
The Cabinet change resulting from a clash of personalities within the government and the army revealed the persistence of the criticism that is one aspect of the freedom for which the British believe they are fighting.
The Prime Minister’s grim determination and confidence in his staying power were characteristic of his country.
The future of the government depends above all upon the progress of the war. If the struggle is prolonged there doubtless will be further shifts, even major crises, but they will be accompanied by discussion and debate.
This procedure is in accordance with a kind of traditional suspicion that no government can run the country properly unless it is constantly goaded, nagged and advised by the Opposition in Parliament and critics outside—a suspicion that forms the foundation of democracy as the British understand it.
The freedom of expression in Britain after four months of war is amazing when compared with that in France today or in the United States in 1917–18. Recently published articles have blamed the Chamberlain appeasement policy for the outbreak of the war, while many letters to the newspapers have dwelt more upon Britain’s than upon Germany’s faults.
In Left Wing publications there has even been considerable debate as to whether this war merits public support.
There has just appeared under the imprint of 1940 a new edition of Lord Ponsonby’s book, “Falsehood in Wartime,” which is a severe indictment of the veracity of British propaganda in the last war and inferentially of the veracity of all official propaganda.
Meanwhile, from Conservative quarters have come attacks on bureaucracy and suggestions that the government has not yet faced important strategic or economic problems.
If Mr. Hore-Belisha demands it, Mr. Chamberlain will be obliged to explain to the House of Commons why he dismissed a Minister who was energetic but a bit too showy and too ambitious to suit the army and some of his colleagues.
Whether or not he explains the lack of harmony between Mr. Hore Belisha and Viscount Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, and General Sir Edmund Ironside, chief of the Imperial General Staff, the Prime Minister must assume the responsibility for the dropping of Mr. Hore-Belisha. This he feels competent to do. He has never run a war before, but feels confident of his ability in directing this one.
From determination to see it through Mr. Chamberlain seems to have gained a kind of rejuvenation. His voice is stronger and has a greater ring of self-assurance than formerly. He has not the slightest doubt about the rightness of the British cause or about Britain’s ability to win.
His speeches are not very eloquent or inspiring and not so deftly phrased as Winston Churchill’s and they reveal more than a trace of complacency.
But Mr. Chamberlain is in full command without a formidable rival as yet and enjoys greater support in the country than when he was striving for peace by Munich methods. The man who made so many concessions for appeasement has got the bit in his teeth and is now as determined to defeat Adolf Hitler as he once was to conciliate him.
Mr. Chamberlain’s strength lies in the fact that in both these policies he has represented major currents of British opinion. Some would have had a showdown earlier. Some Conservatives now favor a negotiated peace with Herr Hitler. There has been and will be much criticism of Mr. Chamberlain, as there would be of any one in his place. But he seems to be firmly established in the saddle for the present.
JANUARY 19, 1940
HONG KONG, Jan. 19 (AP)—Chinese today reported fresh successes on the Kwangtung front in South China, where their accounts pictured Chinese forces driving spearheads from different directions toward Canton.
They said their troops had recaptured a station on the Canton-Hankow Railway, thirty-three miles north of Canton, and caused 500 Japanese casualties, while another force was heading toward Kongtsun, only ten miles north of Canton.
Japanese were silent on the Kwangtung situation, but said their soldiers were making rapid progress in a fresh offensive in the Tapieh Mountains of North Hupeh, Central Chinese province.
They reported Kaocheng, the principal Chinese stronghold in the region, had been captured and Chinese forces put to flight with Japanese in close pursuit.
PEIPING, Jan. 18 (AP)—A settlement was reported today to have ended an outbreak of fighting between the regular Chinese forces of General Yen Hsi-shan and his new communist-influenced volunteers. Frequent friction between these elements of the army in Southern Shansi Province had been reported, but foreign military advices discounted reports of a civil war or any widespread fighting.
JANUARY 25, 1940
Embarrassed silence has been Tokyo’s only reaction to the “peace terms” reported to have been signed by Wang Ching-wei, Japan’s puppet leader in China. Mr. Wang’s pro-Japanese friends in Shanghai explain that a “gentleman’s agreement” was signed on the Japanese side by “unofficial” representatives of the Japanese Government, “with the approval of the Japanese Army.” Since no denial has come from the civilian leaders in Tokyo, it will be instructive for Americans to see what sort of “terms” Japan’s agents in China say they have signed.
The reported agreement would permit Japanese troops to remain for two years in North and Central China, unless in the meantime “the new Government”—that is, the puppet Government—“demonstrates its ability to maintain peace and order.” Permanent Japanese garrisons would be stationed in North China and Inner Mongolia; Inner Mongolia would be “governed jointly” by the Japanese Army and Chinese, and Japan would “supervise” railroads, customs and economic development in China. General Chiang Kaishek is abundantly right in saying that such a peace would make China a Japanese protectorate in all but name.
At a moment when Japan’s civilian leaders would like to rebuild friendship with the United States, these “terms” remind us that the mentality of Japan’s military commanders has not changed; and the absence of denial from Tokyo suggests that the army still controls the Japanese Government’s policy. Was it not the “moderate” and “liberal” Admiral Yonai, the new Premier, who announced the other day that Japan’s policy in China was “immutably fixed”? Apparently it is fixed in accordance with the army’s unchanging ideas. There is every sign in the “peace terms” that Japan still aims at the complete domination of China, to the detriment of Chinese and foreign interests alike. There is no word in them about respect for the foreign rights which the Japanese have violated in their ruthless and unjustified invasion.
Special Cable to The New York Times.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Jan. 19—Norway and Denmark today declared their absolute neutrality but added that if their independence was threatened they would employ all the military means at their command.
Premier Theodor Stauning, supported by six Danish party leaders, recommended that the nation restate its policy, and the neutrality proposal, backed by the threat of military measures in the event of an attack, was adopted by a vote of 135 to none. There was one abstention—the representative from Schleswig, a German.
The Communists as well as the National Socialists supported the proposal.
The Norwegian Premier, Johann Nygaardsvold, was supported when he introduced a similar proposal. He added that a coalition government would not be considered until there was an actual question of war.
During the debate on this issue the Liberal leader, Johann Ludwig Mowinckel, compared Norway’s position with that of Finland and added that in 1935 Russia had already made threats against Finland. He revealed conversations that he had had in Moscow and which in turn he had transmitted to his government.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Jan. 19 (AP)—Denmark struck out today with a firm declaration, adopted by a unanimous vote of the lower house of Parliament that her neutrality “must be maintained” and her independence defended.
The declaration was echoed in Norway, where Prime Minister Johann Nygaardsvold told Parliament that any attacks upon the nation would be met with resistance.
In neighboring Sweden, meanwhile, Stockholm authorities announced a new program of air raid defenses, including trenches in parks and additional shelters.
The Danish declaration was designed partly to correct impressions abroad that Denmark, because of limited armaments, would not resist an attack.
The pronouncement said:
“The Lower House decides to declare that all parts of the Danish people agree that the country’s neutrality must be maintained and that all disposable means if necessary shall be used to keep order, preserve and protect the realm’s peace and independence and promise the Cabinet support in its work in this direction.”
Danes said that both foreign policy and domestic politics were involved in the decision to make the public declaration.
Political sources said that a precise pronouncement appeared required since there were suggestions abroad, based on a pessimistic New Year’s broadcast by Premier Theodor Stauning, that Denmark might be unwilling to put up armed resistance in event of attack.
FEBRUARY 4, 1940
Wireless to The New York Times.
BERLIN, Feb. 3—The strain on humanity of the international situation evidences itself in many ways. In Germany in the critical year of 1939 it brought about a strong increase in the use of tobacco in all its forms.
Reports state that 47,000,000,000 cigarettes, 9,000,000,000 cigars and 32,000,000 kilograms of pipe tobacco were smoked, while 7,000,000 kilograms were used as snuff. Of cigarettes alone, 15,000,000,000 more were smoked than during the pre-depression year of 1929. The total value of tobacco of all kinds sold last year amounted to about 3,000,000,000 marks.
Winston Churchill’s appeal for a million more women to work in British munition plants is another reminder that total warfare makes little distinction between the sexes. It is estimated that 4,000,000 women in England, Wales and Scotland will be drawn into industrial war work and millions more into the auxiliary services where men can be released. There has never been any such mass mobilization of women, not even toward the end of the World War. In the air raid precautions service alone 580,000 women have been enrolled and 35,000 are serving directly with the army. Feminine fliers have been found useful in transporting planes for the Royal Air Force, and 11,000 are registered as R. A. F. auxiliaries, with an equal number in training for the Women’s Royal Naval Service. The arrest of a member of the women’s aircraft service for desertion and her detention to await a court-martial emphasize the serious nature of the responsibilities women have assumed.
The same tendency pervades every warring nation of Europe. In Finland the courageous women of the Lotta Svard supplement the fighting forces and are encountered far up on the battle fronts. In France women keep the farms going. In Germany they are asked to make new sacrifices in the name of patriotism. When a nation goes to war today, everybody goes. Women are simply engulfed in the general catastrophe like drops in a tide.
FEBRUARY 25, 1940
Special to The New York Times.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 24—Adolf Hitler was voted “the most outstanding personality in the world today” by students of the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University in a campus poll undertaken by the Hoya, undergraduate weekly publication. Of 269 votes polled on this question, Hitler received 113. Pope Pius XII took second place with sixty-four, and President Roosevelt third with thirty-five.
President Roosevelt and Postmaster General Farley placed first and second in the “favorite political figure” class, with District Attorney Dewey and Al Smith running third and fourth. Mr. Roosevelt was picked by eighty-nine students as top Presidential choice, with Mr. Dewey and Paul V. McNutt trailing in that order.
The New York Times was ranked as the “favorite newspaper” by seventy-eight voters. Loyal to home products, thirty-nine put the Hoya in second place, and The New York Herald Tribune trailed in third position.
Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt easily won the title of “most outstanding woman in the world today” with Queen Elizabeth nosing out Mme. Chiang Kai-Shek for second place.
One hundred forty-nine voters listed “Girls and Love” as the favorite “bull-session” topic. Sports finished a poor second with twenty-seven votes, and war was third with eighteen.
FEBRUARY 25, 1940
By OTTO D. TOLISCHUS
Wireless to The New York Times.
BERLIN, Feb. 24—Although Germany bitterly complains about the new British “hunger blockade” which would starve her women and children and therefore justifies the most drastic counter-measures, her spokesmen also proclaim that by virtue of her own autarchy, her foresight and her remaining foreign trade—especially her political and economic rapprochement with Russia—Germany really has made herself blockade-proof. In fact, her spokesmen say, time is working not against Germany as in the last war, but for Germany, which day by day and in every way is getting stronger and stronger.
What is the truth about these apparently contradictory assertions?
Unfortunately, the truth is not so easy to obtain, for, in totalitarian warfare statisticians are joined to the propaganda forces so that statistics either are lacking or must be taken with a whole cellarful of salt, a safe way of reading them being to discount what they claim and accept only what they admit. But, with this qualification, an approximate estimate of the situation is still possible.
The problem of material resources readily divides itself into three parts—finance, food and raw materials.
As regards finance, the government and its agencies already collect some 40 per cent of the national income in taxes and levies. In addition, the government also has mortgaged for its benefit all of the nation’s savings and a good part of its remaining wealth. The declared public debt long since has passed 50,000,000,000 marks (it was 49,699,000,000 marks by the end of October, 1939). Methods of financing are causing so many headaches among financial experts that the projected additional tax and other financial measures still await the light of day.
Members of the British Auxiliary Territorial Transport Service trundling lorry wheels across the barrack square at Eastern Command in Bedfordshire, England, in 1939.
As regards food, Germany claimed to be 82 per cent self-sufficient before the Polish conquest, and conquered territories rapidly are being converted into granaries with true German efficiency. But Germany was 80 per cent self-sufficient in food before the last war as well and had even larger conquered territories at her disposal during that war. Yet she was forced to her knees by a “hunger blockade.” The National Socialist regime blames her defeat on mismanagement and lack of foresight of the imperial regime, especially the great “pig murder” early in the last war, undertaken to save feed, and boasts that nothing like it can happen again. Its ration system, introduced even before hostilities began, and its agricultural “production battles,” going on for years, are cited as proof of this.
As regards raw materials, the German Institute for Business Research figured out as early as July, 1938, a self-sufficiency “of 65 per cent,” which, theoretically, should be much higher now owing to the progress of the Four-Year plan. But the institute itself warned that “according to the ‘law of minimum’ even small gaps in the raw-material supply can exert a great influence on production possibilities if the lacking goods are absolutely necessary for the manufacture of certain commodities.” In other words, lack of a few pounds of copper might stop a whole armament plant. And that the war has curtailed supply is evidenced by the fact that despite a drastic crack-down on all production for civilian use, stored stocks are rapidly being used up.
In both food and raw materials, therefore, Germany remains dependent upon her foreign trade.
All in all, it appears, therefore, that the blockade is unable to starve out Germany, and so far at least has been unable to cripple her war machine, which still is working at capacity. But it has definitely put Germany on short rations in every respect. And whether these rations cripple Germany’s military might will depend largely on the conduct and duration of the war.
Russia is to get a lease on Hangoe (1), the entire Karelian Isthmus (2), territory east of Maerkaejaervi (3) and parts of the Sredni and Rybachi Peninsulas (4). The gains are shown approximately by the diagonal shading.
MARCH 21, 1940
By P. J. PHILIP
Wireless to The New York Times.
PARIS, March 20—Dramatically in the last hours, but following a long series of incidents that steadily indicated the probability of that finale, Premier Edouard Daladier resigned today, and of course his entire Cabinet resigned with him.
Tonight Paul Reynaud is considering the invitation of President Albert Lebrun extended this afternoon that he should form another Cabinet. He has promised that tomorrow morning he will answer whether he is willing to undertake the task; that is to say, he considers that he will know by then whether he would be likely to succeed.
Opinion in many quarters tonight inclines to the belief that M. Reynaud will accept. He has certainly that energy of mind and purpose that first the Senate and then the Chamber of Deputies have asked for the conduct of the war. Most probably, if he forms his Cabinet, he will himself take the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and keep M. Daladier at the Ministry of War if the latter will consent.
He is credited also tonight with wishing to take two representative Socialists into the Cabinet. In the past he has always been a user of slogans, and his slogan just now seems to be that when one is in a war parties and personalities do not matter. The only thing that matters is winning. If he succeeds in getting the requisite support, this will be his first Premiership.
[The Socialists, the largest party, were not represented in the Daladier Cabinet. M. Daladier was reported last night to have changed his mind and agreed to enter a Reynaud Cabinet as Minister of Defense, according to The Associated Press. It also was reported that Georges Mandel would remain as Minister of Colonies.]
Meanwhile the effect on public opinion of Premier Daladier’s resignation is what matters most of all. That it should have happened at the end of a secret session of the Chamber is considered unfortunate. The voters in this country like to know the reasons why their Deputies vote or abstain from voting the way they do.
It is admitted that there has been much criticism of the way the war was being conducted and that criticism has been principally that the Premier did not adapt his actions quickly enough to circumstances.
He has lacked initiative and imagination, his critics say, and the failure to support Finland quickly enough has been taken as an example, not because any one seriously believes that more could have been done directly for Finland, but as an indication of what might happen elsewhere if the same tempo of doing things were continued.
If these and other criticisms had been made in open session, it would undoubtedly have been better. That they were made secretly and ended in a very confused vote is not likely to help the formation of any other Daladier Cabinet. M. Reynaud may succeed. If he does not, others probably will be called, and if none of them can succeed, it seems inevitable that President Lebrun will turn again to the man who was not so much defeated as forced to resign because so many Deputies abstained from voting.
MARCH 24, 1940
By ANNE O’HARE McCORMICK
Paris (By Wireless).
At every turn Paris proclaims that it is the capital of a France at war. It is a city girded for battle, prepared for bombardment, ready with every form of succor for expected casualties. In a day here you meet more volunteer workers, hear of more “foyers” for this, that and the other service for soldiers, see more signs of behind-the-front war activity, than you encounter in a month in Berlin.
War is a leveling process and the face of war is singularly alike in all countries, but the first glimpse of Paris after Berlin illuminates the whole difference between two systems of government and two patterns of life. France at war has passed under a form of government control as complete in some respects as that prevailing at all times across the Rhine. Yet in the very aspect of the two capitals it is clear at once that in one the authorities attend to everything and in the other the habit of private enterprise and individual initiative is too strong to be smothered even under the iron mask of war.
An officer on leave from the front was describing yesterday a small engagement in which a French scouting party of nine men was suddenly confronted by a compact company of fifty-four Germans. By instinct, without orders he said, the French immediately fell apart and formed a long line while the Germans advanced in formation, all together, with the result that nine Frenchmen lost only two of their men and captured seven of the Germans.
The incident is typical of the contrast one immediately feels between the mass formation of Germany and the one-by-one march of France. Whether the self-regulated will win proportionate victories over the ordered mass when the opposing forces are multiplied by thousands is not only the supreme question of the war but its main issue. Daily it becomes plainer that the struggle in Europe is the Apocalypse of the long drawn-out fight of man to control the machine. For at its apogee the machine is a war machine, and Hitler is only that machine made flesh, utterly careless of the individual and especially contemptuous of that private monopoly of himself and the use of his own mind which the Frenchman guards with peculiar obstinacy.
Two other contrasts between Berlin and Paris immediately hit the eye. Paris is not only the capital of France at war. It is the Allied war capital, the military center for both nations as obviously as London is the political center.
The animation of the city this week is partly due to the crowds of visitors who have crossed the Channel to spend the Easter holidays with British officers and men on leave from the front. The mingling of uniforms, the mixture of languages, the movement in the streets, the throngs in the cafes and theatres, create an atmosphere of gayety and vivacity belying the sandbags, the shuttered shops, the “abris” against air raids, the grim provisions on every side for the “defense passive.”
They assure France that she is not alone. The fraternization of the French and British betokens an interdependence never felt in the last war. Even the gnarled old lady renting chairs in the Bois knows that it takes the armies and air fleets of both countries to match the German. “We must hang together or separately,” she says, defining Allied policy in a phrase she thinks she has invented.
No war enthusiasms can be worked up among either people, but the Germans cannot really believe the worst will happen and the French think it can. They face open-eyed the horrors that may lie before them, profoundly pessimistic of the future yet determined to maintain a brave front and enjoy to the last minute the small pleasures of normal life—white bread, conversation, budding trees, a café on the terrasse in the first sunshine. France rises magnificently to emergencies, and this applies particularly to the women and the hard-eyed, tight-fisted peasants, above all to the peasants plowing this year the fields they have already seen devastated. “Will they come this way again?” they ask casually.
Berlin is strangely silent. Unter den Linden is a deserted thoroughfare compared to the Champs Elysées. Few restrictions on the use of petrol are imposed in France. Private automobiles and taxis dash around corners in almost the usual number and confusion.
In Berlin motor traffic is reduced to the minimum. Except for the buses burning synthetic oil, and laden trucks linked together in twos and threes to save fuel, the streets are empty. The people hurrying along the sidewalks seldom speak. They are all so preoccupied that even in company they seem to be walking alone. At night the silence deepens. To drive in the main streets in the black-out is like driving through a dark country lane. The buildings are completely blotted out and no sound issues from the invisible doors and windows. Groping along the tunnel-like streets you almost never hear a voice. Other gropers are shadows and footsteps.
Even the big shops, crowded though they are with people hunting for something to buy, are very quiet. Departments offering millinery, jewelry, novelties, silk and luxury goods are well stocked; others are sold out. Wearing apparel is marked with the price in marks and “points” and customers are more interested in the number of points the article will subtract from their hundred-point ration cards than in its cost in money.
The shop windows are filled with new goods in wide variety, but if you try to buy something so displayed you are told it is for “decoration.” In Germany it is the authorities who are putting up the front, and the window dressing explains the suspicion of some Germans that war stocks aren’t so plentiful as they are made to appear.
In Paris there is plenty of noise and enough light at night to make circulation easy. Street lamps are only turned down, many doors are illuminated and curtains are carelessly drawn over the windows. There is no rationing system and apparently no shortage of goods. Food restrictions are applied by the simple device of prohibiting the sale of certain goods on certain days. There are three days without meat, other days without pastry, alcohol, sweets.
Gourmets though they are, the French take their restrictions with a shrug while the Germans think and talk about eating all the time. The Hausfrau spends most of her time in the pursuit of food, and her scent is so sharp that if an enterprising merchant gets a supply of unrationed goods—nuts or oranges, for instance—a line a block long will form the instant he puts it on display.
The Germans are shut up with themselves. They have no allies with whom to fraternize. The Axis never made for comradeship and the Soviet pact induces no influx of Russians in Berlin. Today Germany is almost as completely cut off from the world as Russia is. Behind the Westwall she has had her own way with most of the neighboring peoples, but in all his coups de force or diplomacy Hitler has not made a single friend for his country. Germany fights her war alone, and this isolation produces an atmosphere as different from that of France as the air in a sealed room from that of a breeze-swept field.
MARCH 31, 1940
By HUGH HYAS
Wireless to The New York Times.
TOKYO, March 30—Emerging from his fortress in the Shanghai French Concession, the only Chinese statesman who admits China has lost the war has assembled a government ready to sign a peace with Japan. One of the strongest political missions that ever left Japan will presently be in Nanking demonstrating to China and the world that Japan supports Wang Ching-wei.
Those elaborate performances appear to many merely the curtain raiser for another puppet play. To Japan they are a carefully prepared and long-pondered move. If the great experiment succeeds it will justify the policy which has cost Japan much in lives and money and will force foreign powers to realize that the new East Asia has been born. If it fails—but to assume failure is akin to lèse-majesté in Japan.
The outlook is wrapped in Yangtze mists but tell-tale signs to watch for are, first, the essential nature of the peace terms Japan is ready to sign with Wang when and if they are revealed; second, the amount of fighting power Chiang Kai-shek develops during the Summer. If the peace terms are such that sensible Chinese can feel that in losing the war they have not lost their country, peace will look very attractive to them. If next Summer Chiang Kai-shek can put fresh guerrilla armies all around Japan’s over-extended front, if next Fall the fourth Winter of the war looms with peace still at the rainbow’s end, Japan will have to review the situation.
In dividing China Japan does not admit that she is abandoning any of her objectives. Her aim still is to bring China as a unit into the “New Order” in East Asia under Japanese suzerainty. But three years of war have shown that China is too big to be swallowed at one mouthful and Japan bows to the logic of facts.
Wang Ching-wei’s government offers what seems to Japan a solid basis for consolidating the gains already achieved. Chiang Kai-shek still has control of the larger part of the people and territory, but when material strengths are compared any semblance of equality is seen to be an illusion. The new Central Government dominates the entire coastline and its area includes 90 per cent of China’s railroads; this area produces 90 per cent of the customs revenue, 100 per cent of the sales revenue, 78 per cent of the cotton, 75 per cent of the horses and includes high percentages of China’s industrial, mineral and agricultural resources.
Conclusion of peace in this area will, according to Japanese blue prints, lead to a sudden improvement in trade. International investments will again earn returns, loan payments will be resumed. Even if guerrilla warfare surges around the frontiers, peace and prosperity will gradually return within them. The democracies may refuse recognition but virtually all their contacts with China will be in the region Wang controls.
The Japanese-sponsored Wang regime in China began in March, 1939.