NAZIS JAMMED TIGHTER IN SEINE TRAP
Flight of battered foe called ‘rout’
50,000 prisoners taken from Argentan salient; dead are uncounted; Dutch and Belgians advance in drive toward Le Havre
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NAZIS JAMMED TIGHTER IN SEINE TRAP
Pitkin: Paris city of rebellion
Most people never bowed to swaggering Nazi conquerors
By Dwight L. Pitkin
The Germans entered Paris on June 14, 1940, in a lightning conquest of France that stunned a world which thought the French Army and the Maginot Line invincible.
They goose-stepped up the broad Champs-Élysées and under the Arc de Triomphe built by Napoleon. Hitler came and gloated atop the Eiffel Tower.
The German occupation forces sought to win the French to their side, needling them with propaganda that the democracy of the Third Republic was decadent and that France had a place in the German new totalitarian order. A small minority which had always been Fascist-minded collaborated, but the mass of people in Paris and the rest of France silently and hopefully awaited the day of liberation. A vast underground army was organized throughout France.
The city was rebellious and hungry during four years of Nazi activity.
It was a city that had experienced four years of queueing up for food, cycling or walking to work, curfew hours, firing squads, black markets and the strutting of Nazi officers who monopolized the best hotels, the best shows and all the comforts that pre-war Paris had enjoyed.
Paris had suffered from Allied air raids against German targets within the area of the capital – such as the Renault Works and Le Bourget Airport. German radio broadcasts had perhaps exaggerated civilian casualties, which were estimated in the thousands. But Paris had suffered more than in World War I when the Germans besieged the city from a distance of 20 miles and fired shells from long-range guns that left scars still visible on some of the mellow gray buildings.
Virtual ghost city
Since the German occupation, Paris, whose pre-war population was 2,829,746, has been virtually a ghost city, its young men prisoners of war in Germany, children evacuated to the countryside, monuments standing like stage scenery at the end of a play ready to be packed and carted away. Lack of fuel shut down the metro system. There was no gasoline to operate the big green buses or taxicabs.
During the occupation, the Parisians pulled into a shell. Their relations with the Germans were usually correct and polite, but there was a frigidity the Germans could not mistake. At streetside cafés, the Parisians sat apart from the Germans.
The Germans carried on their customary antisemitic campaign, rounding up thousands of Jews who were sent away to concentration camps. A puppet press followed the Nazi line. When the Germans ordered all Jews to wear black and yellow stars as identification, Gallic humor had its answer. Non-Jewish Parisians blossomed out with black and yellow breast handkerchiefs.
Police raids became routine as the Germans sought to stifle the developing underground army. Youths were rounded up for forced labor in German war factories.
Executions frequent
Reprisal executions were frequent. Fifty Parisians were shot for the killing of one Nazi lieutenant. But stern Nazi measures did not prevent sabotage.
Paris made some semblance of keeping up theatrical activities and cultural life. Sacha Guitry produced new plays. The well-to-do tried to keep up an appearance of gaiety. But a good pre-war meal cost 20,000 francs (nominally $400).
Fashion designers attempted to keep their concerns going by creating new styles which found an outlet through Switzerland.
Most of Paris’ famous attractions are believed to have escaped damage during the occupation. Th Eiffel Tower, at one time reported scrapped to provide the Nazis needed metal, still stands. Other special attractions are the famous boulevards, the many bridges and squares, the formal parks, and Tuileries Garden, the Bois de Boulogne, the fine churches of which Notre-Dame is best known, notable buildings including the Louvre, the Hôtel des Invalides, the Pantheon, the Palais-Royal and the opera.
Most famous of the squares at the Place de la Concorde, where Marine Antoinette was executed, and the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile on a summit at the end of the Champs-Élysées. Under this arch, France’s Unknown Soldier of World War I is entombed.
During the occupation, the custodians of the shrine were fined 6,000 francs for exceeding the gas quota allotted for the flame burning over the tomb. But the Nazis never dared extinguish this flame.
Battle looms in Congress
Senate, House differ over disposal of surplus war goods
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FDR backs Lend-Lease
Wants aid continued until surrender of both Japs, Nazis
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Antitrust suit is filed against rail groups
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Goldwyn battles picture monopoly
Theater circuits seen unfair to producers
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Patterson confers with Gen. Eisenhower
SHAEF ACP, Normandy, France (AP) – (Aug. 22, delayed)
Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson and Lt. Gen. Brehon B. Somervell, commander of the U.S. Army service forces, conferred with Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower yesterday but the topic of their discussion was kept highly secret.
Among the cameramen accompanying the part was Sgt. Robert Hopkins, son of Harry Hopkins.
ON THE RECORD —
High comedy will mock Nazi rule on Paris
By Dorothy Thompson
Today it is difficult to recapture the feeling that gripped the world in June 1940 when Paris fell, and with Paris, France, men’s hearts and minds were paralyzed. Even in America, months before this war had become our own, there was anguish, and a terrible fear that as far as continental Europe was concerned, Western civilization had gone.
Militarily, there was no continental counterbalance. Russia stood aloof, neutral, mysterious. There were few who believed Britain could survive, or do more than hold out for a compromise peace. With the fall of Paris, America had become more isolated than in her entire history – a big island, covered only by a little island, rocking under siege.
In a political sense it was the great breakthrough of fascism, that seemed chosen by destiny to rule the world. In Paris, a quick-eyed camera caught a picture of Adolf Hitler in a capering mincing dance of joy.
So overwhelming was the German force, so swift and disastrous the defeat, that it seemed like an act of nature and at the outset was accepted with a kind of fatalism, as something preordained. In that moment the Germans appeared, even to their victims, as supermen. As they marched through the city, tall, clean, superbly clothed, with the shining rivers of their strange, gleaming, irresistible machines, they awakened a reluctant admiration. From Vichy, Pétain’s wavering voice deepened the French feeling of inferiority. Perhaps it was in the logical nature of things that the strong should win and rule.
Thus, a capricious woman, mastered against her will, may feel a certain dependency and security in the strength and desire of her master. There was something of that, for a brief moment, in France. Who knows? It might have lasted – if the master had not started to reeducate her. That is always the German mistake.
And ordinary men do not remain supermen for four years. A parade isa one thing; an occupation is another. Parisians began to see Germans with their boots off. A successful occupation army must understand the country and the people whom it rules. The Germans could not understand Paris. When they ceased to be conquering tourists, they were homesick strangers. Bit by bit they became not only oppressive, but ridiculous.
In the latitude of the spirit, it is farther from Berlin to Paris than from Berlin to Moscow or London.
The spirit of Paris is wiry and tough; the German spirit heavy and brittle. Parisians are conventional but not disciplined; tolerant but exclusive; skeptical but not credulous; witty, not humorous; lucid, and never sentimental.
Paris is the city of Pissarro, Seurat, Utrillo, who convey its beauty in light and vibrancy, a manner of seeing and painting that no German has ever mastered, in art or in life. Despite that it was mental but graceful. Nothing is overblown; everything is in moderation. Moderation is so un-German that the Germans make vices out of their very virtues, committing, as George Bernard Shaw remarked back in 1901, hideous crimes but always and only in the name of duty. The Parisians care little for “order.” But they have equilibrium. Nor is their laugh the belly-howl of farce, but the fine grin of comedy. in Paris, the satyr is a satirist.
Thus, years from now, when the sufferings of these four years are dimmed, I am sure it will be no French tragedian who will immortalize the four years of German occupation, but a new Moliere, making of it a high comedy – the kind of comedy that destroys, forever, with irony.
The crumbling of the German prestige began with the Parisians long before their armies began to disintegrate. Paris continued to belong to the Parisians. The Germans were everywhere and everywhere on the outside. They wanted to be liked. They strutted their stuff. They wooed the already conquered. When that happens, however, a man is lost. Rejected, the Germans resumed the masterly role and shot those who repulsed them. but nothing is more ridiculous than a superman, wavering between presenting bouquets and battering down the door.
I am sure that the Parisian feeling today is, “Thank God the British and Americans are coming to remove these idiotic bores.”
The Germans in Paris have suffered far more than a military defeat. They have suffered a psychological defeat, which in the long run will trouble and confuse them more. Not even defeat will do most to break the German spirit, but defeat coming atop years of unchallenged victory – and victory that proved pure illusion.
Pegler: Debate
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
A studious observation of the controversies of the last few years in our country bring it home to me that we no longer debate, if we ever did in my time, but confine ourselves to claim, or boast, and accusation. That is to say, in an ancient political phrase, we point with pride and view with alarm. But seldom, even in Congress, are issues actually debated.
A New Deal orator or journalist will say, for example, that President Roosevelt is a great friend of labor and cite the Wagner Act as proof of his militant love for the working man. He presumes that it will be conceded that the Wagner Act is all that he says it is. Other men and women, of contrary opinion, might like to argue that this law is dangerous to labor, meaning the people who work for wages, although a great boon to the professional organizer and union politician and to the New Deal party.
But the question is never debated, head-on. The New Dealer makes his claim in the course of a speech or article and rushes on to insist that therefore Mr. Roosevelt should have the workers’ votes.
The one who insists that the Wagner Act deliberately exposes workers to oppression, exploitation and intimidation by the union and that behind it all is a cunning scheme to hitch labor in chains to Mr. Roosevelt’s chariot, does so in another form, over another hookup or in another publication. The point is that they never meet in public, whether on platform or printed page, and argue the issues in detail, speaking strictly to the subject, as Huey Long used to say.
In that form or oratory which passes for debate, Huey was a master, himself. For that matter, he was a great debater in the true meaning of the word, as good lawyers agreed who heard his argument before the 1932 Democratic Convention. But in speaking to the whole public. Huey actually won over multitudes by showing contempt for their intelligence. Thus, in one oration over the air he got his best effect by smearing Hugh Johnson as a chocolate soldier who had never snapped a cap. This was unfair and irrelevant. It was unfair because everyone who knew Johnson knew he was not a dandy, or chocolate soldier but downright slovenly and that one of the great disappointments of his life in the Army had been his inability to get overseas with a command. But the whole reference had absolutely nothing to do with the subject under discussion.
In one of big Bill Thompson’s campaigns in Chicago, a rather austere opponent who had been sticking to the issues patiently and conscientiously in an effort to arouse the people to intelligent consideration, found all his earnest presentation offset by Thompson’s ribaldry. Thompson said his opponent had egg on his necktie, which may have been true, but still had no bearing on the subject. Finally, Thompson’s opponent let fly with a roar one night that Bill had the hide of a rhinoceros and the brain of a baboon. That wowed them, although it did not win for him. But it touched Thompson more than anything else that had been said of him in the campaign.
I have been told that a Southern Senator first won his seat by campaigning in an old Model-T flivver in misfit clothes and waving at the crowds a bill of fare from one of the expensive Washington hotels which listed such luxuries as caviar at $3 a portion and steak at $8 for four. He would explain that caviar was just nothing but fish eggs and imported from Red Russia at that, and point out that honest, God-fearing people, were lucky to sell a cow, on the hoof, for $8. I am not sure that he was selling out his constituents to “the interests” so as to be able to buy imported fresh eggs at $3 an ounce. The whole idea was one of suggestion. The successful candidate, incidentally, is a man who has been noted for his fastidious dress and luxurious living in Washington in the years since he was first elected.
During the convention of the two big parties in Chicago, many speakers sounded off on many subjects, promising or condemning. But the only possibly way to weigh the opposing claims and charges was to wait until the Democrats were through and then go back over the text in the papers which, of course, nobody did. Not a word was said in defense or answer in either convention. Every speaker just claimed, promised or attacked, with no facilities provided for disproof.
Debate is abandoned in our politics, unless you count those squalling radio forums in which the speakers seldom have a chance to prepare arguments and are subject to hecklement with loaded questions.
West Virginia Senator sees U.S. veering to National Socialism
Chicago, Illinois (AP) –
Senator Chapman Revercomb (R-WV) said today that “I warn, without excitement, but with fairness, that there are signposts in our own country that point towards National Socialism.”
“That generally finds its growth out of a broken economic structure and a desire by a group to rule over and dictate to the people,” Revercomb asserted in a prepared address before the national encampment of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Declaring that the national debt “threatens to reach the gigantic sum of $267 billion,” Revercomb said that:
There are some who have adopted the philosophy of a government by taxing and spending and regulating.
It appears that there are some who would continue the theory of taxing and spending and regulating, even for the days to come. That is a dangerous course. With some justification, caution was thrown away in spending for war. But that can find no sound basis when war has ended.
Pacific air war tempo increased
Halmahera plastered in 135-ton raid
By the Associated Press
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U.S. raid on oil refineries sets off fierce air battles
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Single off Kurowski’s glove robs Max Lanier of no-hit game
Browns’ lead intact in loss to Niggeling with Yankee assist
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Hull, Dulles meet today
Bipartisan support of world security plan is at stake
Washington (AP) –
The possibility of bipartisan support for current efforts at post-war world security comes to a head today in an unprecedented meeting between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and John Foster Dulles, Governor Thomas E. Dewey’s foreign policy advisor.
Preliminary to his afternoon session with the Secretary (scheduled for 3:30 p.m. ET) Dulles sought the advice of two Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Austin (R-VT) and Vandenberg (R-MI), in morning conferences.
Austin is known as a supporter of American peace organization efforts which culminated in the present Soviet-British-American talks here, and Vandenberg said yesterday that the talks had started under the “happiest possible prospects of good effect.”
The session today moved toward detailed analysis of Russian, American and British plans for organizing the world for peace. All three proposals were presented to yesterday’s meetings and officials familiar with them said they showed broad areas of agreement.
The main problems developed for future discussion were apparently the extent of authority to be proposed for small nations and the kind of commitments for the use of force if and when it is necessary to suppress aggression.
Dulles arrived late yesterday and at a press conference gave some broad indications of possible developments in his talks with Hull. He brought, he said, his own ideas and those of Governor Dewey, the Republican presidential nominee, on organizing world peace.
Expects Hull to report
Depending on how the meeting with Hull develops, he expected to present those ideas to the Secretary and he made it clear that if they were in conflict with the American plan, as already presented at Dumbarton Oaks, he might suggest some eleventh-hour alterations. However, he said he did not know what the plan is and could not say in advance whether changes would be suggested.
Asked whether he intended to remain here for the duration of the Dumbarton conversations he said he would “go very far to comply with any request made by Secretary Hull, subject to keeping in touch with Governor Dewey.
Whether he stays or not, he made it clear, he would expect that Hull would keep him and Dewey constantly informed of the progress of the Dumbarton talks because “I think it would be difficult to cooperate without definite information.”
Cooperation in the sense of Republican support for the peace organization plans worked out under the Democratic administration, Dulles said, does not mean complete removal of the subject from campaign discussion. He said it should not preclude “free public discussion” by political leaders in the months ahead.
Dewey plans talking tour
Two-month drive may take him into most states in union
Albany, New York (AP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey’s aides went ahead today with plans for a two-month drive that may take him into a majority of the states of the Union.
The Republican presidential nominee has already announced he will speak in Philadelphia Sept. 7 and Louisville, Kentucky, the following day on what has come to be regarded here as the beginning of a full-fledged campaign swing that may carry him westward to the Pacific Coast later in the month.
Senator Ed H. Moore (R-OK) said after a conference with Dewey yesterday that the GOP nominee would fill a date in Oklahoma City about Sept. 25. Moore added it was his understanding this stop would be made on the return from a West Coast tour.
Thus, the beginning of the active phase of the first wartime campaign since 1864 may find Dewey and his running mate, Governor John W. Bricker of Ohio, in full stride while President Roosevelt bides his time. Mr. Roosevelt said when accepting a fourth-term nomination he would not campaign in the usual way, but would be ready to answer any “misstatements” the Republican nominee might make.
Senator Harry S. Truman (D-MO), the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, has complained that Republicans “have nothing to do but throw bricks,” asserting that all of the campaign speechmaking would probably be done by the GOP.
Roosevelt too busy
Truman, who was to address the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Chicago today and who has arranged to speak in Detroit on Labor Day, said President Roosevelt is too busy running the war to campaign and that he himself has a job to do in the Senate. Truman will accept his nomination and speak in Lamar, Missouri, Aug. 31.
If this made any impression on Dewey’s aides, they gave no sign and Herbert Brownell Jr., Republican National Chairman, went ahead with detailed arrangements which are expected to produce a lengthy itinerary soon for both Dewey and Bricker.
The New York Governor has said he would be in Massachusetts before the campaign is over and has been invited to Maine with some indications he might accept. In the Midwest, he has been invited to Indiana, where Bricker will speak at French Lick, on Sept. 9, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan. Governor Harry F. Kelly of Michigan said he was assured Dewey would talk there.
A West Coast trip will take Dewey into an important political battleground, for both sides admit that California is in the doubtful class and neither is sure of winning the Pacific Northwest.