Berlin Diary (81 page)

C
ALAIS
,
August
15 (
noon
)

Driving down along the coast, I was struck by the
defensive
measures of the Germans. A line of
trenches, dug-outs, and machine-gun nests, strongly manned, stretched along the sand dunes a hundred yards from the water’s edge all the way down to Dunkirk. There were many anti-aircraft guns and about a quarter of a mile to the rear countless batteries of artillery. I had not thought before of the possibility of the British doing any attacking. We do not see any evidence at any place along the coast of German preparations for an invasion. No large concentrations of troops or tanks or barges. But of course they may be there, and we just didn’t see them.

About ten miles from Dunkirk, we suddenly come upon the sickly sweet smell of dead horse and human flesh. Apparently they have not yet had time to fish the bodies out of the numerous canals. Dunkirk itself has been cleaned up, and those who were there two months ago scarcely recognize it. The sentry does not allow us into the part of town around the main port, possibly because we might learn something of the invasion forces. In and around Dunkirk, acres of ground are covered with the trucks and
matériel de guerre
left by the British Expeditionary Force. German mechanics are at work trying to get the trucks, at least, to run. Others are stripping off the rubber tires, which are of a quality unknown in Germany
. In the town long lines of French civilians stand before the soup kitchens for a hand-out of food. Surprising that there are still civilians in this town after the murderous bombing and shelling it got. We all underestimate the power of human beings to endure.

We drive to the beach from which a quarter of a million British troops made their get-away. What surprises me after the German boasts about all the transports and other ships they sank off that beach (in one day, we were told in Berlin, the Luftwaffe had sunk
fifty
ships) is that along a twenty-mile stretch you see the wrecks of only two freighters. Besides these there are the remains of two destroyers, one of which, I believe, was bombed long before the withdrawal from Dunkirk, and a torpedo boat. Five small vessels in all. And any boat sunk within a great distance of the beach would be visible because of the shallowness of the water here. When a bomb does hit a ship, though, it pretty well finishes it. The destroyer nearest us—about two hundred yards off shore—had received a direct hit just in front of the bridge. A huge chunk some twenty feet wide had been torn off the craft down to the water-line.

L
ATER.—
While we are still at lunch here in Calais, we hear the first wave of German bombers roaring over to England. They fly so high you can hardly see them—at least twelve thousand feet. I count twenty-three bombers, and above them is a swarm of Messerschmitt fighters. The weather is clearing. It’s going to be a nice day—for the pilots. About three p.m. we set off in cars along the coast to Cap Gris-Nez. Passing through the harbour, I note that here too there is no concentration of ships, barges, or even the little motor torpedo-boats. Only three of the latter tied up at a quay. Can it be that the Germans have been bluffing about their invasion of Britain? We drive out along the coast road. Now the German planes are humming over, there a squadron of twenty-seven bombers, here fifty Messerschmitt fighters coming in to meet them. They all turn and swing out to sea towards Dover, flying very high. It is soon evident that the British do not come out—at least very far—to meet them. We watch for the British over the Channel. Not a single Spitfire shows.

We speed on up the coast towards Cap Gris-Nez,
where Gertrude Ederle and later a fat Egyptian and a host of others used to camp out in the days—how long ago they seem!—when the world was interested in boys and girls swimming the Channel. The air is now full of the sight and roar of planes, bombers and fighters, all German. A swarm of Heinkel bombers (we have not seen a single Stuka yet) limp back from the direction of Dover. Three or four are having a hard time of it, and one, nearly out of control, just manages to make a piece of land back of the cliffs. Messerschmitt 109’s and 110’s—the latter twin-motored—dash about at 350 miles per hour like a lot of nervous hens protecting their young. They remain in the air until all the bombers are safely down, then climb and make off for England. We have stopped our cars to watch. One of our officers swears the Heinkel was hit by a Spitfire and that the British fighter was brought down, but this is his imagination, for he saw no more than did we. This sort of thing will happen all afternoon. We resume our drive. Peasants sit on binders cutting the brown-ripe wheat. We crane our necks excitedly to watch the murderous machines in the sky. The peasants do not crane their necks, do not look up. They watch the wheat. You could think: who’s being civilized now? We pass a big railroad naval gun which has been firing on Dover. It is neatly camouflaged by netting on which the Germans have tied sheaves of grain. All along the coast gangs of French labourers have been put to work by the Germans, building artillery emplacements. Finally we turn towards the sea down the road that leads to Cap Gris-Nez. Many new gun emplacements here and searchlights, all perfectly camouflaged by nets. How much more attention the Germans seem to pay to the art of camouflage than the Allies! Soldiers are busy camouflaging the entire defence works at Cap Gris-Nez, which the French,
incidentally, have left intact and never bothered to screen. Gangs of men are digging up sod from a near-by pasture and putting it over the gravel around the gun emplacements and the look-out pits. It makes a lot of difference because the white gravel makes an easily distinguished landmark against the green fields.

We spend the rest of the afternoon idling on the grass at the edge of the cliff at Cap Gris-Nez. The German bombers and fighters keep thundering over towards Dover. Through field-glasses you can see plainly the Dover cliffs and occasionally even spot an English sausage balloon protecting the harbour. The German bombers, I note, go over in good formation very high, usually about fifteen thousand feet, and return much lower and in bad formation or singly. We keep on the watch for a dog-fight, or for a formation of Spitfires to light on the returning German bombers. It’s a vain watch. We do not see a British plane all afternoon. Over the Channel today the Germans have absolute supremacy. Hugging our side of the coast are German patrol boats, mostly small torpedo craft. They would make easy targets for British planes if any ever ventured over. The sea is as calm as glass, and German seaplanes with big red crosses painted on their wings keep lighting and taking off. Their job is to pick up airmen shot down in the Channel. About six p.m. we see sixty big bombers—Heinkels and Junker-82’s—protected by a hundred Messerschmitts, winging high overhead towards Dover. In three or four minutes we can hear plainly the British anti-aircraft guns around Dover going into action against them. Judging by the deep roar, the British have a number of heavy
flak
guns. There is another kind of thud, deeper, and one of our officers thinks this comes from the bombs falling. In an hour what looks to us like the same bombing squadron
returns. We can count only eighteen bombers of the original sixty. Have the British accounted for the rest? It is difficult to tell, because we know the Germans often have orders to return to different fields from those they started from. One reason for doing this apparently is to ensure that the German flyers will not know what their losses are.

Boyer and I keep hoping some Spitfires will show up. But now the sun is turning low. The sea is like glass. The skies quiet. The afternoon on the cliff has seemed more like a bucolic picnic than a day on the front line of the air war. The same unequal struggle that we saw in Belgium and northern France. Not a British plane over, not a bomb dropped. The little Jap sneaks up to the gun emplacements to snap some photographs until a sentinel grabs him. The rest of us rouse ourselves lazily from the grass and hurl pebbles over the cliff into the sea. It is time to return to Calais and sup. One of our officers comes running down from the gun emplacement and says excitedly that three Spitfires have been shot down this afternoon over the French coast. This is surprising. We ask to be shown.

The first Spitfire they show us on the way back has been there so long that German mechanics have had time to remove the Rolls-Royce motor and the instrument board. It is already rusting. We point this out. Our officer offers to show us another. It is near the beach of a little village half-way back to Calais. The motor is still on and the instrument board, but a young lieutenant from a near-by anti-aircraft battery takes me aside and ventures the interesting information that this particular Spitfire was shot down weeks ago and that only this very afternoon had he succeeded in dragging it out of the sea at low tide. When our officer offers to show us
his third Spitfire, we say we are hungry and suggest we return to Calais.

L
ATER.—
The thing I’ll never forget about these coastal towns in Belgium and France is the way the Belgians and French pray every night for the British bombers to come over, though often when their prayers are answered it means their death and often they cheer the bomb which kills them. It is three a.m. now and the German
flak
has been firing at top speed since eleven thirty p.m. when we heard the first thud of a British bomb tonight down by the harbour. Fortunately the British seem to be aiming accurately at the harbour and nothing has fallen near enough to us here in the town to cause much worry. There is no air-raid alarm. The sound of the anti-aircraft and the bursting of the bombs is your only signal. No one goes to the cellar. When the Germans have cleared out, we sit in the back room with the French proprietor, his family, and two waiters and drink
vin rouge
to each new British bomb that crashes. To bed now, and fear there are bugs in this room.

C
ALAIS
,
August
16

There were bugs. At breakfast everyone scratching and complaining he got no sleep. You can sleep through the night bombings but not the night attacks by fleas and bedbugs. We eat a hasty breakfast and are off for Boulogne at eight thirty a.m.

B
OULOGNE
,
August
16

How wonderfully the Germans have camouflaged their temporary airfields! We drove by at least
three between Calais and Boulogne. They have established them not in pastures, as I had expected, but in wheat-fields. The shocks of wheat are left in the field, with only narrow lanes left free across the field for the planes to take off from and land on. Each plane is hidden under a hangar made of rope netting over which sheaves of wheat have been tied. As at Ghent, the sides and back of each hangar are protected by sandbags. In one big wheat-field there must have been a hundred of these little hangars. Workshops and oil dumps were also housed under the same kind of netting. The “pocket” system which I saw at Ghent is also used. The planes, when they have landed, taxi down a lane or a road to a near-by “pocket” that may be some distance from the field proper. Here the planes are either hidden under netting or backed up into a wood.

Our officers and officials have been careful to see that we do not talk with any returning German pilots. But I talked to a number of navy and army men in charge of the coastal guns yesterday and this morning and was surprised that they all thought the war would be over in a few weeks. One naval captain in charge of a big gun at Cap Blanc-Nez, half-way between Calais and Cap Gris-Nez, took me this morning into his little dug-out, scooped out of the side of the slope, to show me how he had fixed it up. It was very cozy. He had slung a hammock between the two walls and had a little table crowded with German books and magazines. He was a straw-blond, clean-cut young man from near Hamburg, and extremely intelligent. I had taken a liking to him the day before.

“You’ve got a nice little place here,” I said. “Only—”

“Only what?” he laughed.

“Well, I know Normandy in winter, and from the
end of October until April it’s damned cold here and it rains every day. Your dug-out is all right now, captain, but it won’t be so comfortable over the winter.” He looked at me in complete amazement. “Why, I haven’t the slightest intention of spending the winter here,” he said, deadly serious now.” Why, the war will be over long before then. You were kidding, I think, isn’t it?”