Chapter 1

“CAN THE UNITED STATES KEEP OUT OF WAR?”

September–October 1939

I n the early morning on September 1, 1939 German forces began a carefully planned campaign to destroy the Polish armed forces in a series of rapid and destructive operations. The news, when it came, had not been unexpected, for the European crisis had intensified in the last days of August. In New York it was just after midnight and The Times rushed out an extra edition under the front-page headline “German Army Attacks Poland.” Details were sent through by Otto Tolischus in Berlin (soon to be expelled by the Germans) and confirmed by The Times’s Polish correspondent Jerzy Szapiro, who found himself under bombardment in Warsaw. The German campaign made rapid progress, but in London and Paris, already being evacuated in case of bombing, Hitler was being asked to withdraw his forces and avoid further war. His refusal resulted in two ultimatums. The British one ran out at 11 a.m. on September 3, the French one at 5 p.m. the same day. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain solemnly announced over the radio that Britain was at war and his broadcast was reprinted in full on the front page of The Times that same day. Neither of the Western powers took immediate action to help the Poles, whose forces were swept aside in four weeks of bitter fighting. On September 17 the Soviet armed forces moved into eastern Poland under their agreement with Hitler and by September 27 all Polish resistance had ended

For the United States the crisis in Europe posed many dangers. Neutrality legislation, which had been signed into law in 1937, insured that the United States would not become involved in any war by taking sides or supplying arms. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was under strong pressure to declare U.S. neutrality formally in September 1939, and although he did so, he wanted to keep open the possibility of selling resources to the democracies. The isolationist mood in the United States, which The Times campaigned against, was strong. When The Times asked on September 3 “Can the United States Keep Out of War?,” the overwhelming answer from the public would have been “yes.” For Americans there was not just anxiety over German ambitions, but fear of what Japan might do in Asia and uncertainty over Soviet intentions following Stalin’s decision to throw in his lot with Hitler. There was also widespread fascination in America with the war, evident in the extensive news coverage devoted by The Times to the opening weeks of the conflict.

The historian Allan Nevins asked whether civilization could survive a second war, a question widely debated in Europe in the 1930s. Nevins concluded that it might, but only because civilization somehow always had survived in the past. The Times published the assertion by the exiled Communist Leon Trotsky that sooner or later the United States would have to join in the war; though Trotsky was an unlikely ally for America’s interventionists. Nevertheless, there still existed the possibility that the war might end as suddenly as it had begun. In October Hitler made veiled offers to the West to abandon the conflict now that he had seized his Polish prize. Demands that the West should make peace came from Francisco Franco, recent victor in the Spanish Civil War, the pope, Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands, even from Moscow. For all the popular hostility to Chamberlain as an appeaser, then and now, he was adamant in October 1939 that there should be no negotiating with Hitler. By late October American public opinion held that U.S. involvement in the war could be avoided altogether. A Gallup Poll showed that 54 percent were sure the United States could keep out of the conflict. This was not yet world war. If Britain and France had made peace, there would have been no world war at all.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

GERMAN ARMY ATTACKS POLAND

HOSTILITIES BEGUN

Warsaw Reports German Offensive Moving on Three Objectives

By Jerzy Szapiro
Wireless to The New York Times.

WARSAW, Poland, Sept. 1 —War began at 5 o’clock this morning with German planes attacking Gdynia, Cracow and Katowice.

At Gdynia three bombs exploded in the sea.

The regular German Army started an offensive in the direction of Dzialdowka—in Upper Silesia and Czestochowa. The German plan apparently is to cut off Western Poland along the line of Dzialdowka-Lodz-Czestochowa.

The offensive is developing from East Prussia, toward Silesia and northwards from Slovakia.

At 9 o’clock an attempt was made to bombard Warsaw. The planes, however, did not reach even the suburbs.

A military attack on the garrison at Westerplatte in the Danzig area was repulsed.

The Foreign Office at 8:45 A.M. issues a communiqué saying that military action had begun in Westerplatte in the Danzig area as well as in Buschkowa near Gdynia, and in Dzialowka, Chojnice and Lowa.

Hostilities have begun and Poland has been attacked, said the communiqué.

Three cities in Upper Silesia suffered artillery bombardment, particulars of which are lacking, it was said.

While this dispatch was being telephoned, the air-raid sirens sounded in Warsaw.

DANZIG FIGHTING REPORTED

WARSAW, Poland, Sept. 1 (AP) —It was reported today that Tczew and Czestochowa were bombed by German airplanes early this morning.

There was no official confirmation of the bombing.

Fighting was reported at Danzig.

It was reported officially that German troops had attacked Polish defenses near Mlawa, bordering the southern part of East Prussia. There was no announcement of the damage resulting from the bombing.

Mist and clouds were overhanging the city. A light drizzle apparently afforded momentary protection against air raids. Warsaw went to work as usual.

ROOSEVELT WARNS NAVY

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 (AP) —President Roosevelt directed today that all naval ships and army commands be notified at once by radio of German-Polish hostilities.

The White House issued the following announcement:

“The President received word at 2:50 A.M. Eastern standard time by telephone from Ambassador Biddle at Warsaw and through Ambassador Bullitt in Paris that Germany has invaded Poland and that four Polish cities are being bombed.

“The President directed all naval ships and army commands be notified by radio at once.

“There probably will be a further announcement by the State Department in a few hours.”

The announcement was issued by William Hassett, acting White House press secretary, after the President telephoned him at his home.

White House offices had been dark during the night, but Mr. Roosevelt himself was keeping in constant touch with European developments. Across the street from the Executive Mansion there were few lights burning in the rambling State Department Building.

One factor creating immediate concern in the capital was the presence of many Americans in Europe who have been unable to obtain passenger space on transatlantic liners.

There was speculation that naval vessels in European waters might be ordered to lend a hand to merchant ships in evacuating Americans.

Preparations were going forward, too, to keep American industry stable in event of a general European war.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

BRITISH MOBILIZING

Navy Raised to Its Full Strength, Army And Air Reserves Called Up

PARLIAMENT IS CONVOKED

By FERDINAND KUHN Jr.
Special Cable to The New York Times.

LONDON, Sept. 1 —All attempts to bring about direct negotiations between Germany and Poland appeared to have broken down tonight as Great Britain mobilized her fleet to full strength, stretched her other defensive preparations close to the limit and began moving 3,000,000 school children and invalids from the crowded cities into the safety of the countryside.

Censorship was established over cables after London had been cut off for hours from communication with the Continent.

It was the peak of the crisis, but a day of rumors had not shifted the fundamental issue nor given a conclusive answer to the question of peace or war.

At midnight the British Government was not yet convinced that Germany really intended to attack Poland and provoke a world war.

TERMS CALLED SMOKE SCREEN

All that had happened during yesterday, including the sudden broadcasting of Chancellor Hitler’s sixteen-point demands, was interpreted here as a smoke screen rather than as the flash of guns.

After hearing Herr Hitler’s “terms” officials here quietly announced tonight that “the government primarily interested in the proposals is, of course, the Polish Government.”

Until the Polish Government has had time to consider them, it was said in Whitehall that “it would be highly undesirable for any comment to be made.”

It was fully expected that Poland would reject them later today; indeed, Polish circles here were describing them tonight as utterly unacceptable,” for they would involve dismemberment of Poland and loss of Poland’s capacity to defend her independence. In any event, there was no sign of any intention here to put pressure on Warsaw to accept.

Much might have been said about the German “proposals” here tonight if the government had not been so anxious to leave the first decision to Warsaw without any prompting. That the British regarded them as artful went without saying, since they conveyed a first impression of reasonableness that was not borne out by the terms themselves.

Until the announcement on the German wireless tonight, the British Government had not been told about them officially, and the Polish Government was not informed until Josef Lipski, Polish Ambassador to Berlin, visited Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop a few minutes before the broadcast took place.

Shortly after midnight last night, Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin, had heard the “points” read to him by Herr von Ribbentrop, but the reading was so fast that the Ambassador could not even take notes of them in detail. In any event, he was told Herr Hitler’s “points” were not being given to him or his government officially, on the ground that it was already too late.

TIME LIMIT EXPIRED

On Tuesday Herr Hitler had asked that a Polish negotiator should arrive in Berlin within twenty-four hours; and as nobody had arrived from Warsaw when the time limit expired, Sir Nevile was told that the “points” could not even be communicated officially to London.

The German time table with the Polish Government was even more unusual. About 9 o’clock yesterday morning M. Lipski had asked to see Herr von Ribbentrop. The Ambassador had no response until afternoon, when he was asked by telephone if he were coming as Ambassador or as a plenipotentiary to negotiate. He said “as Ambassador.” He heard nothing more until evening, when he was summoned and was told it was already too late, as the time limit had expired.

Tonight, after midnight talks in Downing Street, it was said here that Herr Hitler’s “points” had not come in any way as a reply to the British proposals. Great Britain’s whole effort in the past few days has been concerned with the conditions in which direct negotiations between the Germans and Poles might take place.

In all the diplomatic interchanges of the last week, the British contention has been that the discussions must be on terms of equality, that a settlement should safeguard the essential interests of Poland and that its observance should be secured by effective guarantees.

If there was any optimism in London yesterday—and one could sense it in spite of all the alarms of the last twenty-four hours—it sprang from a feeling that Great Britain and France were strong enough to face any test.

Opinion in Downing Street was “tough” as never before. It was being said that “appeasement” was nowhere in evidence and that, far from allowing Germany to overrun Poland, the British and French were ready to hit hard on the very first day.

Much was being made of alleged deficiencies in the German Army’s equipment and in the condition of German airplanes, which, according to a source close to the government, is far from what “German propaganda” has represented.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

BRITISH CHILDREN TAKEN FROM CITIES

3,000,000 Persons Are in First Evacuation Group,

Which Is to Be Moved Today

By FREDERICK T. BIRCHALL
Special Cable to The New York Times.

Children from Myrdle School, Stepney, London, being escorted to the station to be evacuated (the first school to do so), on September 1, 1939.

LONDON, Sept. 1 —The greatest mass movement of population at short notice in the history of Great Britain is under way. It is an evacuation, under government order, of little children, invalids, women and old men from congested areas.

From London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow and twenty-three other cities the great exodus is going on as this dispatch is being written. The numbers are stupendous. More than 3,000,000 of these helpless human beings are being taken out of danger of German bombs.

Nothing like it has ever been attempted anywhere; yet it is going on without mishap—so far, indeed, without serious confusion.

Scenes everywhere were much the same whether in the aristocratic West End or the proletarian East Side, but one that this correspondent witnessed was typical both of the method and the neighborhood. This was in Myrtle Street, Whitechapel. Its school had 180 children to be evacuated. They ranged in age from 5 to 16. A large proportion was Jewish.

The children arrived at the school, most of them with mothers or elder sisters, just as the sun came over the eastern horizon about 5:30 this morning. The teachers were already waiting for them outside the school. One teacher at the gate kept the relatives outside it. Only the children were passed through.

All apparently were children of poor families, but for this exodus they had been spruced up so that all were neat and clean. Every one, boy and girl alike, carried a knapsack over the shoulders, but the quality of the haversacks varied. Some were of real leather or rubberoid. Some were made out of pillowslips. In each were a change of clothes, toilet articles and a food package sufficient for the day. But there was one invariable piece of equipment. Each child carried a gas mask.

As they arrived in the school yard the teacher fastened onto each child a stout label on which were the child’s name, number and school. When they were duly labeled they were marshaled into the assembly hall. There the headmistress told them that they were going on a holiday and that it would be nice to begin it with a little prayer. This was the prayer solemnly chanted in the treble child voices:

“May God take us all in His keeping and bring us safe back to our mummies.”

At 7 o’clock came the evacuation order with a male guide who was to see the children safely to the station and onto the train. The teachers marshaled the children out and they went along in a ragged procession, the smallest ones hand in hand, with the bigger ones interspersed among them.

It was only four blocks to the station, but every block was lined with anxious mothers who ran alongside with cautions and last messages, which again threatened to upset decorum. So after one block the headmistress called a halt and primly told the disturbers to leave because the children were getting excited. Some obeyed, but others just couldn’t.

All along the street windows were opened and faces leaned out, the women weeping and the men calling out: “Keep smiling! Keep your head up and keep your feet dry!” The children began to feel that this was a really good joke and forgot their tears.

Nevertheless, it took fifteen minutes to traverse those four blocks to the station, and there the little scene was soon ended. The children lined up along the platform. There were no more tears, for the weeping mothers had been left outside.

In a few minutes along came a cheerfully lighted train. The children were shepherded aboard and the train went off to collect more elsewhere. When it departed the children were happily singing. This excursion was really turning out to be a grand holiday.

There is no panic, no terror about this evacuation. The government has been anxious from the outset to have it understood it did not imply that war was inevitable; it would rather be in the nature of a rehearsal.

In that spirit it is being taken. Never did the stout souls of British plain folk show to better advantage. Never did the innate courtesy and kindness of the whole populace and the generous hospitality and readiness to help of the well-to-do shine more clearly. It is typical of that spirit and of the real piety of this land that the British Broadcasting Company held over the radio tonight a short religious service in which God was besought to comfort parents separated from their children and give courage to children and invalids, many of whom are leaving home for the first time.

No American could hear that or could witness the scenes of cheerful fortitude at schools, in little homes, in streets and at railway stations unmoved. This is a staunch and true people. In any “war of nerves” it is not they who will falter.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

FREE CITY IS SEIZED

Forster Notifies Hitler of Order Putting Danzig Into the Reich

Special Cable to The New York Times.

DANZIG, Sept. 1 —By a decree issued early this morning Albert Forster, Nazi Chief of State, proclaimed the annexation of the Free City to the Reich, thus settling by a fell stroke the original point of contention in the international crisis.

In a telegram to Chancellor Hitler Herr Forster explained his action as necessary to remove “the pressing necessity of our people and State.” Herr Forster also issued a proclamation to the people of Danzig saying the hour awaited for twenty years had arrived because “our Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, has freed us.”

[A New York Times dispatch from Berlin this morning said Herr Hitler telegraphed Herr Forster today thanking him and all Danzigers, and stating:

“The law for reannexation is in effect immediately.”

The Chancellor stated furthermore, that Herr Forster was appointed head of the civil administration of the Danzig area.]

In a four-article decree Herr Forster declared the Constitution of Danzig no longer valid. He declared himself sole administrator of the Danzig part of the German Reich, and he declared that until the Reich’s legal system had been introduced by command of Herr Hitler all laws except the Constitution remained in effect. Then Herr Forster immediately wired Herr Hitler of his action, begged the Chancellor to give his approval of the move and through Reich law complete the annexation.

The German flag is now flying everywhere over Danzig, Herr Forster said, and all church bells resound to the event. “We thank God,” he declared, “that He gave the Fuehrer the strength and the possibility to free also us from the evil Versailles treaty.”

‘REPUBLIC IS MENACED’

By JERZY SZAPIRO Wireless to The New York Times.

WARSAW, Poland, Sept. 1 —“The republic is menaced!” This war cry was splashed over all the front pages of Warsaw newspapers yesterday, including the official Gazeta Polska. The gravest view of the situation is taken here in government circles. The occupation by the Gestapo [German secret police] of Danzig’s main railroad station and of the vital junction to Polish-owned railroads in the Free City was regarded as a challenge that could not be tolerated any longer.

Control of the railroads is one of Poland’s most important prerogatives in Danzig. It is gone by the seizure of the station, through the requisitioning of freight trains and the stoppage of traffic. Other prerogatives like customs control and the free use of the port now exist only on paper. Short of actual occupation of Free City territory by German troops the Nazis already have achieved their aims of Danzig’s incorporation in the Reich.

Poland is seen here as nearing the limits of her patience and calm. There are already signs of impatience among the people, who are wondering why the war has not begun yet in spite of German provocations and Poland’s preparedness. The semi-official Gazeta Polska for the first time uses the word “war” in its editorial commenting on mobilization.

REICH HELD RESPONSIBLE

“Poland’s security is menaced,” it says, “by Germany’s demands and aggressive acts. We have made no demands, territorial or other. We want peace with all our neighbors. We do not want war and hope it will not break out. If it comes, Germany will be responsible for the worst cataclysm in the history of mankind.”

“With superhuman patience,” says the independent Wieczor, “we have tolerated various aggressive acts in the Reich and Danzig; Hitler’s threats, the concentration of German troops on all frontiers, the occupation of Slovakia, the violation of our rights in Danzig, the territorial claims, the inhuman treatment of the Polish minority in Germany, frontier terrorism—these can last no longer.”

Yesterday was very critical. When the news of the occupation of Danzig’s station and the hoisting of swastikas in the Free City reached Warsaw after midnight, it was feared a coup would come this morning. Everything was prepared on the Polish side to strike.

The situation is both tragic and grotesque, it is pointed out here. All Europe is mobilized and prepared for war, but the man responsible for the crisis cannot take the decision of peace or war. Chancellor Hitler’s chances of victory in war or an advantageous agreement lessen daily, it is felt—and yet he hesitates.

War preparations here were speeded yesterday. Railroads were placed on a war basis and taken over by military authorities. Passenger traffic was greatly reduced. Beginning today special passes will be needed for traveling by private persons. Newspapers are full of descriptions of scenes of unparalleled enthusiasm from all parts of the country after the proclamation of general mobilization.

Hundreds of thousands of reservists hurried yesterday to join their units. The first day of full mobilization outwardly differed but little from all the other crisis days. Tram and bus services to Warsaw were slightly reduced, but the streets of the capital were still alive with cars and taxicabs, no restrictions having yet been imposed on gasoline consumption. The food situation is unchanged, which means it is satisfactory apart from the milk shortage in the morning owing to the disturbances of suburban traffic.

In all railroad stations cloakrooms were closed and cleared of trunks and other objects. The reason was the discovery in Warsaw of a German terrorist gang which planned to blow up several public buildings at the outbreak of war.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

WASHINGTON VIEWS THE CRISIS GRAVELY

Outbreak of Hostilities Now Only Matter of Hours, Some Officials Believe

By HAROLD B. HINTON
Special to The New York Times.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 —Officials, guided only by incomplete and delayed dispatches from Europe, were inclined today to take the gravest view of the situation abroad, some of them fearing war was merely a matter of hours. Only private and confidential opinions were expressed, as both the State Department and the White House maintained official silence.

President Roosevelt spent most of his day reading press bulletins which were relayed to him and listening to radio news broadcasts. Late in the afternoon, he motored to Carderock, Md., a few miles from Washington, to inspect the Navy Department’s new testing tank there, where large-scale ship models are put through their paces under various conditions. On his return he detoured a short distance to look at the site of the new Naval Hospital under construction at Bethesda, Md.

The terms for a peaceful solution of the crisis outlined in a Berlin broadcast were felt to leave little hope of averting conflict, because they were considered obviously unacceptable to Poland.

Hitler acts against Poland: The port of Gydnia, north of Danzing (toward top of the map) was blockaded this morning. At Glewitz (shown by cross) artillery fire was heard after a Polish-German skirmish had been reported there. Cracow, to the east, was among Polish cities said to have been bombed.

EXPECT POLAND TO FIGHT

The general belief here is that Poland will fight if Germany makes any move into Danzig and that Great Britain and France will at once join as belligerents. The continued German intransigence on the Danzig question, despite the repeated appeals and representations from almost every quarter of the globe, has tended in the past few days to diminish official optimism that war will be averted.

SEPTEMBER 2, 1939

ROOSEVELT PLEDGE

He Promises Efforts to Keep U. S. Out of War—Thinks It Can Be Done

By FELIX BELAIR Jr.
Special to The New York Times.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 —President Roosevelt pledged the nation today to make every effort to keep this country out of war. He said he hoped and believed it could be done.

Then he made a final check-up on the machinery already set up for preserving American neutrality, as well as for swinging military, naval and industrial forces into action in event of any unexpected emergency.

The President’s promise to do all in his power to keep the nation at peace was given as he gravely faced his regular Friday morning press conference. There was little he could say at this critical period in the world’s history, he remarked, except to appeal to the newspapermen present for their full cooperation in adhering as closely as possible to the facts, since this was best not only for this nation but for civilization as a whole.

In this regard, the President set an example for his auditors. He said what he had to say without attempting to minimize or exaggerate the gravity of the European situation. He appeared to be neither exuberant nor depressed by the turn of events that kept him from his bed for all but a few hours last night. Occasionally he was humorous, but throughout his manner was calm.

WOULD “ALLAY ANXIETY”

Later in the day the President let it be known that he would address the nation over the three major broadcasting networks on Sunday night from 10 to 10:15 o’clock, Eastern daylight time, in an effort “to allay anxiety and relieve suspense.” Stephen T. Early, his secretary, who hurried back to Washington from a brief vacation today, said Mr. Roosevelt would speak on international affairs in a manner that would “clearly state our position” and would be of international interest.

The President began his memorable press conference with the explanation that there was little if anything he could say on such anticipated questions as when he would call a special session of Congress and issue a neutrality proclamation. These things, he explained, would have to await developments “over there” during the day, and possibly tomorrow, which would have a direct bearing on any American action.

But if any one had any questions that he was able to answer, Mr. Roosevelt said, he would answer gladly. A reporter observed that the question uppermost in everyone’s mind just now was: “Can we keep out of it?” The President cast his eyes downward for a moment as he pondered the request for comment. Then he replied:

“Only this—that I not only sincerely hope so, but I believe we can, and that every effort will be made by the Administration to so do.”

The President consented readily when permission was asked to quote him directly on his statement.

SEPTEMBER 2, 1939

FRANCE MOBILIZES; 8,000,000 ON CALL

Martial Law Declared Over Entire Country—Daladier Meets Deputies Today

By P. J. PHILIP
Wireless to The New York Times.

PARIS, Sept. 2 (Passed by Censor) —France’s reply to Germany’s violation of Poland was to decree general mobilization for this morning, establish martial law throughout the country and convoke Parliament for 3 P.M. today so as legally to carry out whatever must be done.

These decrees were approved at a Cabinet council held during yesterday morning without midnight secrecy or undue haste.

ULTIMATUM ORDERED

In the evening the government gave instructions to Ambassador Robert Coulon-dre in Berlin to hand to the Wilhelmstrasse an ultimatum in terms analogous to and in the same sense as the British note which, Prime Minister Chamberlain announced during the afternoon, had been handed in by the British Ambassador.

Only cessation of hostilities in Poland at this time could enable an international conference such as has been suggested to be set up, and hope of such a happening is frail.

There was much speculation tonight as to whether Premier Daladier will alter and enlarge his Cabinet, but the Premier has taken no one into his confidence. It is not possible now to predict that any “Sacred Union” Cabinet will be formed as was done in 1914.

RELIED UPON BY POLES

From the Polish Ambassador, Julius Lukasiewicz, Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet learned officially that fire had been opened by German troops along the Polish frontier at 5:45 o’clock yesterday morning, that airplanes had attacked several centers and that Poland, feeling her independence endangered, placed her reliance on France to fulfill her engagements.

This information and request confirmed news that had been pouring out from the German radio since before 8 A.M. when Albert Forster, Danzig’s chief of state, handed over the Free City to Germany, an event followed by the Reichstag meeting and Chancellor Hitler’s speech.

FORMALITIES OBSERVED

Even as early as that there was no doubt about the French retort, but formalities must be satisfied in a democratic country, which is not ruled by any personal pronoun. So diplomatic activity continued all during the day and Parliament must have its say simultaneously with the preparations being made by the military command.

General Marie Gustave Gamelin, supreme commander of French defense forces, was indeed the first at work yesterday morning, calling on Premier Daladier at 8:45. That was only the first of many meetings during the day. At the Ministry of Marine the Minister, Cesar Campinchi, was in conference with Vice Admiral Jean Darlan, commander of the navy.

It will not be until today, when certain diplomatic situations will have been cleared up and the Chamber of Deputies given its approval that the irrevocable choice between peace and war will be taken.

Meanwhile there is much insistence on what is described as the duplicity of Herr Hitler’s presentation of his case. As on so many previous occasions both in internal and external relations, it is claimed he misrepresented facts and disregarded what did not suit his plans.

POINTS NEVER DELIVERED

In Thursday’s broadcast of his sixteen points, which it is asserted he proposed for a settlement with Poland, it was stated that no answer had been received. Here it is said that unless they were contained in a document which Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop read hurriedly to British Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson and of which he did not hand over a copy, they were never delivered.

Nevertheless on Wednesday evening the French Ambassador to Poland, Leon Noel, at the request of his government, asked Foreign Minister Josef Beck if he would make another effort at a direct settlement. M. Beck replied that he would and ordered his Ambassador in Berlin, Josef Lipski, to ask for an interview with Herr von Ribbentrop.

When M. Lipski did so he was asked whether he made this request as a plenipotentiary or as Ambassador, and at 7 o’clock Thursday evening he was received by Herr von Ribbentrop. It was only an hour and a half later that the German radio announced the German terms, which it declared had been rejected before they had been discussed and which were, in so far as the Polish Corridor was concerned, much more moderate than anything that had been proposed previously.

Herr Hitler’s evident if not avowed demand, it is said, was that M. Beck should come hat in hand even more humbly than Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg of Austria and Premier Milan Hodza of Czecho-Slovakia, and should be treated in an even more cavalier manner. Not having had his own way, Herr Hitler opened fire.

The intense diplomatic activity of the last few days here continued at increased pressure as Ambassadors and Ministers sought the latest information for their governments. The United States Ambassador, William C. Bullitt, was among the most active. He made several visits to the Foreign Office, on the second of which, at 1 o’clock, he transmitted President Roosevelt’s strongly worded appeal to Germany and Poland.

Today’s meeting of the Chamber of Deputies and Senate will be “for discussion of an important communication from the government.” It is the second time within living memory that a decision will have to be taken by the elected representatives of France whether or not to go to war with Germany.

Today there will be the same union as there was in 1914. All party meetings which have been held have expressed approval of every step the government has taken.

Hope that peace could be and the belief that it might be arranged have died hard in many hearts. There are still some that think it can, in a sense, be limited to one front only, but there is not a doubt in any one’s mind that in dealing with Hitlerian Germany there is now no alternative for France than to accept the challenge which has been thrown down in Poland.

SEPTEMBER 2, 1939

Nazi Efforts Centered on Preventing Spread of Conflict to the Rest of Europe

HITLER EXPECTED TO REJECT TERMS

Acceptance of Ultimatum of Britain and France Said to Be Out of the Question

‘LITTLE WAR’ IS NAZI AIM

Wireless to The New York Times.

BERLIN, Saturday, Sept. 2 —That Chancellor Hitler will accept the Anglo-French ultimatum is regarded here early this morning as out of the question.

In semi-official quarters it is regarded as out of the question because first, all efforts at peaceful solution have failed, even Prime Minister Chamberlain’s own mediation effort, and, second, it is not Herr Hitler’s way to leave “appeals” from Germans in Poland unheeded.

Thus Europe is plunged into a new if undeclared war which, for the moment, is still between Germany and Poland but which has already paralyzed the whole Continent, where more than 10,000,000 men are under arms, and which is rapidly expanding into a test of strength between resurgent Germany and the Western powers.

Arrows indicate the advances of the Reich’s forces in the north and south of Poland. The Germans hoped to crush Polish resistance before Western powers could interfere.

LOCAL WAR HELD AIM

At the moment, therefore, all German diplomatic efforts are now concentrated in localizing the conflict to keep it down to a “little war” and preventing its expansion into a big war. For that purpose, while emphasizing Herr Hitler’s determination as expressed in his Reichstag speech to “win or die” in his struggle to revise the Versailles settlement in the East, all diplomatic quarters also stress the thesis that Germany does not want anything from the Western powers, least of all war with them.

With that end in view neither mobilization nor war has been declared so far and diplomatic contacts have continued in London throughout the day. Even the “theoretical” possibilities of further negotiations are held open, especially since Josef Lipski, the Polish envoy, is still in town, though assurances that Herr Hitler’s sixteen points, announced Thursday, are still valid are declared to be impossible in view of the Polish rejection of them and military developments.

There is every indication that the possibility of localizing the conflict and keeping the western powers out is seriously entertained in German quarters, which hope to crush Poland’s military resistance before the western powers intervene with force. And the press published yesterday many appeals to western statesmen to understand the meaning of the historic hour and to make right decisions that will create a better and more just peace.

But these hopes dimmed to the vanishing point when late yesterday afternoon Mr. Chamberlain’s speech in the House of Commons became known with its virtual ultimatum to Germany to evacuate Poland or face the alternative of force being met with force in conformity with the doctrine proclaimed by Herr Hitler yesterday morning. Almost simultaneously with that speech Sir Nevile Henderson and Robert Coulondre, the British and French Ambassadors, called on Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop separately and delivered similar notes, which are believed to be in the same terms as Mr. Chamberlain’s speech.

PREPARED FOR EVENTUALITIES

Semi-official quarters and the press declared Germany was prepared for all eventualities and trusted in Herr Hitler and the Germany Army implicitly. But it goes without saying that the entry of the Western powers would completely change the nature of the present conflict and put a strain on Germany’s military and economic capacity, a test of which has yet to be made.

MANY RUSH TO SHELTER

The grim reality of the war was brought home to Germans shortly before 7 o’clock last night when sirens sent thousands scurrying to cover. In a few minutes the streets were completely deserted. There was no way for German residents or any one else to determine whether this was merely a trial or an attack. Natural anxiety was evident, but the regulations apparently were carried out to the letter. Less than half an hour later the lengthy wail of the siren announced that the danger had passed.

Berlin and other German cities will be blacked out indefinitely, by official order. Residents shout warnings to forgetful fellow-citizens who have neglected to cover their windows. A courteous German last night rang the bell of the American Church to inform the pastor that the interior rectory light was visible without suggesting that he cover the window or extinguish the light.

The Reich Civilian Air-Raid Defense Corps was fully mobilized for emergency service. The elevated trains used lights so dim that it was barely possible to discern the features of fellow-passengers. All street lights were extinguished. Fire apparatus, moreover, was stationed at key points.

CAFES DO BIG BUSINESS

Cafes did a rousing business all yesterday. The crowds were quiet and last night small groups were seen standing in the darkened streets eagerly conversing in hushed voices. Yesterday was the first “fish day” which, in the future, will be every Tuesday and Friday. Menus in even the larger hotels frequented by government, party and military leaders were reduced and the rationing system for most essentials is now in full force.

Vehicle owners fortunate enough to have received fuel for their cars were informed that the cars could be used only in life-or-death cases. Pleasure rides are forbidden. Taxis can be obtained only when necessity obviates other means of transportation.

Work clothes were removed from the restricted list and are now purchasable without ration cards.

SEPTEMBER 3, 1939

NEUTRALITY VOTED BY DAIL AT DUBLIN

De Valera Gives Partition as Reason but Hears Strong Opposition In Session

By HUGH SMITH
Special Cable to The New York Times.

DUBLIN, Sept. 2 —The Dail Eireann tonight approved Prime Minister Eamon de Valera’s policy of neutrality in the event of a European war and gave his government the sweeping wartime powers that have been asked.

In his speech to the Dail, Mr. de Valera hinted that it might be necessary to reshuffle his Cabinet and create a special Ministry to control supplies. Arrangements were also being made tonight to establish a press censorship forthwith. For a State that proposes to remain neutral the Administration is abrogating ordinary constitutional rights to a degree equal to that of a country engaged in actual warfare.

Despite Ireland’s remoteness from Central Europe, Dublin, Cork and other large centers here were blacked out tonight, while armed military guards were placed on railways and public buildings.

Even in the face of these official precautions and the calling up of army reserves, the people here refuse to believe that there is any immediate danger that Ireland will come within the war zone. In fact, ships from England today were again heavily laden with women and children coming to find sanctuary here.

FOOD SUPPLY A PARADOX

Just how far Ireland can maintain her neutrality and send food supplies to Britain is a question that is exercising many minds here. If hostilities with Germany develop on a large scale it is recognized that the export of farm produce from Ireland to Britain and the importation of supplies for Ireland industries from England could be carried on only under the protection of the British fleet. Mr. de Valera himself admitted in the Dail that the preservation of neutrality while having close trade relations with Britain would present many difficult and delicate problems.

OPPOSITION IS EXPRESSED

In the Senate tonight Mr. de Valera heard opposition to his neutrality policy. Senator Sir John Keane, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ireland, declared that the Conservative and property-owning classes were much dissatisfied with the attitude of neutrality. If Ireland, he said, came out openly with the other Dominions of the British Commonwealth on the side of the democracies that act would do much to unite the country and break down the barriers dividing it.

Eamon De Valera

Also opposing neutrality was Senator Frank MacDermott, who said:

“There is not a single country in the world whose spiritual and material interests are so immediately affected by this war as our own. If Britain, France and Poland are defeated everything the Irish race has stood for spiritually will go down and this country will be reduced to a state of rags and beggary that it has not known for centuries.”

PARTITION IS EMPHASIZED

In his speech Mr. de Valera stressed that the partition of Ireland was a stumbling block to any whole-hearted cooperation with Britain.

“I know,” he said, “that there are strong sympathies in this country with regard to the present issue, but I do not think that any one would suggest that the official policy of this State should be other than neutrality.”

So many American citizens have been left here awaiting ships home that United States Consul William Small at Cork has found it necessary to issue a public appeal asking for lodgings for them. This announcement suggests that Americans returning home from Europe may find Ireland a suitable place to await transport across the Atlantic.

SEPTEMBER 3, 1939

CAN THE UNITED STATES KEEP OUT OF THE WAR?

By HAROLD B. HINTON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 2 —The questioner who asked President Roosevelt at his press conference yesterday whether the United States can stay out of the European war was demanding of the Chief Executive the powers of a soothsayer. The President made the oracular response—which is the only one possible—that he hoped and believed the country could stay clear and that his Administration would do all that lay in its power to keep it clear.

There is no secret about which side in the conflict enjoys the sympathy of President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Hull, the entire Administration, nearly all of Congress and the overwhelming majority of the American public. The President’s job in the difficult days to come will resemble that of Woodrow Wilson in 1914, 1915 and 1916 in that he must, to carry out his promise of yesterday, try to curb the natural sentimental reactions of public opinion in order to follow a pragmatic course of conduct that will have as its goal only the enlightened self-interest of the United States.

QUESTION OF WAR GUILT

So far as public opinion can be gauged here, there is every indication that the American people do not want to be involved in the European war as it stands at this writing.

Professional feelers of pulses believe that this frame of public mind will continue for some time—perhaps for a year or more. Then, the accumulation of dislikes (likes are not very important in determining mass psychology in wartime, experts believe) will bring national reaction to a focal point.

The question of war guilt has already been argued, and it will be a subject for argument in the free forums of American public opinion for a long time. Chancellor Hitler, replying to President Roosevelt’s peace appeals, asserted that he had tried in every conceivable manner, including an acceptance of the British offer of mediation, to arrive at a peaceable solution, but that the Poles were too determined on armed arbitrament.

Prime Minister Chamberlain, in his speech to the House of Commons yesterday, was equally certain that the German Chancellor had done nothing of the kind and that on the Fuehrer’s shoulders rested the responsibility for the catastrophe that seemed about to engulf Europe.

FINGER POINTED AT HITLER

Even those who have disagreed with Mr. Roosevelt’s foreign policy concede that he has consistently pointed to Chancellor Hitler as the potential aggressor who might plunge the whole world into war. The President’s conviction on this score, which has been fully shared by Mr. Hull, has been expressed on repeated occasions in language that was not even veiled by the niceties of official usage.

In his struggles with Congress the President has tried to keep before the eyes of the legislators the spectacle he envisaged of a growth in aggression, whether military, political or economic, which would eventually involve the interests of the United States. That is to say, he foresaw a time, even if that should be years and years ahead, when the United States would have to decide, perhaps all alone, whether it could live in a world where brute force was the only determinant.

Believing that this country’s answer would be in the negative, when and if the issue were directly posed, the President has tried to lead the nation into taking part in the prevention of the very situation which has now arisen. He has had little success.

The United States Government has undoubtedly taken greater precautions than were dreamed of in 1914 to cushion the impact of European war on this country’s national life. Plans drawn in advance (largely as a result of the war scare preceding the Munich agreement of last September) have thus far worked efficiently to promote the evacuation of American citizens from danger zones, to keep the financial structure of the country, including the Stock Exchanges, functioning as nearly normally as possible, and to approach closely as that can be done to “business as usual.”

There has been complete absence of hysteria on the part of hard-worked and sleepless officials. Each one appeared to know in advance what he was supposed to do and has done it. The advent of the current European situation undoubtedly found the United States in a much better state of preparation than was the case twenty-five years ago.

Even under these favorable conditions, however, there has been an appreciable upset in the nation’s normal routine in the two days that hostilities have been actually under way. Stock and bond quotations fluctuated up and down. Investors and speculators were trying to divine what the value of these securities would be in a world pretty generally involved in war.

UPSET TO NATION

The mere fact of cutting off telephonic communication with most of the continent of Europe, for private users, had an unsettling social and economic effect. Distressed Americans were unable to talk with relatives traveling or living in Europe. Merchants and bankers were unable to conclude quick deals involving profits to be made only with dispatch.

Thus, if Congress should come into session immediately the isolationists would be in a confused situation. They would have to admit that the war makes some difference to the United States. On the other hand, they would be prodded by a measurable segment of public opinion at home urging them to keep out of “that mess” at all costs, the implication to them being that the best thing to do would be to do nothing.

FLUIDITY IN OUR POLICY

All of these divergent thoughts must course through President Roosevelt’s mind as he weighs the best path to follow in these early days of the conflict. In this time of lightning developments he has resolved, and has told his helpers to resolve, that fluidity of policy is of the essence. Every department and agency in Washington is on an hour-to-hour basis for an indeterminate period.

For the moment the war news naturally outweighs all else in importance here. For the moment the 1940 Presidential campaign has been forgotten, but that situation will not last long. The President will have to appease fears that he will exploit the situation in favor of a third-term candidacy, or for the purpose of perpetuating the Democratic party in power, as time goes on.

Just now it can be reported that national anxiety has produced at least a semblance of national unity behind the President’s declared policy of keeping the country out of war. That is not to say that there will be lacking, a little later, tedious and tendentious arguments about the best way to realize that aim.

SEPTEMBER 3, 1939

London Kills Zoo Snakes Lest Air Raid Free Them

Wireless to The New York Times.

LONDON, Sept. 2 —All poisonous snakes and insects and the deadly black widow spider at the London Zoo have been destroyed in case they should obtain their freedom during an air raid.

All the zoo’s valuable animals are being evacuated to the Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire. Ba-Bar, the baby elephant, made the journey there today. Two giant pandas, four of the eight chimpanzees who amuse children with their daily tea party, the rare zebras and the orangutans are already safely in their new home.

Thousands of Londoners are having pets destroyed at clinics, particularly dogs which would be terrified by gunfire.

SEPTEMBER 3, 1939

SOUTH AMERICANS SEE GAINS

They Hope Sale of Surpluses to Warring Nations Will Give Them Prosperity

By JOHN H. WHITE
Special Cable to The New York Times.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, Sept. 2 —South America’s reaction to the European conflict has been almost exclusively commercial. War means immediate wealth for virtually all South American countries by creating a heavy demand for their raw materials.

At present there are huge unsold stocks of almost all these raw materials in all South American countries. War in Europe, therefore, offers an easy, painless remedy for existing serious economic ills.

This would react favorably on more than one shaky government, as political troubles in South America are closely linked with economic troubles. When times are good and prices stationary, almost any kind of government can stay in power. When prices fall and banks begin closing on notes and mortgages, it is difficult for any government to remain in office except by force.

BUSINESS MEN WANT WAR

It is no exaggeration to say business men—Britons, Americans and other foreigners, as well as Argentinians—welcome war. They make no attempt to hide their eagerness.

It is also true than many economists in government positions welcome war in Europe as an opportunity to get themselves and their governments out of some of the monetary and other financial and economic messes into which they have got themselves. But they are not openly expressing their hopes, as are business men.

With very few exceptions the economic ills of virtually all South American countries have been aggravated rather than alleviated by the remedies applied. In most cases these remedies have consisted of South American versions of directed economy measures designed in the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere to cure industrial ills. They have not worked when applied to non-industrial new countries that depend almost exclusively on agriculture and mining.

To say that business men greet with glee a war to put an end to such a situation is to put it mildly—provided the war occurs in Europe, of course.

With the exception of the Chaco war between Bolivia and Paraguay and several serious civil wars in Brazil, the present generation in South American countries does not know what war means. Even those that followed the United States into the World War on the side of the Allies felt none of war’s suffering or hardships. They have no direct political interest in the present conflict in Europe and contemplate no trouble in maintaining a detached and profitable neutrality, unless the United States should be dragged in.

In that case several South American republics would undoubtedly join the same side as the United States, although probably not in an active role.

PREFER ITALIAN FASCISM

The ideology of Premier Mussolini and Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain has a much stronger appeal to South Americans than Chancellor Hitler’s. Unless Italy or Spain becomes seriously involved, South American countries probably will have little difficulty in maintaining a purely academic interest in the political issues at stake.

SEPTEMBER 4, 1939

Chamberlain Talk Announcing War

By The Associated Press.

LONDON, Sept. 3 —Following is the text of the address by Prime Minister Chamberlain this morning:

I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room from 10 Downing Street.

This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed to the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were preparing at once to withdraw their troops from Poland a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and in consequence this country is at war with Germany.

You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed.

Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more or anything different that I could have done that would have been more successful.

Up to the very last it would have been quite possible to arrange a peaceful and honorable settlement between Germany and Poland but Chancellor Hitler would not have it.

He had evidently made up his mind to attack Poland whatever happened, although he now says that he put forward reasonable proposals which were rejected by the Poles. That is not a true statement.

British Prime Minister Nevile Chamberlain.

The proposals were never shown to the Poles nor to us and although they were announced in the German broadcast on Thursday night Herr Hitler did not wait to hear comment on them but ordered his troops to cross the Polish frontier next morning.

His action shows convincingly that there is no chance of expecting that this man will ever give up his intention of using force to gain his will.

And he can only be stopped by force.

We and France are today, in fulfillment of our obligations, going to the aid of Poland, who is so bravely resisting this wicked and unprovoked attack on her people.

We have a clear conscience.

We have done all that any country could do to establish peace. But a situation in which no word given by Germany’s ruler could be trusted and no people or country could feel itself safe has become intolerable.

And now we have resolved to finish it. I know you will all play your part with calm courage. At such a moment as this the assurances of support we have received from the empire are a source of profound encouragement to us.

When I have finished speaking certain detailed announcements will be made on behalf of the government. These need your close attention.

The government have made plans under which it will be possible to carry on the work of the nation in the days of stress and strain which may be ahead of us.

These plans need your help. You may be taking your part in the fighting services or as a volunteer in one of the branches of civil defense. If so, you will report for duty in accordance with the instructions you receive.

You may be engaged in work essential to the prosecution of the war, for maintenance of the life of people in factories, in transport and public utility concerns and in the supply of the other necessaries of life.

If so, it is of vital importance that you should carry on with your job.

Now may God bless you all and may He defend the right. For it is evil things that we shall be fighting against, brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution. And against them I am certain that right will prevail.

SEPTEMBER 4, 1939

ITALY FAILS TO ACT AS HER ALLY FIGHTS

Rome Plans to Stay Neutral Unless Attacked—Fascist Moves Kept Secret

By HERBERT L. MATTHEWS
Special Cable to The New York Times.

ROME, Sept. 4 —Although Great Britain and France are at war with Germany, Italy has taken no step to join her Axis partner. She remains friendly to Germany but neutral, and she will make no move against the French and British unless attacked. This was made clear in Premier Mussolini’s newspaper, the Popolo d’Italia, this morning, which reaffirmed the declaration of neutrality contained in the Council of Ministers’ communiqué Friday.

Whether there is any possibility of Italy going beyond that attitude toward one side or the other cannot be stated yet, for the Italians continue to be completely secret. Since history always repeats itself, one may well suppose that the French and British are doing everything they can to win Italian benevolence, if not aid. That is the normal and natural thing for them to do whether they have hopes for success or not. After all, diplomatic relations between Rome and Paris and London continue on a friendly basis, and none need be surprised if André François-Poncet and Sir Percy Loraine, the French and British Ambassadors, who see Count Ciano, the Foreign Minister, so often these days, should be exerting their greatest efforts to win Italy away from Germany. It is their business to do so.

ATTITUDE IS NOT CHANGING

None can say yet what success, if any, they are having. So far as today is concerned there is that Popolo d’Italia article to go upon, which indicates clearly enough that Italy is not changing her attitude because Britain and France have entered the conflict. Although it was printed before those countries acted it was written at a time when there could be no doubt of what was going to happen.

The editorial begins by saying that the Council of Ministers’ communiqué should be “re-read and meditated.” Its words were “sculpted in stone,” says the editorial, meaning that it was meant to last.

From Premier Mussolini’s efforts for “peace with justice,” two things are to be deduced. It continues:

First, that notwithstanding certain foreign interpretations which are too hasty or ingenuous nothing is changed on the plane of Italo-German friendship.

Second, that Signor Mussolini has worked not only for the solution of the German-Polish problem but for all other problems which like this one now being solved by arms, have their origin in the Versailles Treaty.

“It is therefore natural,” the article goes on, “that whatever happens, whether the German-Polish conflict remains localized or spreads to a catastrophe, the Duce’s work—that is to say the work that will give a just peace to the Italian people and Europe—continues.”

There are two things about that editorial that should not be missed. One is insistence on the revising of the Versailles Treaty. The idea first cropped out August 30 in another Popolo d’Italia editorial, thought to have been written by Signor Mussolini himself. It was repeated in the Ministerial Council’s communiqué and all Italian comment yesterday, while today it is again emphasized. One should, therefore, feel entitled to believe that so far as Italy is concerned revision of the Versailles Treaty (by which Italians really mean the granting of what was promised to them in the Treaty of London) would satisfy her demands for “justice with peace.” If she could get that “justice with peace” without fighting or by going with one or the other side, one must also suppose she would act accordingly.

Benito Mussolini with Adolf Hitler, ca. 1939.

Premier Edouard Daladier of France in his speech before the Chamber of Deputies Saturday made clear the overtures to Italy. After paying homage to the “noble efforts” of the Italian Government on behalf of peace he said “if the attempt at conciliation were renewed we are ready to associate ourselves with it.”

Italy’s claims are chiefly against France and if the French were now willing to rectify them there is little doubt that M. Francois-Poncet has been telling Count Ciano that in the last few days. However, both French and British embassies deny that there was any contact with the Foreign Minister today.

The other thing to note in the Popolo d’Italia’s editorial is its insistence that Signor Mussolini is continuing his peace work. Signor Mussolini’s first openly mentioned peace work was the cessation of hostilities and the five-power conference, to which Viscount Halifax, British Foreign Secretary, referred Saturday. It was turned down regretfully and no mention that it was an Italian peace move has appeared in this country’s press.

However, it is important to note that this was not an Axis move, it was an Italian move. Italy did not intervene to give Germany what she wanted; Italy intervened for peace. In so doing Italy took a stand at variance with Germany’s.

Further than that one cannot go, and, indeed, the official attitude is that “nothing is changed on the plane of Italo-German friendship.” The press continues its violent support of Germany, although at the same time it prints Polish official communiqués in full. The Polish diplomatic staff incidentally remains here and continues, apparently, on friendly relations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

There has been one war measure announced here today—starting today dance halls will be closed.

SEPTEMBER 4, 1939

CANADA DECLARES AUTOMATIC ENTRY

Prime Minister King on Radio Asserts Necessity of Step—Arrest of Nazis Begun

By JOHN MacCORMAC
Special to The New York Times.

OTTAWA, Sept. 3 —On the principle that “when Britain is at war, Canada is at war,” first laid down by the great French-Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Wilfred Laurier, Canada automatically entered the struggle against Hitlerism at 6 o’clock this morning when the British ultimatum to Berlin expired.

Canada’s entry had been a foregone conclusion since French-Canada’s chief representative in the present government, Minister of Justice Ernest Lapointe, had told Parliament last March that neutrality would be impossible for the Dominion in practice if the mother country were engaged.

It became certain on Friday when Prime Minister Mackenzie King cabled Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that his government would recommend effective wartime cooperation with Britain to the Dominion Parliament.

Today nothing still remained to be decided but the degree of Canadian participation. Events and the wishes of the British Government are likely to play so large a part in this that it is quite likely Mr. King’s recommendations to the special session of Parliament, called for Thursday, may not include the immediate dispatch of even a volunteer expeditionary force.

“Our first concern,” said Prime Minister King in a broadcast speech late in the afternoon, “is with the defense of Canada. To be helpful to others we must ourselves be strong, secure and united. Our effort will be voluntary.”

SUPPLY ORGANIZATION SPED

In the process of defending herself Canada will recruit new soldiers and train them. Later, if and when the British Government indicates the need for an expeditionary force and it becomes apparent that Canada is in no great danger of attack, there is no doubt that such a force will be sent.

Meanwhile, the Dominion will organize herself as a source of supply of food and war essentials.

At 9 A.M. the Canadian Cabinet met to put Canada for the second time in twenty-five years on a war footing. A 6-year-old girl leading a spotted dog was the only lay spectator. But as the hours passed crowds and camera men gathered.

ARMY CHIEF ARRIVES

They saw Major Gen. T. V. Anderson, Chief of the General Staff, in civilian clothes but with an empty coat sleeve to proclaim his trade, dash up in a motor car to join the Cabinet conclave.

Not until he had listened to King George’s speech to the Empire did Prime Minister King emerge. He returned in the afternoon to make his broadcast appeal to Canadians for a united war effort.

Already the streets of this capital were echoing with bugle calls, but they were a call to the colors by a local militia unit. From all over Canada come reports of active recruiting. The young men are joining up with as much readiness as in 1914.

The end of Hitlerism was the only issue in this war, Prime Minister King told the Canadian people.

ACTIVE NAZIS ARRESTED

The Canadian Mounted Police, reinforced by 500 former members, have started arresting active Nazis in Canada. They will be sent to internment camps if their numbers require such action.

The government reiterated, however, that the war would not be allowed to make any differences to United States citizens who wish to come to Canada, either on business or as tourists. Commenting on a report that Colonial Airways had asked New Yorkers flying to Canada to bring their passports, F. C. Blair, director of immigration, said this was totally unnecessary.

An appointment which met wide approval was that of Walter Thompson, publicity chief of the Canadian National Railways and chief press officer on the royal pilot train during the recent royal visit, as chief press censor.

Press censorship, delayed while the government awaited Britain’s declaration of war, goes into effect tomorrow and the partial radio censorship will become more stringent and widespread.

SEPTEMBER 4, 1939

AUSTRALIA AT WAR, RESOLVED TO WIN

Many Volunteer For Service in Commonwealth Forces as Units Are Called

Wireless to The New York Times.

MELBOURNE, Australia, Sept. 3 —Prime Minister Robert G. Menzies announced tonight that Australia was at war with Germany.

The Prime Minister acted after he had broadcast a statement announcing that the Commonwealth would join Britain in war on the Reich. The proclamation declaring Australia in a state of war with Germany was signed by the Governor General, Lord Gowrie, at an urgent meeting of the Executive Council tonight.

Brigadier Geoffrey A. Street, Defense Minister, announced that the navy air force had been fully mobilized on a war basis and that a number of mili tia units had been called up for special duty, but that no immediate call would be made for recruits.

WAR PLANS ARE RUSHED

The Ministers, who had gone to Canberra for a meeting of Parliament Wednesday, immediately set in motion the last phases of the Commonwealth’s war plans.

Speaking over 125 national and commercial stations at 9:15 P.M., Mr. Menzies said:

“It is my melancholy duty to announce officially that in consequence of Germany’s persistence in her invasion of Poland, Britain has declared war, and as a result Australia also is at war.

“Britain and France with the cooperation of the dominions struggled to avoid this tragedy. They have patiently kept the door to negotiation open and have given no cause for aggression, but their efforts failed. We, therefore, as a great family of nations involved in the struggle must at all costs win, and we believe in our hearts that we will win.”

Mr. Menzies outlined the course of recent events in Europe and declared it would exhibit the history of some of the most remarkable instances of ruthlessness and indifference to common humanity that the darkest centuries of European history could scarcely parallel and demonstrate that Adolf Hitler had steadily pursued a policy deliberately designed to produce either war or the subjugation of one country after another by the threat of war.

“Bitter as we all feel at this wanton crime,” Mr. Menzies concluded, “this moment is not for rhetoric but for quiet thinking and that calm fortitude which rests on the unconquerable spirit of man created by God in His image. The truth is with us in the battle; truth must win. In the bitter months ahead, calmness, resoluteness, confidence and hard work will be required as never before.

“Our staying power, particularly that of the mother country, will be best assisted by keeping production going as fully as we can and maintaining our strength. Australia is ready to see it through. May God in His mercy and compassion grant that the world will soon be delivered from this agony.”

A steady stream of men is calling at military headquarters offering their services, but so far only militia personnel, coast defenses, anti-aircraft batteries and other units required to protect vulnerable areas have been called. Members of the citizen air force have been called and also certain members of the Royal Australian Air Force Reserve.

While German citizens will be liable to internment a large proportion of the refugees will be allowed liberty, subject to strict surveillance.

NEW ZEALAND COME IN

Wireless to The New York Times.

WELLINGTON, N. Z., Sept. 4 —Governor General Viscount Galway this morning proclaimed that New Zealand was at war with Germany and would give the fullest consideration to British suggestions as to the methods by which the common cause might best be aided.

DIVISION IN SOUTH AFRICA

Special Cable to The New York Times.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Sept. 4 —The Union Cabinet, scheduled to meet this morning, is reported to be split over the question of supporting Britain in the war with Germany.

There was a prolonged Cabinet meeting last night and it is understood that the members were divided seven to six in favor of cooperation with the British Commonwealth as opposed to neutrality.

SEPTEMBER 4, 1939

Editorial

WAR GUILT

The publication of the full exchange of messages between the British and German Governments from Aug. 22 and the terrible events of the last few days only serve to make it clearer than ever that the sole responsibility for the present catastrophe rests on the shoulders of one man—Adolf Hitler.

If this correspondence is published in Germany—and especially if, as seems more likely, the German end of the correspondence alone is published there—no doubt millions of Germans, with no outside sources of information, may continue to think that Hitler’s course was justified. They can do so only if their memories have forgotten the events of the last few years and wiped out the trail of broken pledges that Hitler left behind him in his series of diplomatic advances.

The correspondence reveals an ever patient and persistent Chamberlain, seizing upon every hope of pacific adjustment, and a Hitler finally determined to carry his threats to the point of actual war and stooping to new depths of brazen mendacity for the effect upon his own people. So reasonable and patient were the messages of Chamberlain and of the British Ambassador, that Hitler was driven to pretend that it was vital for Germany that the questions at issue should be settled, not merely in a matter of weeks, or even days, but of hours. To make this pretext look anything but ridiculous he coolly invented “killings” and “barbaric actions of maltreatment” (of the German population in Poland) “which cry to heaven.” It was precisely the technique adopted in alleging Czech persecutions a year before.

The only message from the German Government that is written in a tone of reason—though it still demanded return of Danzig and a German corridor through the Corridor—is the proposed “sixteen-point” settlement of the Polish question which the German Foreign Minister read to the British Ambassador at top speed at midnight on Aug. 30. It is now entirely obvious that this “offer” was never intended for serious two-sided discussion, but was merely framed as a propaganda document for the benefit of a German people already plunged into war. When the British Ambassador, hearing it for the first time, asked for the text, he was told that it was already too late, as a Polish plenipotentiary had not arrived in Berlin by that midnight as had been demanded by the German Government.

This demand had been handed to the British Ambassador only the evening before. The British, in their note two days previously (Aug. 28) had already informed the German Government that they had “received definite assurance from the Polish Government that they are prepared to enter into discussions.” The German Government could then have sent for the Polish Ambassador; but it demanded instead that within twenty-four hours after its note to the British (which made no mention of the later announced sixteen points) the Poles send an emissary “empowered not only to discuss but to conduct and conclude negotiations.” No doubt if the Poles had been willing or able to comply, this emissary would have been treated as Schuschnigg and others had been before him. This technique could not be used on a mere Ambassador, and Hitler apparently had little hope that he could work it again in any case, for he set a time schedule with which it was virtually impossible for the British or Poles to comply.

One internal evidence of the fraudulent character of the whole German negotiations is significant. In the sixteen-point proposal Hitler and von Ribbentrop declare their willingness to wait as long as twelve months—in fact, insist on at least that period—before the plebiscite to settle the fate of the Corridor. Yet in their messages to the British they declare that it is impossible to wait more than two days for the arrival of the Polish negotiator they had demanded!

Even after Hitler had launched his attack on Poland and bombarded open towns, the British and French held off from announcing a state of war for two days, advising the German Government that if it would agree to withdraw its forces Great Britain “would be willing to regard the position as being the same as it was before the German forces crossed the frontier” and would be open to discussion on the matters between the German and Polish Governments.

This time the record could hardly be clearer than it is.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1939

HULL ISSUES ORDER

NEUTRALITY EDICTS

Proclamations of Our Status and Arms Ban to Be

Issued Today

Special to The New York Times.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 —Following upon the heels of the sinking of the Athenia yesterday the United States took its first sweeping step to insure neutrality in the European war when Secretary Hull tonight issued an order drastically restricting travel by Americans to and from Europe.

Secretary Cordell Hull, signing the Neutrality Proclamation, 1939.

Under the order, issued unexpectedly this evening, “imperative necessity” must be proved by any prospective traveler to Europe before a passport can be obtained. On return to this country the passport will be taken up and locked in the State Department. In no case shall a passport be granted for more than a six-month visit.

Minute details of the reason for a journey to Europe must be supplied, as well as of the identity of the applicant. Documentary evidence must be furnished as to the imperativeness of the trip. False or misleading statements will be punished by a fine up to $2,000, imprisonment up to five years, or both.

DECISION MADE ON PROCLAMATIONS

Meanwhile President Roosevelt and his Cabinet decided that the United States Government would declare its neutrality in the war tomorrow in two proclamations, one setting forth the status of this nation as a neutral under international law and the other establishing an arms embargo against present belligerents as required by our neutrality statute.

The decision to this effect was reached at a specially called Cabinet meeting this afternoon, at which means for convoying American nationals safely home and for putting a ban on war-profiteering in this country were also discussed.

The order by Secretary Hull in regard to travel by Americans came after he had conferred with President Roosevelt. The restriction on Americans traveling to Europe was regarded here as a far-reaching move to prevent this country being drawn into the conflict through the presence of her citizens on foreign flag ships attacked by a belligerent.

That part of the departmental order requiring the return of passports to the State Department was taken as a definite step to prevent these valuable identification documents from finding their way into the hands of spies or other agents of foreign governments.

SEPTEMBER 7, 1939

HITLER ‘REPORTED’ AS MENTALLY ILL

Professor H. C. Steinmetz Says This Statement Was Made by a ‘Leading Physician’

By The Associated Press.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 6 —Before a group of social psychologists, Professor Harry C. Steinmetz of San Diego State College repeated today what he termed “a report or calumny” that Adolf Hitler was suffering from a severe mental disorder and was under the almost constant care of an physician.

Professor Steinmetz said that the statement was made to him by “a leading American research physician, recently returned from Germany.” He did not name the physician.

The report “or calumny” said that Hitler’s affliction was paranoid manic depression. It is a supposedly incurable mental disease which causes its victims to have alternate fits of depression and elation, complicated by delusions that they are being persecuted.

Professor Steinmetz, addressing a division of the American Psychological Association, made the remark in a technical discussion of what he termed increasing paranoid conditions.

He asserted that whole peoples or groups were being subjected to a sort of national paranoid infection—that is, in their collective thinking and acting, particularly under prolonged, unusual stress.

Erroneous beliefs, he said, became a center of paranoid infection, especially under social disorganization and tension. Such stresses, he added, might cause people to take refuge in delusions, in “rationalizations” or excuse making, or in “defense mechanisms,” described as mental tendencies designed to thwart expected trouble.

Such centers of infection, he added, could facilitate the spread of paranoid conditions among individuals, making their social organization progressively more dependent upon the very persons affected.

Features of paranoid conditions which he named included delusions of grandeur as well as of persecution; “retrospective falsification,” a chronic course through suspicion, retreat and defense to delusion, illusion and attack.

Discussing recent potential modifications of the definition of “paranoia,” Professor Steinmetz referred to the Oxford Group and “the bourgeois moral rearmament craze” as being “within the hypothetical classification of euphoric paranoidal delusion.”

SEPTEMBER 7, 1939

GERMAN INDUSTRIES PUT ON A WAR BASIS

Long Lists of Regulations Are Being Issued Daily

Wireless to The New York Times.

BERLIN, Sept. 6 —The mobilization of Germany’s industrial organization is proceeding at top speed. Long lists of specific regulations for different industries are published daily. They are designed to turn German business life into a unified mechanism for the most efficient carrying on of the war.

Workers who will be forced to change jobs, leaving unessential industries to augment labor in the essential ones, will no longer receive the same wages that they received in their original jobs as they have in the past. They must accept the wage scale of the new industry in which they are placed. The Reich Labor Organization will give weekly allowances up to 19 marks for those whose new jobs necessitate their living away from home.

Those who have incurred special obligations, which the wage scale of their new jobs makes them unable to meet, will receive financial assistance in order to meet these obligations.

The new impost of 50 per cent of one’s income is meant to apply to all income whether derived from wages, salary or otherwise, according to the newly issued explanation of the original “war economy” decree issued Monday. This means that in addition to having to take a reduction in wages, workers must also pay a higher tax on earnings.

The new “Reich compulsory service law” issued today obligates manufacturers to operate their businesses as directed by the government in the best interests of the nation as decreed by the latter’s agencies.

Berliners already are being deprived of their little luxuries on a scale unknown hitherto even under the Nazi régime. Tobacco and cigars are more expensive and unobtainable in some districts where would-be purchasers found all tobacconists “closed for stock-taking.”

Berlin beer, never the stoutest of brews, is 20 per cent thinner.

SEPTEMBER 10, 1939

PLEDGE AT LONDON

Ministry’s Declaration Sets Plans for Britain To Fight to End

By FREDERICK T. BIRCHALL
Special Cable to The New York Times.

LONDON, Sept. 9 —This highly significant official statement of government policy, the most important made for Great Britain since Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that this country was at war, was issued tonight:

At their meeting this morning the War Cabinet decided to base their policy on the assumption that the war will last three years or more.

Instructions are being issued to all government departments to insure that plans for the future shall at once be prepared on this assumption.

In the meantime all measures for which preparation has already been made are being brought fully into active operation.

In furtherance of the expanded defense programs already operating, the Minister of Supply will forthwith take the necessary steps to insure that productive capacity for munitions of all kinds is increased on the scale required to meet every possible issue.

Corresponding arrangements are being made at the Admiralty and the Air Ministry.

In the great national interest, however, the civil needs of the country will be borne in mind as well as the importance of maintaining the export trade.

The War Cabinet are confident that this significant decision will meet with the whole-hearted support of the British people and will be welcomed by their allies and friends.

A REPLY OF DOUBLE FORCE

This is the British Government’s emphatic and unmistakable answer to suggestions thrown out in the day’s speech by Field Marshal Hermann Goering, published here, that in the light of German successes to date, Great Britain might be prepared to reconsider her position with regard to peace or war.

It is also a reply to certain wishful thinkers here who have been taking at face value the well-promulgated rumors of discontent inside the German lines, of food riots and strikes of women in the German cities, which inner official circles in London appraise at their actual worthlessness.

It is an answer, in fact, that once more carries mature men with good memories back to the somewhat analogous situation in 1914, when the wishful thinkers of that day were confidently asserting that the war would be finished in six months, until Earl Kitchener, rising in his place in the House of Lords, electrified the nation by soberly announcing that it would be, not a short, but a long war, carried on to the finish, “if not by us, then by those who come after us and take our place in the conflict.”

In official quarters the emphasis is being laid, not so much on the assumption in the Cabinet statements that the war will last three years or more, but on the pledge that Great Britain is determined to see it through. In this there is not the slightest doubt that the government expresses the firm resolve of the nation as a whole.

The answer to Field Marshal Goering is a quite secondary matter. His speech, which, apart from his appeal to Britain to reconsider her position, is regarded here as a curious mixture of braggadocio and reasonableness, has happened to come at a time when an unequivocal declaration of the British position was needed. Goering’s speech furnished an excuse for making it.

Obviously, as it seems here, Field Marshal Goering was making, none too skillfully, another attempt to divide Britain and France, a manoeuvre that has cropped out frequently in recent German propaganda.

His exaggerations of the undoubted success which has so far attended the overwhelming and wonderfully well equipped German attack on Poland and his deliberate minimizing of the powers of resistance still inherent in the still unbroken Polish Army is regarded as characteristic of the man and his party and not worth a serious effort at refutation. The real point of the Goering speech, it is felt, lies in its appeal to Prime Minister Chamberlain.

GERMAN HOPES CALLED MISTAKEN

Evidently the German leaders are still hoping against hope that the Franco-British resolution to fight Nazism to the bitter end is not irrevocable. They will soon learn how mistaken that hope is.

As to the war operations thus far, the preliminary moves on the Western Front can scarcely be intelligently analyzed here, because so little that is really authoritative is known about them.

For the moment the real center of activity is still Poland; and the situation there is not yet so desperate as the German propagandists—who yesterday were professing that Warsaw was already in their possession when it wasn’t—would have it.

The facts to date seem to be that the Germans invaded Poland with some fifty or sixty divisions. Of this huge and marvelously equipped force, some ten divisions were completely mechanized and therefore able to move extremely fast. The German success is regarded here as largely due to this factor.

Another factor largely in the Germans’ favor was their overwhelming superiority in the air, which enabled their planes to break up Polish counter-attacks before they had time to develop and to paralyze the valuable efforts developing in the back areas.

By using thirty of their divisions there, the Germans were able almost at the outset to seize the great Silesian area containing the richest supply of Poland’s raw materials.

Meanwhile their mechanized divisions from Pomerania drove eastward across the Corridor, while from East Prussia ten divisions advanced southwest. The big pincers move was aimed to lop off the great manufacturing area west of Warsaw.

But it is not over yet. Warsaw has been holding out; and Poland is likely to keep the German armies busy for some time to come, while the French press the advantages they have already gained on the Western Front.

And meanwhile the German leaders—and the German public, if it is ever permitted to know the facts—have something to think about in the firm expression of Britain’s high resolve, just made.

SEPTEMBER 10, 1939

ALL OF LIFE IN BRITAIN TRANSFORMED BY WAR

A Theatreless London Goes Black at Night and the Country, Filled With Refugees, Experiences a Rebirth

By JAMES B. RESTON
Wireless to The New York Times.

LONDON, Sept. 9 —The world’s largest city folds up every night now just like London, Ohio. After a week of war there is not a single play or movie in town; there is not a chink of light in Piccadilly Circus; the big restaurants are deserted, and the boys didn’t even play football in London today.

The only establishment that seems to have gained by the government’s decision to keep theatres and sports events closed—the theory is that a single bomb might kill hundreds if they were packed together—is the “pub.” There is definitely a boom in the drink business and already some persons are worried.

“Drink in excess may be an ally of the enemy,” warns The Evening Standard darkly, and adds:

“The open door at the public house is partly due to the closed entrance at the cinema and the locked turnstiles at Chelsea and Highbury. The cinemas are still open in Warsaw and Paris. Madrid watched Charlie Chaplin when Franco was beating at the gates of the city.… We don’t want to fiddle while Europe burns. But we will fight none the worse for an occasional glimpse of Ginger Rogers.”

George Bernard Shaw has been firing his merry shafts at the government for this theatre decision, too. He not only wants the theatres opened but more theatres built and all actors exempted from military service. He calls the government’s decision “a masterstroke of unimaginative stupidity.” This pressure forced slight modifications yesterday, and from now on Ginger Rogers will be fighting on the Allied side—at least in a few safe areas on the outskirts of the city.

TO IMAGINE NEW YORK—

The best way to understand what has happened to London this week is to imagine what New York would be like under similar conditions.

If you can possibly imagine all the youngsters from the lower East Side and Hell’s Kitchen and Brooklyn and the Bronx suddenly thrown into every corner of every safe mansion in Westchester and upper New York State and New Jersey you will have a vague idea of what the evacuation was like.…

If you can imagine those white New York ambulances rolling up to Gotham Hospital on East Seventy-sixth Street and to Bronx Maternity and Women’s Hospital on the Concourse and to every other hospital in town, rolling up and carrying away every patient who could possibly be moved you will know something about this tragic exodus.…

If you can see the people in those walk-ups on the river streets shoveling sand and dirt into burlap sacks and piling them up at their miserable windows.… and see carpenters nailing boards over the windows of every store on every street in town you will know what has been going on in front of every door here all week.…

If you could watch Manhattan suddenly fill up with thousands of young boys in uniform, young lads of 20 running for trains in Grand Central Station and manning anti-aircraft guns and digging trenches in Central Park you would understand what London is doing right now.…

If you saw, like some fabulous picture on a popular science magazine cover, silver anti-aircraft balloons floating night and day above the skyscrapers.…

And if at 9:30 o’clock it got darker than you had ever seen Manhattan and every light on the Great White Way went out and every movie and every single show closed, and cars crept along dark streets in second gear with only vague blue lights showing on the ground, you would have a glimmer of an idea of what a London blackout is like.…

A STRAIN ON THE PEOPLE

For all these things are happening in London tonight and the people in the city are grim and strained.

From start to finish the business of buying and selling and living and dying and rearing children has changed in this first week of the war and the new routine has imposed a whole encyclopedia of new rules and duties on the average citizen.

Under penalty of a heavy fine he must not let a thread of light escape from his windows. He must not toot the horn of his car or ring bells or blow whistles or keep pigeons or take photographs in certain areas or hold certain foreign currency.

Even the ancient custom of going to bed is different. The average man not only goes to bed earlier, but he has several important chores to do before he goes. First he must turn off the gas at the main [a bomb may fracture the pipe and let the gas escape]. He must fill his bathtub with water for use against incendiary bombs. He must place buckets of water around the house and put his gas mask in the safest room where he can get it if there is a raid during the night.

On top of all that he usually lays aside a warm blanket and knows exactly where his shoes and trousers are. That’s in case he has to run for the bomb-proof shelter at the end of the yard in the night.

NOT A WAR OF HATE

But in spite of all these inconveniences, though his family is split up and his gasoline rationed (ten gallons per month for a small car, at 32 cents a gallon) and his life is in danger, this average Briton is not fighting a war of hate. There is none of the old college spirit about this war. The people did not rush down to the palace to cheer when Prime Minister Chamberlain announced that they were at war with Germany. And one scarcely hears a word against the German people. This spirit of justice has been encouraged by the Government and over the Government-controlled radio stations.

A Government spokesman in the House of Commons, asked this week whether the Germans were bombing the civilian population in Poland, said frankly that the evidence showed that they were restricting their attacks to military objectives. Harold Nicholson, independent member of Parliament and one of the most popular British radio speakers, went on BBC the other night and said, “let’s try to understand the German argument… let’s don’t be self-righteous.”

Similarly Alfred Duff-Cooper wrote this week pleading for kindness to German Jews who are now refugees in this country. “It has been alleged,” he wrote, “that they are not all genuine refugees but that some have been sent in as agents… it is to be hoped that little credence will be attached to this kind of rumor.”

What hatred there is—and there is a good deal of this kind—is personal hatred for Hitler and von Ribbentrop and Goebbels. The English, noted for their understatement, have paraded their gutter adjectives in Hitler’s name and cartoonists have drawn him in the guise of everything from a snake to a dragon.

SEEN AS “HITLER’S WAR”

One man expressed the feeling of the public pretty well yesterday when he wrote to The Times of London suggesting that everybody agree to call this “Hitler’s war.” So many people recently have been talking about the Fuehrer and condemning him that one restaurant off Fleet Street felt obliged to post a sign reading “Don’t mention Hitler during meals; it is bad for your digestion.”

The past few days have confirmed the Government’s fears that there are just as many rumor-mongers in the world in 1939 as there were in 1914 and officials and newspapers are taking every possible opportunity to ridicule them into silence. The first two commandments on how to behave during a war appear to be, first, don’t get spy fever, and, second, don’t believe or spread rumors. After the first flight of German bombers near the English coast stories circulated rapidly that the bombers had penetrated far inland and Chamberlain had to issue a denial in the House of Commons.

LIFE IN THE COUNTRY

Life in the countryside has changed incredibly. In fact for the first time since before the Industrial Revolution, the center of the islands’ social activity is back in the small town and country village. The village tavern naturally seems to attract adults who have fled from the cities and this is the only place where any kind of dramatic performances are being given. Several years ago an organization was formed in England to present poetry readings and simple plays in the nation’s pubs and it is not at all unusual to go into a country tavern now and find a lad standing on a box reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets to an appreciative audience.

For the children evacuated to the country, the war so far has been a windfall. They have had no classes and they have had a week of remarkably good weather; and while the quick young Cockneys from the East Side of London think the picturesque villages are “a bloomin’ wilderness” their school teachers report that most of them are beginning to settle down. The Ministry of Education hopes that classes can be resumed in some sections next week but it is bound to take months to find adequate accommodations for all classes and even then teachers plan to hold school in two shifts.

Nighttime view of Regent Street in London’s Piccadilly Circus, 1939.

As usual a new routine of life produces a few ingenious devices. The Mens Wear Council, for example, has produced already a special white jacket to be worn during blackouts and one manufacturer has marketed a small red light which hooks on your clothes. Working hours are also being changed to meet the new early-to-bed-early-to-rise habit, some shops opening as early as 7:30 A.M. and all closing early enough to enable people to get home before the blackout.

In other words Britain has set about the task of meeting with fine patience her new task and, while bombs have not started falling yet on English soil, the people seem to agree with a barricaded shopkeeper in Charing Cross Row who posted a sign reading “business as usual during alterations.”

SEPTEMBER 10, 1939

CAN CIVILIZATION SURVIVE A WORLD WAR?

By ALLAN NEVINS
Professor of History, Columbia University.

In an eloquent passage written at the beginning of the first World War Romain Rolland spoke of it as “a sacrilegious conflict which shows a maddened Europe ascending its funeral pyre, and, like Hercules, destroying itself with its own hands.” We are reminded of the figure as a new conflict begins. Each nation cries aloud that it is fighting for self-preservation; but for the continent as a whole the struggle seems rather self-destructive. Nor are the neutrals across the seas spared. Sir Edward Grey said on Aug. 3, 1914, that “if we are engaged in war we shall suffer but little more than if we stand aside.” This was an overstatement, yet what nation escaped the devastating effects and repercussions of the World War?

If this second Armageddon endures and spreads, the damage wrought may be equally titanic. The whole world, as if mined for destruction, is contemplating the possibility of an explosion which will involve its costliest possessions, material, intellectual and spiritual, and do incalculable damage not merely to every human being on the planet but to long generations yet unborn.

In recent years men, facing the possibility of such a cataclysm, have frequently said that a new world war would be “the end of civilization.” They have declared that, partly through the subsequent crises it would provoke, it would “destroy human culture.” The idea has just been emphatically repudiated by Dr. Eduard Benes, the former President of Czecho-Slovakia, who better than most men knows the meaning of the word destruction. But it has been put forward so frequently and with such emphatic pessimism that it is worth a brief examination. Conceive of another four years’ war, setting the whole world aflame, and piling new destruction on old ruins, adding vast new graveyards to those already dotting Europe. Would civilization or even great parts of it be extinguished?

Let it be said at once that the part of civilization represented by great monu ments of art and architecture can—and all too easily may—be destroyed. Europe is filled with these monuments and filled also with fleets of bombers. A single air raid might wipe out all Oxford University, and with it a source of beauty, graciousness and inspiration which it took seven centuries to build. One well-planted shell would reduce Sainte Chapelle to a memory over which artists would grieve a thousand years hence. Italy is one of the treasure-houses of the human race. It would take but a few weeks’ bombardment by fleets of racing planes to leave Florence a rubble heap, Rome a few square miles of smoking ashes, Venice some ruins sliding into the Adriatic; their towers, temples, palaces and museums forever vanished. New buildings could be erected, new galleries stocked with new works of art. But the human race would be permanently the poorer for what it had lost; life would be thinner and bleaker, and one important element of civilization would be irremediably weakened.

Let it be said also that if by the phrase “destruction of civilization” it is meant that one phase or cycle of civilization may be terminated, that also is possible. It is more than that; it can now be called inevitable. We are doubtless face to face with a new era in human culture. The first World War put an end to the century of comparative peace that had followed the Napoleonic conflicts, to the swift material and scientific advance of that hundred years, to the lurching but nevertheless seemingly irresistible advance toward democratic self-government throughout the world. It ushered in a period of moral lassitude, political chaos, economic storm, religious and racial persecution that would have seemed incredible to advance residents of the Western Hemisphere in 1900. After the French Revolution, the age of reason; after the World War, the age of unreason—and the new conflict cannot but add new and darker mazes to the Temple of Confusion.

These two terrible struggles, which future historians may well call the beginning and end of a thirty years’ war—for fighting has never really ceased since 1914—are undoubtedly compelling mankind to turn not a new page but a new chapter. They mean the end of one civilization and the emergence of another, which at least in its beginnings will be baser, harder and darker.

But fortunately the talk of destroying civilization does not need to be taken literally and completely. Civilization is now a many-rooted, widely ramifying growth, indestructible by anything short of a planetary disaster. If it survived the downfall of Athens, the barbarian conquest of Rome, the so-called Dark Ages, the endless religious and dynastic conflicts, it can survive even two world wars.

The real danger is not that civilization will be destroyed, but that it will be crippled for generations and perhaps centuries. If this new war lasts long, an iron age will be inaugurated when it closes.

Europe as a continent may no longer hold the easy primacy which has been hers in the past. And it may not be merely the New World which will gain ground. There is danger that the depletion of European manhood, if pushed much further, will permanently weaken the Caucasian stock in its competition with black and yellow races; that Asia and Africa by sheer default of the present leaders will take a new rank in world affairs. European strength cannot withstand the drain of successive periods of butchery without exhaustion, and some of the resulting changes may go further than peoples of European blood will like to contemplate.

The next great lines in the history of civilization are to be written in blood. When the battle has been fought and its successful outcome assured, then it will be time to think of a new world order for strengthening and protecting civilization; an order in which, it is to be hoped, the United States will play a more courageous part than it did after the war of 1914-18, a role befitting its strength, its culture and its concern for the destinies of the human race.

SEPTEMBER 10, 1939

Sales of Maps Soar Here

Rand McNally & Co., publishers, announced yesterday that more maps had been sold at its store at 7 West Fiftieth Street in the first twenty-four hours of the European war than during all the years since 1918. The announcement said fresh supplies of maps were being rushed daily by planes from factories working on a day-and-night schedule.

SEPTEMBER 12, 1939

POLES UNPREPARED FOR BLOW SO HARD

The following dispatch is by a member of the Berlin staff of The New York Times who was allowed to visit the German armies in the field in Poland and to send this account:

By OTTO D. TOLISCHUS
Wireless to The New York Times.

WITH THE GERMAN ARMIES IN POLAND, Sept. 11 —Having hurled against Poland their mighty military machine, the Germans are today crushing Poland like a soft-boiled egg.

After having broken through the shell of Polish border defenses, the Germans found inside, in comparison with their own forces, little more than a soft yolk, and they have penetrated that in many directions without really determined general resistance by the Polish Army.

That is the explanation of the apparent Polish military collapse in so short a time as it was gathered on a tour of the Polish battlefields made by this correspondent in the wake of the German Army and, sometimes, in the backwash of a day’s battle while scattered Polish troops and snipers were still taking potshots at motor vehicles on the theory that they must be German. But such is the firm confidence of the Germans that a cocked pistol in front of the army driver is held to be sufficient protection for the foreign correspondents in their charge.

STAND MADE AT BORDER

Even a casual glance at the battlefields, gnarled by trenches, barbed-wire entanglements, shell holes, blown-up roads and bridges and shelled and gutted towns, indicates that the Poles made determined resistance at the border. But even these border defenses seem weak, and beyond them there is nothing.

Polish prisoners of war captured in September, 1939.

It is a mystery to both Germans and neutral military experts on the tour with the writer that the Poles made no provisions for second or third lines and that in retreat they did not make any attempt to throw up earthworks or dig trenches such as helped the Germans stop the Allies after the Marne retreat in 1914.

In fact, the only tactics the Poles seemed to have pursued in the retreat were to fall back on towns from which, later, they were either easily driven out by artillery fire or just as easily flanked. But presumably neither their number nor their equipment, which, judging from the remnants thrown along the road of retreat, was pitifully light as compared with the Germans’, permitted them to do anything else in view of the enormous length of the border they had to defend.

Again God has been with the bigger battalions, for the beautiful, dry weather, while converting Polish roads into choking dust clouds on the passage of motor vehicles, has kept them from turning into mud as would be normal at this time of year; this has permitted the German motorized divisions to display the speed they have.

But the Germans have proceeded not only with might and speed, but with method, and this bids fair to be the first war to be decided not by infantry, “the queen of all arms,” but by fast motorized divisions and, especially, by the air force.

The first effort of the Germans was concentrated on defeating the hostile air fleet, which they did not so much by air battle but by consistent bombing of airfields and destruction of the enemy’s ground organization. Having accomplished this, they had obtained domination of the air, which in turn enabled them, first, to move their own vast transports ahead without danger from the air and, second, to bomb the Poles’ communications to smithereens, thereby reducing their mobility to a minimum.

NO BLACKOUT IN CONQUERED ZONE

Today the German rule of the air is so complete that, although individual Polish planes may still be seen flying at a high altitude, the German Army has actually abandoned the blackout in Poland. It is a strange sensation to come from a Germany thrown into Stygian darkness at night to a battlefront town like Lodz, as this correspondent did the night after the Germans announced its occupation, and find it illuminated although the enemy is only a few miles from the city.

With control of the air, the Germans moved forward not infantry but their tanks, armored cars and motorized artillery, which smashed any Polish resistance in the back. This is easy to understand when one has seen the methods of open warfare attempted by the Poles and an almost amateurish attempt at digging earthworks for machine-gun nests.

To German and neutral experts the Poles seem to have clung to eighteenth century war methods, which, in view of modern firing volume and weight, are not only odd but also futile. This does not mean that the Poles have not put up a brave fight. They have, and the Germans themselves freely admit it.

As a purely military matter, the German Army is the height of efficiency. It moves like clockwork, without hurry and apparently almost in a leisurely manner. Yet that army moves with inexorable exactitude. The roads into Poland are jammed but not choked with heavy vans and motor trucks carrying food and munitions, while the Poles have to depend mainly on their smashed railroads or on horse carts. Bombed bridges are soon passable for the Germans and they move forward quickly. Communication lines follow them almost automatically.

Poland may not be lost yet and may be even able to offer further resistance by withdrawing into the eastern swamp. But as long as the present disparity between the military resources and her will to fight exists she faces terrible odds.

SEPTEMBER 13, 1939

W. & J. Starts Courses on ‘Second World War’

By The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON, Pa., Sept. 12 —President Ralph C. Hutchison announced today that Washington and Jefferson College had started studies of the “second world war” designed to help prevent the “mass hysteria” which he said had characterized the conflict of 1914-18.

Dr. Hutchison expressed the belief that Washington and Jefferson having an enrollment of about 500, was the first college to offer such studies “to help this generation understand better than did their fathers when they entered the first World War.”

Three faculty members will teach four war courses bearing full college credit and ranging from the cause of the hostilities to the accompanying propaganda.

SEPTEMBER 16, 1939

LINDBERGH URGES WE SHUN THE WAR

He Tells Nation That if We Fight for Democracy Abroad We May Lose It Here

By FRANK L. KLUCKHOHN
Special to The New York Times.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 —An appeal to the American people to maintain this country’s isolation from the European war, and from European struggles, was made tonight in a radio speech by Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh. “If we enter fighting for democracy abroad, we may end by losing it at home,” he said.

It was the first formal speech made by the flier since Aug. 28, 1931, when he addressed Japanese dignitaries in Tokyo, and the National Broadcasting Company, the Columbia Broadcasting System and the Mutual Broadcasting System all carried his words.

Colonel Lindbergh followed in the steps of his father, the late Charles A. Lindbergh, Representative from Minnesota and one of the few to vote against the entry of the United States into the World War in 1917, when he said:

“I am speaking tonight to those people in the United States who feel that the destiny of this country does not call for our involvement in European wars.”

SAYS OCEANS GIVE PROTECTION

Colonel Lindbergh declared that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were still barriers for the United States, even against modern aircraft, and added that “we must band together to prevent the loss of more American lives in these internal struggles of Europe.”

“If we take part successfully,” he asserted in speaking of the European war, “we must throw the entire resources of our entire nation into the conflict. Munitions alone will not be enough. We cannot count upon victory merely by shipping abroad several thousand airplanes and cannon.

“We are likely to lose a million men, possibly several million—the best of American youth. We will be staggering under the burden of recovery during the rest of our lives. And our children will be fortunate if they see the end in their lives even if, by some unlikely chance, we do not pass on another Polish Corridor to them.”

The flier held that if war brought new dark ages to Europe, the best service this country could render humanity would be to act as the bulwark for the type of civilization Europe has known. He held that by staying out of war itself this country might even be able to bring peace to Europe more quickly.

DECLARES TROOP AID “MADNESS”

Our safety does not lie in fighting European wars, Colonel Lindbergh declared, but rather in the internal strength of the American people and their institutions. In this connection he asserted that “as long as we maintain an army, a navy and an air force worthy of the name, as long as America does not decay within, we need fear no invasion of this country.”

There is no halfway policy possible for this country, he said. He held that if this country enters the quarrels of Europe during war, it must stay in them in peace as well. He characterized as madness “the sending of American soldiers to be killed as they were in the last war,” if we turn the course of peace over to the “greed, the fear and the intrigue” of European nations.

This country was colonized by men and women who preferred the wilder ness and the Indians to the problems of Europe, he stated, adding that “the colonization of this country grew from European troubles and our freedom sprang from European war.”

George Washington clearly saw the danger ahead and warned the American people against becoming entangled in European alliances, the colonel said, noting that this policy was followed for over one hundred years. Then in 1917 we entered “a European war.”

“The Great War ended before our full force reached the field,” he said. “We measured our dead in thousands. Europe measured hers in millions. A generation has passed since the armistice of 1918, but even in America we are still paying for our part in victory—and we will continue to pay for another generation.”

Colonel Lindbergh warned against propaganda “foreign and domestic,” as well as “obvious” and “insidious” with which he said this country would be deluged.

Much of our news is already colored, the colonel asserted. Americans, he said, should not only inquire about the personality, interests and nationality of every writer and speaker, but should ask who owns and who influences the newspaper, the news picture and the radio.

He made no reference to the arms embargo in the Neutrality Act.

Colonel Lindbergh made his address into the microphones in a hotel room.

Charles Lindbergh argued for American isolation in September, 1939.

SEPTEMBER 16, 1939

DIPLOMATS CROSS THE

POLISH BORDER

Envoys Say Refugee Conditions Are Desperate, With the Danger Of Famine

CERNAUTI, Rumania, Sept. 15 (AP) —Foreign diplomats fleeing war-torn Poland arrived here tonight with reports of a tremendous new German drive through Southeast Poland designed to cut off Poland from Rumania.

The new southern offensive was reported being built up with vast numbers of reserves pouring in from Germany, while the air attack was being accelerated.

Extensive fighting was reported in the region of Lwow, largest city in Southeastern Poland, which lies slightly more than 100 miles northeast of the Polish-Rumanian frontier.

The caravan of diplomats that arrived at this town just across the Polish border included the United States Ambassador to Poland, Anthony J. D. Biddle; Mrs. Biddle, their daughter, Peggy Thompson Schultz, and Mrs. Biddle’s secretary, Mary McKenzie. It was their fourth move since leaving bomb-wrecked Warsaw.

Polish refugees fleeing the approaching German army, September, 1939.

Others in the party of sixty that reached here at 6 P.M. included Mme. Josef Beck, wife of the Polish Foreign Minister, and their three children, and diplomatic representatives of Brazil, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Japan, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Cernauti, already over-crowded, offered few accommodations and most of the diplomatic refugees arranged to leave quickly for Bucharest. Mme. Beck is on her way to Paris.

The diplomats said they had left Zaleszcyki, an emergency Polish Government headquarters, because of threatened raids by German planes. They reported planes flew over the town yesterday and there were numerous alarms, but no bombs were dropped.

The diplomats reported that refugee conditions in the vicinity of Zaleszcyki, a village on the Polish-Rumanian border, were becoming desperate, with indications of a possible famine among those fleeing before the Nazi war machine.

Members of the diplomatic group said Germany apparently now was determined to cut off Poland from Rumania, regardless of the price to be paid for a swift advance. A touch of the rainy season already appeared to spur the new offensive and complete it before operations were bogged in mud.

CERNAUTI, Rumania, Sept. 15 —This city today became the headquarters for diplomats, newspapermen and Poles. All day long one diplomatic automobile after another crossed the border after an exciting journey through Polish territory.

All the automobiles were camouflaged and the flags of the respective countries were displayed. The machines were filled with everything from pillows to radios. When the automobile of Ambassador Anthony J. D. Biddle arrived with its American flag hundreds of curious gathered around. A small police detachment was necessary to keep order.

All hotels were filled completely. At the border Rumanian officials took strict measures, prohibiting completely the entry of refugees without visas.

Rumania tonight barred her frontiers to the bulk of the thousands of Polish refugees fleeing before invading German armies.

An official communiqué stated that “all private persons” from Poland, especially from Galicia, where the percentage of Jews is high, were barred from entrance into Rumania.

The communiqué dashed the hopes of most of some 10,000 Jewish refugees congesting the Polish side of the Rumanian border seeking entry.

SEPTEMBER 17, 1939

MERCHANT CONVOYS SET UP BY BRITAIN

By The Associated Press.

LONDON, Sept. 16 —The British Admiralty pressed into service tonight convoys for merchant shipping after it was disclosed authoritatively that enemy craft had sunk twenty-one British ships, involving a tonnage of 122,843, during the first two weeks of the war.

The use of convoys was not instituted by the British in the last war until 1917.

While slim cruisers and racing destroyers roved and struck on the shipping lanes, planes of the Royal Aircraft patrolled the skies around the United Kingdom in redoubled efforts to halt the persistent shipping losses to U-boats or mines.

Despite the casualties, naval quarters expressed optimism about the situation at sea.

UNDERSTATEMENT IN REPORTS

Increasing patrol activity and the Admiralty’s cautious announcement that “a number of U-boats have been destroyed,” was taken by naval authorities to tell a story of far greater successes than the guarded statement indicated.

Britain placed responsibility on Germany for the sinking last night of the 8,000-ton Belgian motorship Alex Van Opstal in the Channel off Weymouth, asserting she was sunk by mine or torpedo in violation of international law.

A British communiqué said there were no British mines in the neighborhood, that Germany had sent no notification of German mines there and that attack without warning was in violation of the submarine protocol to which Germany subscribed.

[The Alex Van Opstal left New York on Sept. 6 for Antwerp with eight passengers and 3,400 tons of grain.]

Eight passengers and a crew of forty-nine escaped from the Alex Van Opstal, which, according to her captain, broke in two after a terrific explosion near her No. 2 hatch.

The crew of another British tanker, the Inverliffey, landed in England today and members of her crew told how the captain of the submarine had hauled them to safety when the tanker exploded and went up in flames. Third officer Albert Lang said men in boats were trapped by flames from their burning ship after the explosion.

“Flames and smoke from the ship went up 500 or 600 feet,” he said. “We seemed almost under this wall of flames, and when we thought we were done for the commander of the submarine sailed his ship alongside and told us we could stand around the conning tower. No sooner had we got on the submarine than it got up speed and took us out of danger. The commander treated us decently and took us to our boats before he waved his hand and submerged.”

SEPTEMBER 17, 1939

GANDHI URGES BRITAIN TO ‘LIBERATE’ INDIA

Says Free Country Would Be an Ally To Defend Democracy

Wireless to The New York Times.

WARDHA, India, Sept. 16 —Mohandas K. Gandhi told Britain tonight that she could gain a willing ally in the war by making India a “free and independent nation.”

“The recognition of India,” he said, “as a free and independent nation seems to me to be a natural corollary of the British profession of democracy.”

Mr. Gandhi asked for a clear statement of Britain’s war aims in relation to democracy and imperialism, but urged the working committee of the Congress party that whatever support they should give to Britain should be given unconditionally.

He asked Britain for “honest action to implement the declarations of faith in democracy made on the eve of the war,” and said:

“The question is, will Great Britain have an unwilling India dragged into war or a willing ally cooperating with her in the prosecution of the defense of true democracy?”

SEPTEMBER 18, 1939

JAPAN NOW DRIVES FOR CHINA VICTORY

Kwantung Army Being Shifted to South—Peace Deal With Chiang Not Ruled Out

TOKYO, Sept. 18 (UP) —Informants close to the War Office said today that “it was natural to assume” that large numbers of Japanese troops were being removed from the Soviet frontiers of Manchukuo to China.

Following the Russo-Japanese agreement to cease fighting on the Manchukuoan-Soviet borders, increased military activity in China may be expected at once, it was said, in line with Premier Nobuyuki Abe’s announced decision to bring the long undeclared war with China to an early end.

So far the China war has been fought largely with second line reservists, many of them married men, but now, it was said, major units of the crack Kwantung army will be thrust into the China struggle in an effort to induce Chinese Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to surrender.

RETIREMENT NOT NECESSARY

Japan, it was said, will be willing to make peace with General Chiang and permit him to continue in power if he will come to an early “reasonable” agreement.

This government still is willing to make peace with China on the basis of the declaration made by Prince Fumimaro Konoye, then Premier, last December. The Konoye declaration, it was recalled, did not make General Chiang’s retirement a necessary preliminary to peace.

Japanese units late last week started moving forward south of Nanchang, in the Hankow-Canton railway area, and it was believed that a first phase of the new push would be to clear this railway and break Chinese positions in General Chiang’s Hengyang defense triangle.

The Japanese then would move into Yunnan Province and undertake to cut the Burma-Chungking highway, thus rendering untenable the whole Chinese defense system in the southwest.

It will be recalled that when General Chiang abandoned Hankow almost a year ago he set up two “final” defense areas—one in the southwest to be fed by the Burma-Chungking highway and railways and highways into French Indo-China, and another in the northwest around Lanchow, Kansu province, and munitioned by trucks operating on the motor truck highway from Sian, Shensi Province, through Lanchow, to Soviet Russia.

The informants believed that General Chiang “now realizes” that both these defense areas are hopeless since his supplies of munitions from abroad are being cut off.

Japanese troops in northern Hebei province, China during the Second Japan-China war, 1939.

FIGHT CONTINUES, SAYS CHIANG

CHUNG KING, China, Sept. 17 —Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek tonight made his first public pronouncement on foreign affairs since the outbreak of the European war in a speech before the People’s Political Council, now in session here. Despite the war in Europe, he stated, China must consistently carry out a fixed policy of armed resistance against Japanese aggression.

“The European war will make us fight Japan with greater vigor,” he said, “since we are confident of ultimate victory and of China’s rightful place in reshaping a new world order.”

General Chiang called Japan’s policy of non-intervention in any European war tantamount to saying that she does not want any interference by Europe or America in the Chinese-Japanese conflict, since she is attempting to establish her so-called “new order in East Asia,” which would place her in the predominant position in Asia to the exclusion of other powers.

Turning to the Chinese-Japanese war situation, General Chiang declared:

“I am now in a position to state that our present military strength, compared with that at the outbreak of the war, is more than doubled. * * * Japan has exhausted her manpower and is already defeated.”

SEPTEMBER 17, 1939

SOVIET TROOPS MARCHED INTO POLAND AT 11 P. M.; NAZIS DEMAND WARSAW GIVE UP OR BE SHELLED

FIERCE BATTLE IS RAGING ON WESTERN FRONT

By The United Press

BERLIN, Sept. 17 —A spokesman for the Propaganda Ministry announced that Russian troops had marched into Poland today at’4. A. M. Moscow time, [11 P.M. Saturday in New York].

The Soviet troops entered Poland with the full knowledge and approval of the German Government, he said.

The spokesman ‘made his statement after D. N. B., the official German news agency, had reported from Moscow that the Soviet Government had informed the Polish Ambassador, Dr. Waclaw Grzybowski, Saturday night that Soviet troops were about to cross the frontier.

The agency said that the note handed to the Ambassador informed the Poles that the troops would cross the frontier along its entire length from Polozk in the north to Kamenets-Podolski in the south “in order to protect our own interests and to protect the White Russian and Ukrainian minorities.”

The Soviet Government, the agency said, told the Poles that it maintained its neutrality despite its military action, but added that its treaties with the Polish State could be regarded canceled because the Polish State could no longer be regarded as existing.

TO OCCUPY TWO DISTRICTS

MOSCOW, Sept. 17 —Soviet Russia has decided to send her army across the Polish frontier today and to occupy the Polish Ukraine and White Russia.

The government was understood unofficially to have sent a note last night to the Polish Ambassador here saying that the Red Army would enter the Polish Ukraine and White Russia today from Polozk to Kamanets-Podolski.

Copies of this note were said also to have been sent simultaneously to all diplomatic representatives here saying the action was taken because Poland no longer exists. It was said to have declared there no longer is a Polish Government because its whereabouts are unknown.

The note was said to have declared that “the Soviet Union will retain neutrality, but feels it necessary to protect White Russian and Ukrainian minorities in Poland and will do everything to keep peace and order.”

[Poland not only has a non-aggression pact with Russia but in mutual assistance treaties by which the British and French are pledged to aid Poland in defense of her independence against any aggression. Polish invocation of this treaty brought Great Britain and France into war against Germany on Sept. 3, two days after a German army invaded Western Poland.]

COVERS ENTIRE FRONTIER

The scene of the Russian action would extend across the whole of Russia’s Polish frontier.

It would increase considerably Russia’s frontier with Rumania. Rumania holds Bessarabia, wrested from Russia after the World War, and the Soviet Government never has relinquished its claims on this territory.

Russia’s decision to act came after she had sent a vast number of men to her western frontier in semi-mobilization and had followed with her “peace” with Japan.

It was believed here that the Polish Embassy in Moscow would leave and that, possibly the British also would leave, since they are allies of Poland.

MAN POWER IS THREAT

If necessary, Soviet Russia could throw nearly 2,000,000 trained soldiers against the struggling Poles.

The official Communist party newspaper Pravda this spring estimated Russia’s peacetime army at 1,800,000. This estimate did not include the mi1lions of semi-trained reserves who could be called up by conscription.

In addition to this manpower, the newspaper credited Russia with 9,000 airplanes, 30,000 light machine guns, 23,000 heavy machine guns, 1,600 pieces of heavy artillery and between 6,000 and 10,000 tanks.

During the past week Russia called up part of her army reserves in a mobilization move, and foreign observers said most of the troops were sent to the western frontier, facing Poland.

SEPTEMBER 18, 1939

SOVIET ‘NEUTRALITY’ STRESSED IN MOVE

By G. E. R. GEDYE
Wireless to The New York Times

MOSCOW, Sept. 17 —The totally unprepared population of the Soviet Union learned through loudspeakers on the streets at 11 o’clock this morning that its governmentm during the night had committed it to the invasion of a neighbor’s territory. Warlike operations, which elsewhere are preceded by parliamentary debates and long newspaper: campaigns and even in Germany by a special session of the Reichstag, here were brought to the knowledge of an unprepared people hours after they had begun.

Little wonder that the Moscow population, recalling the reiterated declarations of leaders headed by Joseph Stalin that they did not desire a foot of anyone else’s territory, went about today asking: “What has happened now?” “Are we at war; with whom and why?”

‘’What do we want in Poland?” “What has gone wrong with the neutrality pact signed with the express purpose of keeping us from war?”

The Soviet radio declared that special propaganda meetings in every part of the Union today revealed general support “for the noble act of the government.” The only emotion revealed by the foreign observers with whom the writer spoke was one of utter bewilderment.

NEUTRALITY ASSURANCES GIVEN

As the Soviet forces marched into Poland representatives of Britain and France and of countries as far removed from European quarrels as the United States received notes assuring them that Russia would observe “neutrality” toward them.

The British and French Embassies are awaiting instructions from their governments as to the next steps. In British quarters there was at first a tendency to assume that unless the Poles called on Britain to fulfill the terms of the Anglo-Polish pact the case might be met for the moment by withdrawal of the British Ambassador to mark disapproval of-the Soviet attitude.

News that Polish troops were resisting the Soviet advance caused a rather graver view to be taken this evening. Diplomatic circles considered it possible that the British and the French might break off diplomatic relations and even declare war.

However, it is not believed that any precipitate step will be taken. Probably Russia will first be asked for an explanation of her action and assurances that no annexation is intended. Neutral diplomats question whether a declaration of war at this juncture would be of any advantage to the Western democracies; although it is obvious that the day will come when they will be obliged to insist that Russia restore the territory of their ally.

Meantime, it is felt, they are more likely to concentrate on their efforts on the Western front. Existing blockade regulations suffice to assure that Russia’ as a neutral will not import anything that might aid Germany in the prosecution of the war.

SEPTEMBER 18, 1939

Editorial

THE RUSSIAN BETRAYAL

It is altogether probable that the Russian invasion of Poland, just at the moment when that country has been laid waste and rendered all but helpless, reveals at least part of the secret understanding that lay behind the German-Russian non-aggression pact. This, no doubt, is the deal that Hitler and Stalin arranged. This was the price for which Stalin was ready to betray the French and British with whom he had ostensibly been negotiating for an anti-Nazi alliance. Germany having killed the prey, Soviet Russia will seize that part of the carcass that Germany cannot use. It will play the noble role of hyena to the German lion.

This gross betrayal of the professions that Soviet Russia has been making for years is being defended in the manner with which the world has now grown sickeningly familiar. Because Poland has “virtually ceased to exist,” Russia is free to break every treaty with it.

The Soviet Government deems it its “sacred duty” to “extend the hand of assistance” to its dear brother Ukrainians and brother white Russians. The Polish Government has denounced as having been “rotten” anyway, and of having “persecuted” its minorities in contrast one supposes, to the well-known kindliness with which Soviet Russia treats minority opinion. The technique is established: just before you pillage your neighbor and kill his wife and children, you must denounce him as a scoundrel.

What further agreements and developments lie behind the ominous non-aggression pact—whether, for example, a re-partition of Poland is to be followed by a partition of Rumania or a more extended drive on the Balkan states, either to annex them or to reduce them to vassalage—we shall doubtless learn soon enough. It is possible that Russia does not intend to participate in warfare if she can help it, but merely to sit on her re-acquired territories or new possessions and hold them. In any case the outlook is hopeless for Poland and dark for England and France. The latter are more threatened in Asia by Japan, and Germany is in a position to get valuable supplies in particular, some of the oil that her motorized warfare so desperately needs.

But this virtual alliance of Germany and Russia, at least for temporary ends, will certainly not work altogether against the democracies, As Germany and Russia draw closer together, as buffer states shrink or disappear, the mutual distrust between the two Governments must grow. It is not likely that Hitler has changed the opinion he expressed in “Mein Kampf” that “The present rulers of Russia do not at all think of entering an alliance sincerely or of keeping one.” He must still believe that the Russian leaders combine “a rare mixture of bestial horror with an inconceivable gift of lying,” and the Russian leaders doubtless reciprocate the compliment. In such conditions no real or durable alliance is probable. The two Governments can act together only in dividing helpless intervening nations “between them, while quarrels over the division are always possible.

The most immediate effect is the complete moral and “ideological” change which this working alliance must bring. It clears the air. It will sweep illusions from millions of minds. For at least the last fifteen years communism and fascism have lived on each other. Each has declared itself to be the other’s exact antithesis and only formidable enemy. Millions of Germans stomached Hitler in the belief that he was the only hope, as he himself repeatedly boasted, to save them from communism. He framed his anti-Comintern pacts and posed before the world as communism’s arch-foe. Though Stalin has always held western democracy in contempt, he created and kept alive for years the pretense of an alliance with it against fascism; his satellites, tools and dupes in other countries formed their “popular fronts” and their leagues against war and fascism. All these pretenses and lies have collapsed together. The most squirming apologists now will not be able to convince anyone but idiots of their sincerity. At last the issue stands clear. Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism. The world will now understand that the only real “ideological” issue is one between democracy, liberty and peace on the one hand and despotism, terror and war on the other.

SEPTEMBER 22, 1939

HEAVY GUARD KEPT AROUND ROOSEVELT

Women in Peace Group From Philadelphia Try Vainly to Storm The House Wing

By FELIX BELAIR Jr.
Special to The New York Times.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 —The most elaborate precautions taken to safeguard the life of the Chief Executive since World War days were employed here today when President Roosevelt went to the Capitol to address a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives on the subject of American neutrality.

Even before Mr. Roosevelt left the White House the streets through which he was to pass were being patrolled, and the Capitol Building and grounds had taken on the appearance of an armed camp. The corridors of the House wing of the building where the President was to speak were barricaded at strategic points and a Secret Service agent guarded every entrance to the chamber.

Rarely if ever before had there been assembled a more formidable guard of uniformed, Capitol and metropolitan police, Federal operatives and city detectives. Such was the apprehension of those whose first duty is to protect the life of the President that a number of selected private detectives were brought to Washington for the occasion from other cities.

ALL WINDOWS ARE WATCHED

Their numbers suddenly enlarged by news of the assassination of Premier Calinescu of Rumania, plainclothes secret service agents and city detectives idled about the corridors and doorways leading to the House chamber. Every Treasury agent available for duty was pressed into service.

As the President entered and left the west wing of the Capitol, every window overlooking his waiting limousine was being watched and Secret Service men walked back and forth along the balustrade bordering the esplanade which separates the building from the surrounding lawns. There was not a nook or cranny that was not under constant surveillance.

When the President goes to the Capitol he always is accompanied by a motorcade of escorting policemen. Their number was increased today and a Secret Service car flanked the President’s car on either side a little to the rear.

For the first time in the Capitol’s history, the Secret Service took over the duties of the House doormen. Admission to the chamber was by card only, and trained eyes scrutinized the few lucky ones who held them, in search of anything unusual about their appearance and clothing.

No one was allowed to enter or leave the chamber once the President had gone inside. The huge inner doors at all entrances, ordinarily closed only when the House goes home for the Summer, were shut tightly as Mr. Roosevelt began his address.

PRECAUTIONS IN THE PRESS GALLERY

Nor was the press gallery overlooked in the preparations for the Presidential visit. In the inner gallery overlooking the House floor, Secret Service agents were posted as a precaution against unauthorized intrusion, while other agents roamed about the adjoining room where correspondents write their dispatches.

President Roosevelt at the White House, 1939.

The unusual amount of advance planning for the day was apparent to reporters as they arrived early this morning at the White House executive offices. All gates were half closed so that they could be manned easily by one of the household guards. Those not readily recognized were asked to present their credentials. Sight-seers and other pedestrians were barred from the White House grounds.

Actually, wherever the President went from the time he left the White House until he re-entered it, he was surrounded with Secret Service agents. They were around his automobile when he appeared on the south lawn of the mansion to start out for the Capitol, and they were within quick reaching distance even after he had entered the House chamber.

Tension did not ease until the iron gates closed behind Mr. Roosevelt after the motor trip back from the Capitol that ended where it began—on the south lawn.

The task of policing the Capitol’s interior was made no easier by the appearance of several hundred Philadelphians, purporting to represent the Committee for Defense of Constitutional Rights, who picketed members of the Senate as they proceeded in a body from the Senate wing of the Capitol to the House chamber.

One group attempted to storm the entrance to the House wing, and several women became enraged at Capitol policemen who barred their way.

“And me with a flag in my hand,” one remarked.

“We’re mothers,” another shouted. “We don’t want our boys to go to war. I have six; she has seven.”

Eventually Representative Luther A. Patrick arrived on the scene.

“What did Congress do to you that wronged you?” he inquired.

“We don’t want it to do anything to wrong us,” one of the women exclaimed. “Are you a Communist?”

“No,” he assured her.

“Well,” said she, “you sure look like one.”

SEPTEMBER 26, 1939

Letters to The Times

VIEWS ON THE ARMS EMBARGO

MAJORITY OPINION EXPRESSED IN LETTERS TO THE TIMES FAVORS REPEAL

To the Editor of The New York Times:

It seems to me that the discussion of the embargo repeal issue, in your letter columns and elsewhere, has ignored a fact of basic importance to our policy—the overwhelming popular sentiment in favor of the Allies.

Both the Gallup poll and the Fortune survey reveal that our sentiment in favor of non-participation is based in the premise that the Allies can win without it. Both sources show a considerable bloc of opinion, potentially much larger, which favors our entering the war in the event that the Allies should begin to sink. It follows, I submit, that a neutrality policy designed to help the Allies win is the best conceivable policy to keep us out of war. For if the Allies begin to lose the pressure for our participation will become enormous, perhaps irresistible.

Since Germany has every interest in keeping us out of war, I cannot take seriously the conceptualist arguments of those who suggest that, in the context of war, repeal of our arms embargo would be an unfriendly act toward Germany, likely to involve us in the struggle. The phrase “act of war” has only the concreteness which history has given it. Lesser events than the repeal of an embargo have in the past been “acts of war,” and greater affronts have often been ignored.

If Germany in its sovereignty decided that repeal was an act of war against it, and followed by declaring war against us, then certainly the repeal would be such an act. If, on the contrary, Germany did nothing, then repeal would be repeal, and neither an act of war nor an unfriendly act likely to embroil us in Europe.

Eugene V. Rostow,

New Haven, Conn., Sept. 23, 1939.

FAVORING INTERNATIONAL LAW

To the Editor of The New York Times:

The majority of the American people want peace. They stand by President Roosevelt and support the views expressed by him in his speech before Congress.

It is to be noted, however, that this great majority is unorganized, whereas the minority, those who disagree with the President, or a substantial part of it, appears to be highly organized.

Under these circumstances it would be most unfortunate and regrettable if the President’s proposals should be defeated by the pressure of the organized opposition. Therefore, those who support him should immediately take effective measures to offset or overcome the pressure of that opposition.

I want peace as much as any American, and no one wants it more than our President; we all want to avoid involvement. We can best protect ourselves by repealing the embargo and having our neutrality governed by international law, as it should be. At the same time, by repealing the embargo, we would return to England and France, with whom we have common vital interests, the advantages which they have over Germany, to whose policies almost all of us are opposed.

Jules Schnapper.

Brooklyn, Sept. 23, 1939.

SEPTEMBER 29, 1939

Editorial

NEWS IN WARTIME

The need of caution in sifting truth from falsehood in reports of war moves is also indicated in assaying reports of peace moves. In recent days the British have flatly denied official German accounts of a Nazi air raid on the British fleet in the North Sea. A similar denial now has been given to a report from Rome stating that the Pope is working diplomatically through neutral countries to induce Britain and France to agree to a conference for peace based on the creation of a Polish buffer state. This unconfirmed story was current in Rome, our correspondent said, and had been repeated by an Italian correspondent in Berlin. Later the Vatican declared that no new efforts had been initiated by the Holy See, and that the report had originated in Germany.

These contradictions of fact are the daily by-product of a war being fought at the moment more fiercely with diplomatic bombshells and propaganda raids than with military weapons. They differ from the contradictory interpretations placed on the negotiations now in progress in Moscow. These are the product of deliberate mystification. Even when the secret conversations in the Kremlin are concluded, the full extent of agreement or disagreement between Stalin and Hitler will be revealed only by their subsequent moves on the Western Front no less than in the East.

Less and less, however, do conflicting reports or confusing intrigues becloud the judgment of the American public. Opinion in this country has become pretty expert in sifting evidence and appraising the credibility of the statements of governments that live by lying and chicanery. Seldom in our history has America shown itself so aware, so skeptical, so consciously responsible as during the present crises, and the chief reason for this sobriety and vigilance is that our information, though often contradictory, is more complete and reliable than that of any other people. We are in the unique position of hearing all the contradictions and therefore of basing conclusions on all the evidence available. It is not by accident that the United States is the object of every variety of appeal and propaganda. It is a recognition of and in a way a tribute to the fact that this is now the largest open forum of free report and uncensored opinion.

SEPTEMBER 29, 1939

TALLINN GIVES WAY

Capitulates to Demands as Russian Planes Fly Over The City

By G. E. R. GEDYE
Special Cable to The New York Times.

MOSCOW, Sept. 29 —Without its necessitating any immediate change in the uncertain map of Europe the Estonian Republic virtually ceased to exist in the early hours of today.

By the signature of two treaties, labeled “mutual assistance” and “trade agreement,” the little Baltic republic passed under the full domination of the Soviet Union and yielded to Russia naval bases and airdromes and the right to maintain military forces in Estonian territory.

She fully accepted the implications of Soviet assertions about the operations of mysterious, unidentified submarines in Estonian waters and handed to Moscow the keys to her security and national existence, which she had held since the collapse of Russian Czarism and the formation of the Soviet Union.

The “mutual assistance” pact is to come into force upon the exchange of ratifications at Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, within six days. The pact is concluded for ten years. Unless it is denounced by either party within a year from the date of expiration, it is to continue for another five years.

It was signed by Premier and Foreign Commissar Vyacheslaff M. Molotoff of Russia and Foreign Minister Karl Selter of Estonia.

TERMS OF THE AGREEMENT

Article I of the Soviet-Estonian pact says the two contracting parties will give each other every assistance, including military, if direct aggression occurs on the part of any great European power against their respective frontiers in the Baltic Sea or their land frontiers or across the territory of the Latvian Republic, as well as against the bases in Estonia, that are granted to the Soviet Union, which are indicated in Article III.

Article II says the U.S.S.R. is to give the Estonians assistance in armaments and other military equipment on favorable terms.

Article III says the Estonian Republic assures the U.S.S.R. of the right to maintain naval bases and several airdromes on the stipulated terms at a reasonable leasing price on the Estonian islands of Faarenaa, Hiccunha, Taleiska and Baleiski. The exact sites of the bases are to be allotted and their boundaries defined by mutual agreement.

For the protection of the bases and airdromes, the U.S.S.R. is to maintain at its own expense Soviet land and sea forces of a strictly limited strength in Estonia. The maximum numbers are to be determined by special agreement.

Article IV provides that the two parties agree not to participate in any coalition directed against either party. The fifth article says the pact does not affect the sovereign rights of the contracting parties or their economic or State organization.

OCTOBER 1, 1939

HITLER, POLES CRUSHED, WOULD HALT WAR NOW

He Will Offer ‘Peace’ To Britain and France, Hinting Russia Will Help Him if Answer Is ‘No’

By EDWIN L. JAMES

Now that Poland has been crushed and divided between Germany and Russia, Hitler thinks Britain and France should halt their war against Germany. It is his argument that if London and Paris declared war on Berlin in order to carry out their pledges to protect Poland, it is henceforth useless to fight about that because Poland is gone. It is understood that Italy will probably propose peace and Hitler has called the Reichstag to meet next week.

It looks like Hitler expects Britain and France to turn a deaf ear to his proposals and that he is preparing to tell the German people that the democratic allies are really fighting to destroy Germany and that the war he will lead will be to save the Third Reich from that destruction.

Of course, there is a certain amount of logic in all this as the Germans state it. But there are imponderable considerations which affect that logic. When they gave their guarantee to Poland, London and Paris had more in mind than a simple wish to preserve Polish independence. Poland, in a way, had become a symbol. In other words, London and Paris sought to end the aggression of Hitler, which seemed without limits, or rather which did not conform to the limits Hitler set upon it. From this point of view, the destruction of Poland constitutes a reason for continuing the war rather than for stopping it.

WHAT WOULD PEACE BRING?

It is naturally an important matter which Hitler plans to bring to the attention of Chamberlain and Daladier. The war has really not started on the Western Front and Germany proposes that it not start and that those concerned forget about it, demobilize their forces and go home. What the British and French leaders have got to consider is, “Where will that leave us?”

German Chancellor Adolf Hitler at a 1939 Nazi rally.

Hitler started out with a program of getting as many Germans as possible within the confines of the Third Reich, making a great deal of the point that he wanted only Germans. There was no little sympathy with this ambition in many quarters. But when he went to Prague and annexed millions of Czechs, he did much damage to that program; he caused people all over the world to think that it was only a cloak for imperialistic ambition.

Now the line drawn through Poland has brought under the German aegis millions on millions of Poles, who are not German by any stretch of the imagination. That puts a further dent in the program Hitler boasted.

THE GERMAN-RUSSIAN HOOK-UP

For years Hitler built up his position as the great knight defender of the world against communism. Now he is a partner with Stalin in the rape of Poland. That does further damage to his simple program of bringing Germans together in one happy family. It makes his Anti-Comintern Pact, for years the center of his foreign policy, look like a lost hope in a fog—a fog out of which no one knows what will come.

Furthermore, Berlin is now threatening that Russia will come to the active military help of Germany if Britain and France keep up the war and he has announced with enthusiasm the arrangements made by which Russia will become a base of supplies for Germany. Whether or not one believes that Germany will let a Russian army cross its soil to fight on the Western Front, there can be no doubt that Hitler is threatening, for what the threat is worth, to bring Russian military force to his aid.

Where does that prospect leave Britain and France if they agree now to take back the declaration of war on Germany? What future do they face? What would happen to the Continent of Europe if they agreed that Hitler could have his Polish spoils with impunity? On the other hand, it may be argued that they should ask the question as to where they would be if they fought Germany and lost.

If Britain and France call off the war now, it means that Germany would be free to go ahead with her plans of economic collaboration with Russia, becoming in the next two or three years immensely more powerful. It would mean that Hitler and Stalin would almost certainly continue their expansion in Central Europe and in the Baltic regions. In other words, it would mean that Britain and France would, in the comparatively near future, confront a much more serious peril unless Hitler changed all his spots, and that they do not believe will happen.

MUSSOLINI’S POSITION

As for Mussolini, he is on the anxious seat. When he suggests peace, if he does, it will be not only altruism which actuates him. It is doubtful indeed that in a prolonged war Italy would be able to remain neutral—especially as a friend and purveyor to Germany. It seems that a realization of this is percolating through the Peninsula. If some day, London and Paris told Rome it would have to take a more positive position, Mussolini would be in a very tough position. What he has to think about today is whether Italy will be given the six months she got the last time to decide which way she would go.

The coming week promises to bring some clarification to the situation. There will be the expected peace offer of Hitler, accompanied by the threats he will emit. There may be the intervention of Mussolini and then there would be the replies of London and Paris.

The best guess seems to be that a week from now the war will still be on. In fact, it seems something better than a ten to one bet.

OCTOBER 4, 1939

FRANCO OFFERS AID TO RESTORE PEACE

Says ‘This War Is Absurd’ and Sees Little Hope for a Quick, Decisive Victory

Wireless to The New York Times.

MADRID, Oct. 3 —Declaring that “this war is absurd” and “the hope of a quick, decisive victory does not exist,” Generalissimo Francisco Franco today appealed to the belligerents to make peace so that Germany could be a bulwark against the ideas of Soviet Russia.

General Franco’s statement, which was the first he has made since he enjoined the Spanish nation to observe the “strictest neutrality,” was made in the course of an interview with Manuel Aznar, chief of the Madrid Press Association.

“Spain,” said General Franco, “is disposed to do all within her power without limitation or reserve to conciliate the present belligerents. In this way we can best serve the historic destinies of our country and defend that Western civilization which for Spain is sacred.”

Discussing the unexpected alliance of Russia, the great enemy of Nationalist Spain during the recent civil war, with Germany, General Franco declared:

“The Russians’ incursion in Europe is a matter of the deepest gravity; nobody can hide that fact.

“In view of what has already happened, it is necessary to agree quickly on some step to avoid greater damage: the evil must be minimized so that from the East of Europe will not come newer, stronger dangers for the spirit of Europe.

“This will not be attained without peace in the West of Europe. Germany should be a sufficiently strong and solid barrier to oppose the orientation of Europe toward those political and social ends of a great and expanding Russia.”

OCTOBER 4, 1939

TROTSKY SAYS U. S. WILL JOIN CONFLICT

Asserts Only Washington Can Get Russia to Shift From Supporting Germany

By LEON TROTSKY
North American Newspaper Alliance, Inc.

MEXICO CITY, Oct. 3 —The policy of the Soviet Union, full of surprises even for interested observers, flows in reality from the Kremlin’s traditional estimation of international relations, which could be formulated approximately in the following manner:

Since a long time ago the economic importance not only of France, but of Britain, has ceased to correspond to the dimensions of their colonial possessions. A new war must overthrow those empires. Not by accident, they say in the Kremlin, the smart opportunist, Mohandas K. Gandhi, already has raised a demand for the independence of India.

This is only the beginning. To tie one’s fate to the fate of Britain and France, if the United States does not stand behind them, means to doom one’s self beforehand.

The “operations” on the Western Front during the first month of the war only strengthened Moscow in its estimation. France and Britain do not decide to violate the neutrality of Belgium and Switzerland—their violation is absolutely inevitable in case the real war develops—nor do they attack seriously the German Westwall. Apparently, they do not want to wage a war at all, not having in advance the guarantee that the United States will not acquiesce in their defeat.

Moscow thinks, consequently, that the actual confused and indecisive manner of acting of France and Great Britain is a kind of military strike “against the United States,” but not a war against Germany.

In these conditions, the August pact of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler was supplemented inevitably by the September agreement. The real meaning of the algebraic formulas of the new diplomatic instrument will be determined by the course of the war during the next week.

STALIN SEEKS TO AVOID WAR

It is very improbable that Moscow will not intervene on Herr Hitler’s side against the colonial empires. Mr. Stalin entered the extremely unpopular bloc with Herr Hitler only to save the Kremlin from the risks and disturbances of a war. After that, he found himself involved in a small war in order to justify his bloc with Herr Hitler. In the crevices of a great war, Moscow will try, also, to attain some further new conquests in the Baltic Sea and in the Balkans.

It is necessary, however, to view these provincial conquests in the perspective of the World War. If Mr. Stalin wants to retain the new provinces, then, sooner or later, he will be forced to stake the existence of his power. All his policy is directed toward the postponement of this moment.

But, if it is difficult to expect the direct military cooperation of Moscow with Berlin on the Western Front, it would be sheer light-mindedness to underestimate the economic support that the Soviet, with the help of German technology, particularly in the means of transportation, can render the German Army. The importance of the Anglo-French blockage will certainly not be annihilated, but considerably weakened.

The German-Soviet pact will have, under these conditions, two consequences. It will greatly extend the duration of the war and bring closer the moment of intervention of the United States. By itself, this intervention is absolutely inevitable.

It is a question of the struggle for world domination, and America will not be able to stand aside.

The intervention of the United States, which would be capable of changing the orientation not only of Moscow but also of Rome, is, however, a song of the future. The empiricists of the Kremlin stand with both feet on the basis of the present. They do not believe in the victory of Britain and France, and consequently they stick to Germany.

To make the Kremlin change its policy there remains only one way, but a sure one. It is necessary to give Herr Hitler such a decisive blow that Mr. Stalin will cease to fear him. In this sense, it is possible to say that the most important key to the Kremlin’s policy is now in Washington.

OCTOBER 7, 1939

DALADIER REJECTS HITLER PROPOSALS

Declares France Will Fight To Establish ‘Real Justice And Lasting Peace’

By P. J. PHILIP
Wireless to The New York Times.

PARIS, Oct. 6 —To Chancellor Hitler’s speech before the Reichstag Premier Edouard Daladier replied this afternoon: “We must go on with the war that has been imposed on us until victory, which will alone permit the establishment in Europe of a regime of real justice and lasting peace.”

The Premier was speaking to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, which had asked for a full account of the diplomatic position of the country. Every member of the committee was present and at the end of the meeting the Premier was subjected to extensive questioning. His thesis was, as it was a few days ago before the Chamber of Deputies Foreign Affairs Committee, that France and Britain were making war to end the reign of aggression and to end the necessity of mobilizing every six months.

He said they wanted a lasting peace that would depend on respect for the given word and on honor and would guarantee the security of France and of all nations. Such a peace, he stressed, would exclude all domination in Europe and could be founded only on the right of peoples to their life and their liberty.

Neither France nor Britain, he declared, would lay down their arms until such a peace had been effectively secured.

UNCERTAINTIES STILL REMAIN

But millions of men are standing to arms all over Europe. Whether they will fight and where they will fight has still been left uncertain, just as it is uncertain where and how the Rome-Berlin Axis, the anti-Comintern pact and the Third International are in accord and disaccord.

That puzzlement is not confined to France. Every country is suffering from it. Amid the confusion the French have this firm faith to hold to: that their men and their Maginot Line will resist any attack, whether the war be a waiting war or a lightning war.

French War Minister Edouard Daladier.

They know that they do not want for themselves or for any other peoples a Europe on the Hitler model and, whether they must stand still and wait for victory or fight for it, they are prepared. They are confident, too, that the British Government, people and army are equally determined to stand fast and keep cool while Herr Hitler alternates between promising peace on his own conditions and threatening to spread the war further.

OCTOBER 8, 1939

CHURCHILL AWAKENS BRITONS

Of All Leaders He Best Rouses
The Confidence Of the People and Their Fighting Spirit

By JAMES B. RESTON
Wireless to The New York Times.

LONDON, Oct. 7 —Great Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who agreed with the poet Milton that it is “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” has emerged from the first five weeks of war as the most inspiring figure in Great Britain and ultimate successor to the 71-year-old Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

War is Mr. Churchill’s natural element. Like a happy old tugboat captain with a battered sailor’s hat on his head and a dead cigar between his teeth he has looked and sounded like a war leader. And more than any other man he has spread a little confidence about the land.

In the newspapers and—what is probably more important—in pubs, the people are beginning to talk about him and smile approvingly at his chip-on-the-shoulder attitude. He is the Cabinet member who gives the impression that he is getting a big kick out of fighting Adolf Hitler. He has dropped the diplomatic double talk of the Front Bench and has spoken in simple, blunt language.

“THE PERFECT MAN”

When Mr. Churchill went to the United States to lecture in 1900, Mark Twain introduced him.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the American humorist, “The lecturer tonight is Mr. Winston Churchill. By his father he is an Englishman; by his mother, an American. Behold the perfect man!”

That American connection is important. Mr. Churchill has inherited a deep vein of American candor from his mother, and while this very quality has made him many enemies and helped keep him out of No. 10 Downing Street, it is working definitely to his advantage today.

He has been condemned as a Russophobe and a Teutophobe, as an irresponsible genius, but even his old critics seem to agree now that he will make a great wartime leader. They read in Germany’s tendency to vilify him a sign that Germans fear and respect him and many are beginning to believe that he and he alone has the drive and imagination to lead the British Empire through the greatest crisis in its history.

Winston Churchill making a recruiting speech at London’s mansion house for the territorial army in April, 1939.

OCTOBER 15, 1939

U-BOAT SINKS BRITISH BATTLESHIP; 396 OF 1,200 ON ROYAL OAK RESCUED; SOVIET-FINNISH ACCORD HELD NEAR

By RAYMOND DANIELL
Special Cable to The New York Times.

LONDON, Oct. 14 —A torpedo from a German submarine sent the battleship Royal Oak to the bottom of the sea today and struck grief into more than 800 British homes.

Of approximately 1,200 officers and men aboard, only 378 are known to have been saved and the Admiralty feared tonight that all the others are lost.

[Shortly before midnight the Admiralty gave out a list of eighteen names, bringing the list of survivors to 396 and indicating that 804 still were missing, The United Press reported.]

It was the second heavy blow Germany has struck at the navy of this island center of a far-flung empire since the war broke out on Sept. 3. Exactly a fortnight later the aircraft carrier Courageous was sunk by a submarine with a loss of 518 lives.

Such is Great Britain’s superiority over Germany at sea, however, that it was human beings of flesh and blood instead of ships of steel that were mourned the most in government circles.

SPEEDY SINKING FEARED

Inquiry at the Admiralty regarding the probable cause of so heavy a loss of life elicited the opinion that the ship must have gone down rapidly after being hit. While British Navy ships carry lifebelts for every man and 30 per cent extra for emergencies, it was said these usually are stowed below. Probably few of the crew had time to get them. Most of those saved, it was believed, got off on carley floats or rafts.

Only the hardiest swimmers could live long in the icy waters of the North Sea even if they were wearing lifebelts, it was said.

Rescue work was complicated by a northeasterly gale. It is not known whether there was additional trouble, experienced in the case of the Courageous, of oil inches thick that covered the sea and is believed to have caused many drownings when the aircraft carrier went down.

The first list of survivors released by the Admiralty contained only a handful of names. Later it was announced that 378 were saved, among them Captain W. G. Benn and Commander R. F. Nicholls, first and second in command.

The British warship Royal Oak was torpedoed in Scapa Flow, an English naval base in the Northeast of Scotland, October 11, 1939.

OCTOBER 13, 1939

Prime Minister Says Bar to Peace Is the Present German Government

By RAYMOND DANIELL
Wireless to The New York Times.

LONDON, Oct. 12 —The answer of Great Britain to Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s offer of a “white” peace was given by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain today in the House of Commons. It was an emphatic “No!” delivered with all the vehemence at the Prime Minister’s command and echoed by spokesmen for all parties.

Deeds, not words were necessary now, Mr. Chamberlain declared, to the accompaniment of cheers, if Herr Hitler hoped to convince the Allies that he wanted peace. Thus did the Birmingham business man who had tried to trade with the dictators return the onus for the final fateful decision of peace or war to the erstwhile Austrian house painter who is now German war lord.

Not by the slightest word or hint had Herr Hitler shown any intention or desire to right the wrongs done to Poland and Czecho-Slovakia, Mr. Chamberlain pointed out. Even if he had, his record of broken pledges was such that any further promise from him would require very substantial guarantees.

One thing and one thing alone, the Prime Minister declared, stood between the world and the peace so ardently desired by the people of all nations and that one thing was the present German Government.

Mr. Chamberlain spoke as an apostle of peace transformed by disillusionment into a man of action and of war. In some quarters it was felt that his blunt rejection of Herr Hitler’s peace terms would be a signal for the unleashing of all the horrors of war by the Nazis. But bombs did not rain at once on British ports, nor was there any immediate assault on the Western Front.

In the distinguished strangers’ gallery, as Mr. Chamberlain began speaking, sat August Zaleski, Foreign Minister of the new Polish Government established on French soil since the Nazi conquest. Before this afternoon’s session of Parliament he had been received by King George and had read the parts of the Prime Minister’s address dealing with the Allies’ attitude toward restoration of his native land.

The Ambassadors of Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, China, Egypt, France, Russia, Spain and Poland listened intently to every word from their gallery. Near by were the Ministers of Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Iran, Yugoslavia, Latvia, the Netherlands, Rumania, Liberia, Denmark, Nepal and Finland and the High Commissioners for South Africa, Australia, Canada and Eire.

From the outset there was no doubt in the House of Commons about the tenor of Mr. Chamberlain’s reply, which had been endorsed before its delivery by France and by the British Dominions. The Prime Minister’s demeanor was that which he reserved for occasions when he intends to be firm and uncompromising. His face was grim, and his voice was raised to an unusual degree for that British leader whose umbrella had become a symbol of the school of diplomacy known as appeasement of dictators. Instead of adopting his characteristic stance, leaning with one elbow on the Treasury table, he stood stiffly upright, away from the lectern on which his manuscript lay.

CHEERS GREET REFUSAL

At first the members listened eagerly like litigants waiting for some word in the judge’s opinion that would show whether he had found for or against them. Before long that word came in the declaration that Britain could not accept Herr Hitler’s terms without forfeiting her honor and abandoning her stand that international disputes should be settled by discussion and not by force.

Cheers greeted this firm refusal to surrender without fighting for the ideals for which Britain went to war. As the Prime Minister’s speech proceeded in even more unequivocal terms, the enthusiasm of the Commons grew until at the end it was cheering every other phrase and leaders of the Opposition groups were outdoing each other in endorsing the rejection of Herr Hitler’s terms, while expressing disappointment that this nation’s war aims had not been more clearly enunciated.

OCTOBER 16, 1939

ARMY AND NAVY ADD BILLIONS TO PLANS

HUGE NEW TONNAGE LIKELY

By HANSON W. BALDWIN
Special to The New York Times.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 —Both the army and the navy are due to share in large-scale expansion within the next few months of plans prepared for submission to the President and to Congress are approved.

Most of these plans, which are expected to call for an extraordinary expenditure of perhaps several billions over and above the ordinary national defense annual budget for the next fiscal year, which may approximate another $2,000,000,000, are now ready and could be submitted to the present special session of Congress after the debate on the Neutrality Act is finished.

It is more generally believed, however, that national defense legislation will await action by the next regular session of Congress opening in January.

Plans for further strengthening of the navy have been closely guarded and their details await announcement by the President or by Congress. There has been much talk about—and some public approval of—“two-ocean navy” to be attained by building enough ships to maintain in the Atlantic a fleet roughly as strong as the fleet in the Pacific, a program which would eventually cost billions of dollars.

“TWO-OCEAN” PROGRAM DOUBTED

Although the Navy Department’s official spokesman has pointed out that any program to be offered will simply be responsive to the wishes of the President and of Congress, it is believed that the navy will not suggest any such tremendous expansion as that implied by the term “two-ocean navy.”

Such a program would undoubtedly look not only toward further strengthening of our naval forces in the Atlantic, but to remedying certain deficiencies evident in our main forces in the Pacific.

The navy now has fifteen battleships in commission—twelve of them battle line ships, the others in the Atlantic—and eight building. It is probable that two more 45,000-ton battleships will be requested at the next session, bringing to ten the number under construction. Today, we have five carriers built and two building; others may be requested. Submarines and destroyers will also be asked, and, of course, cruisers.

If any material addition is made to the fleet or to our present building program, additional manpower will be required by the navy over and above that already authorized by the President since the outbreak of war in Europe.

PROBABLE PERSONNEL INCREASES

The present authorized strength, as recently set by the President when he invoked his “limited emergency” powers—a strength which the navy hopes to reach before the start of the next fiscal year—is 145,000 enlisted men and 25,000 marines. These totals will probably be increased if a further expansion program is undertaken, since the navy is already feeling a severe shortage of petty officers and men because of the commissioning of forty old destroyers for duty with the neutrality patrol.

The army’s plans, as published yesterday, contemplate an increase in the enlisted strength of the regular army to the full 280,000 authorized by the National Defense Act. The National Guard would be increased also to its full authorized quota as defined in the act, a force of approximately 420,000 enlisted men, bringing the strength of what is known as our “I. P. F.” or “Initial Protective Force” to about 705,000, plus perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 officers.

The enlisted strength of the regular army, which is now about 210,000, including the Philippine Scouts, is being raised to 227,000 under the terms of the President’s executive order issued soon after the start of the European war.

The further increase contemplated will mean, therefore, an addition of another 53,000 men to the regular forces, while the Guard would be almost doubled in strength. The Guard’s strength today is somewhat short of 200,000, but it is being increased to 235,000 under the President’s recent order.

OCTOBER 18, 1939

BRITISH PREPARING FOR A ‘BLITZKRIEG’

Motor Units Behind Lines Are Seen in Practice by Corps of Correspondents

By HAROLD DENNY
Wireless to The New York Times.

WITH THE BRITISH FORCES IN FRANCE, Oct. 16 [Delayed] —Though the war, which at any time may surge over the fields and villages about us, seems remote now, every element of the British Army, which is moving into position at a daily increasing pace, is on the alert as completely as if Chancellor Hitler’s legions already were on the next ridge.

Behind the front line, where the infantry, formidably armed and strongly fortified, is on guard night and day, other elements are rehearsing daily the manoeuvres that they are likely to be called on to execute in battle conditions among these very hills and valleys.

Vital among these elements is the mechanized cavalry—a new development of modern war technique, and it was your correspondent’s privilege today to participate in field exercises of this arm. These had many of the thrills of a real battle without, however, the annoyance of being shot at.

The unit that I visited was a squadron of this new horseless cavalry. It was composed of light but powerfully armored and armed tanks—which certainly will slow up if they do not themselves absolutely check any Hitlerian “Blitzkrieg” through here—and of “carriers.”

ARMED BATTLE WAGONS

These “carriers” are well-armored battle wagons carrying machine guns and rifles of various types suitable for firing on anything, including infantry, tanks and airplanes. The speed with which these carriers can get into serious action is amazing.

We saw a squadron race across an open field, come to a sudden halt, and then the personnel of all but one leaped out with their guns and mounted them for anti-aircraft work. The one carrier covered them with its machine guns. Meanwhile, the carriers whose crews were mounting guns on the ground raced for cover and in a few seconds were so well camouflaged we, who knew where they were, had difficulty in finding them even with field glasses.

Then came a sham battle in which the correspondents participated, though as backseat drivers.

The function of motorized cavalry is much the same as that of cavalry in the earlier eras—to act as a screen for other arms, to feel out the enemy and make the initial contact, to seize and to hold ground when required until infantry can come up and take over. Officers and men who are in this branch know that it is one of the riskiest in all warfare, but those we met today displayed the same easy confidence that we have seen all along the British front.

CORRESPONDENTS IN TANKS

When the positions were taken for an advance by the tanks against a simulated enemy, the correspondents clumsily climbed into these weird vehicles and found themselves in the midst of a forest of mechanical implements arranged in an incredibly small space. It fell to the lot of this correspondent to sit in the place of the tank commander with eyeslits just in front of him in a tiny subturret that he could swing with almost no effort so as to see everything going on in front and at sides and even behind, had he chosen to swing his turret in that direction.

Troops of the British Expeditionary Force after disembarking the troopship ‘Worthing’ at Cherbourg in France, 1939.

This little turret was like the conning-tower of a submarine. Everything was at hand to control the tank’s movement. Just in front of my face was a speaking tube to the driver, who sat straight out in front before an instrument board as intricate as that on an airplane.

My own spot was tight and well-padded with rubber at places that might strike me. Below, at my left in the main turret, was another correspondent—Webb Miller of The United Press—manning a high-powered automatic gun and also fixed so fast in his place that he was almost immune to any injury from the progress of the tank itself. He did emerge, however, with a bruised leg as the result of one of our jumps over natural obstacles.

REPORT MADE BY WIRELESS

I frankly confess that I had only the faintest idea what was our objective, and in fact there was none—merely to make contact with the enemy, report his position by wireless, with which every tank is equipped, and scoot back for cover.

The squadron commander had instructed me to give orders through the speaking tube and I did so with excellent results, I thought. I commanded “forward” when I thought that appropriate and ordered the driver to veer off the path of a tank with which I thought we might collide.

He did these things and I felt quite pleased until he began going quite contrary to my directions. After hurdling a ditch and coming to rest on the edge of a potato field, I learned that the entire operating personnel had had full instructions before we started and we emerged as merely slightly seasick passengers.

OCTOBER 19, 1939

SHORTAGE FEARED OF SCOTCH WHISKY

231,000 CASES ON OCEAN

Loss of Two Ships With This Cargo Would Badly Deplete Supply of Aged Stocks

Special Cable to The New York Times.

LONDON, Oct. 18—There are two ships on the Atlantic tonight with 231,000 cases of eight-year-old Scotch whisky on board. If the Germans get it there is going to be a shortage of aged Scotch before long.

Distillers here say there is enough young whisky here to last at least two and a half years of a war, but all the really aged whisky available now is “depression whisky.” In 1931, 1932 and 1933 the makers were hit hard and they did not lay down nearly the normal supply.

So, what with the war and depression, whiskies are likely to get younger and dearer all the time. The price is going up because British ships carrying them to New York are traveling in expensive convoys and insurance rates for both British and United States vessels have soared since the start of the war.

WAREHOUSE INSURANCE BARRED

Then, too, distillers over here are having plenty of trouble. They cannot get any insurance for their bonded warehouses, so that an air-raid like the few in Scotland the last couple of days might seriously diminish the supply. It is possible, for some unexplained reason, for distillers to get insurance on whisky not in warehouses, but that is not going to console the boys on Broadway if a stray bomb wipes out one of their favorite distilleries.

Before long nobody is likely to be permitted to grow barley or corn over here except for “human consumption.” While there is evidence that whisky is actually consumed by human beings, there are other restrictions that prevent crops from being used for spirits.

The supply of gin also is likely to be reduced, but the same problem of an aged supply does not arise, because it is an immature spirit anyway.

EMBARGO ON DRINKING SEEN

The only immediate hope of increasing the supply of Scotch for the United States is that an embargo be placed on drinking in this country, as was done in the last war. So far, however, consumption of whisky has gone up since the blackout restricted many other forms of amusement. But if it keeps going up and the agitation for some wartime form of prohibition increases, consumption here may be reduced and so release some of the supply to the United States.

OCTOBER 25, 1939

BELIEF RISING HERE U.S. WILL SHUN WAR

American Institute of Public Opinion Survey Shows 54% Hold to This View

The number of American voters who believe the United States will be drawn into the European war has decreased sharply since hostilities started, according to a survey made public yesterday by the American Institute of Public Opinion, of which Dr. George Gallup is director.

“Two weeks before the war broke out an institute survey found a large majority believing that the United States would be drawn into a war if it came,” the institute said. “Today opinion is more evenly divided, with a small majority saying they think the country will avoid armed participation in the present war.

“The question on which a cross-section of voters throughout the country were asked to express their views read as follows:

“‘Do you think the United States will go into the war in Europe, or do you think we will stay out of the war?’

“Those who expressed an opinion divided as follows:

Will go in 46%

Will stay out 54

“Approximately one voter in every eight (13 per cent) expressed no opinion.

“The fact that before the war a majority thought the United States would be in volved, whereas today there is a tendency to believe it can stay out, may have several explanations. First, two months ago most voters thought of the next war in terms of the last, or, in other words, a ‘war in earnest.’ The first six weeks of the present war, however, with its cautious and perfunctory fighting and the absence of bombardments on open cities in France and England during that period, have apparently caused a reduction in fear of immediate American involvement.

“Second, the voters themselves, and many experts, apparently underestimated two months ago the intensity of desire throughout the country to avoid getting into war. Since the outbreak of hostilities this intensity has manifested itself in many surveys by the institute, in letters to Congress and in other ways.

“Third, President Roosevelt has on repeated occasions since early September solemnly assured the country that the United States is not going to join the conflict. These pronouncements may have had a quieting effect.