Berlin Diary (80 page)

B
ERLIN
,
August
8

The Wilhelmstrasse told us today that Germany declines all responsibility for any food shortages which may occur in the territories occupied by the German army. The Germans are hoping that America will feed the people in the occupied lands. They would like to see Hoover do the job.

B
ERLIN
,
August
10

French sailors loyal to de Gaulle will be treated as pirates and shown no mercy if captured, the Foreign Office announced officially today.

B
ERLIN
,
August
11

For some days now workmen have been busy erecting new stands in the Pariserplatz outside my hotel. Today they painted them and installed two huge golden eagles. At each end they also are building gigantic replicas of the Iron Cross. Now the talk in party circles is that Hitler is so certain of the end of the war—either by conquest of Britain or by a “negotiated” peace with Britain—that he has ordered these stands to be ready before the end of the month for the big victory parade through the Brandenburger Tor.

Funk, speaking at Königsberg this morning, warmly praised Lindbergh for having remarked: “If the rich become too rich and the poor too poor, then something must be done.”

“That’s just what I said some time ago,” remarked Funk.

L
ATER.—
Today has seen along the coast of England
the greatest air battle of the war. German figures
of British losses have been rising all evening. First the Luftwaffe announced 73 British planes shot down against 14 German; then 79 to 14; finally at midnight 89 to 17. Actually, when I counted up the German figures as given out from time to time during the afternoon and evening, they totalled 111 for British losses. The Luftwaffe is lying so fast it isn’t consistent even by its own account.

B
ERLIN
,
August
13

Today was the third big day of Germany
’s massive air attack on Britain. Yesterday’s score as given by the Luftwaffe was 71 to 17. Tonight’s score for the third day is given as 69 to 13. On each day the British figures, as given out from London, have been just about the reverse. I suspect London’s figures are more truthful. Tomorrow I’m flying to the Channel with half a dozen other correspondents. We don’t know whether we’re being taken up to see Hitler launch his invasion of Britain or merely to watch the air attacks.

I
N A
G
ERMAN ARMY TRANSPORT PLANE BETWEEN
B
ERLIN AND
G
HENT
,
August
14

Last night we had our first air-raid alarm for a long time. It came at two a.m. just after I’d returned from broadcasting. Tess, who has been in Berlin for a few days, and I stayed up to see the fireworks, but there were none.

We take off at Staachen at ten forty-five a.m., flying low at about five hundred feet so as to be easily recognizable by German anti-aircraft crews. They shoot down altogether too many of their own planes…. Now Antwerp to the north and the pilot is coming down.

… One bad moment. Two fighters dive on us from out of the clouds and we think they may be Spitfires. (The other day they got a German general flying from Paris to Brussels.) But they’re Messerschmitts and veer off. Now the pilot is trying to find his field—no small job because of the way the fields here are camouflaged….

G
HENT
, B
ELGIUM
,
August
14

The camouflage of this field worth noting. From the air I noticed it looked just like any other place in the landscape, with paths cutting across it irregularly as though it were farm land. Each war plane on the ground has its own temporary hangar made of mats plastered with grass. Tent poles support the mats. Along the back and both sides of this tent of mats, sandbags are piled to protect the plane from splinters. So skilfully are these hangars constructed that I doubt if you could distinguish one from above a thousand feet. The field itself is not large, but the Germans are feverishly enlarging it. Gangs of Belgian workers are busy tearing down adjacent buildings—villas of the local gentry. An example, incidentally, of how Belgians are made to aid Germany’s war on Belgium’s ally, Britain. One neat way the Germans hide their planes, I notice, is to build pockets—little clearings—some distance away from the field. Narrow lanes from the main airfield lead to them. Along the sides of these pockets are rows of planes hidden under the trees. From the air it would be hard to spot these pockets and you might bomb the airfield heavily without touching any of these planes.

Ghent has a certain romantic interest for me because I remember my grade-school histories’ telling of the signing of the peace treaty concluding our War of 1812 on
Christmas Eve here. A Flemish town would be a picturesque place around Christmas Eve, if we can believe the early Flemish painters. Here were the American and British delegates leisurely coming to an agreement to end a war which neither side wanted. Christmas was in the air, snow in the narrow, winding streets, skaters on the canals, and there was much hearty eating and drinking. Christmas Eve was an appropriate moment to conclude the peace. But there was no radio, no cable line across the Atlantic then, and America only learned of the peace three months later. In the meantime Jackson had fought at New Orleans.

We sit around in the gaudy salon of a sugar merchant’s villa which the German flyers have taken over. We are waiting for cars to take us to the “front.” Someone forgot to order them in advance. Dr. Froelich, from the Propaganda Ministry, whom we call “the oaf,” a big, lumbering, slow-thinking, good-natured German with a Harvard degree and an American wife, can never bring himself to make a decision. We wait and the German flyers serve drinks from the sugar merchant’s fine cellar. The cars do not come, so we take a bus in to see the town. Ghent is not so romantic as I had imagined. It is a grey, bleak, lowlands industrial town. Many German soldiers in the street, buying up the last wares in the shops with their paper marks. We drop in and chat with a local shopkeeper. He says the soldiers behave themselves fairly well, but are looting the town by their purchases. When present stocks are gone, they cannot be replaced.

O
STEND
, B
ELGIUM
,
August
14

Our cars finally came at seven p.m. and we made off for Ostend, skirting round Bruges, a fairytale
town in which I had spent my first night on the Continent exactly fifteen years ago. Driving into Ostend, I kept my eyes open for the barges and ships that are to take the German army of invasion over to England
, but we saw very few craft of any kind. None in the harbour, and only a few barges in the canals behind the town. The Germans selected for us a hotel called the Piccadilly.

L
ATER.
August
15, 6
a.m
.—Sat up all night. When the Germans had gone to bed, the proprietor and his wife and his exceedingly attractive black-haired, black-eyed daughter of about seventeen brought out some fine vintages and we made an evening of it. Some local Belgians joined us and we (Fred Oechsner, Dick Boyer, and I) had much good talk. It was touching how the Belgians kept hoping the British bombers would come over. They did not seem to mind if the British bumped them off if only the RAF got the Germans too. One Belgian woman, whose bitterness was very pleasant to me, explained that most of the damage in Ostend, the majority of whose houses are pretty well smashed up, was the work of German artillery, which kept on firing into the town long after the British had left. Some time before dawn we went for a walk along the beach. There was a slight mist which softened the moonlight and made even the battered ruins of the houses along the sea-front take on a pattern of some beauty. The smell of the salt water and the pounding of the waves made you feel good. The Belgians kept cursing the British for not coming over.