The First Lady of Radio (29 page)

There is great gratitude on every hand here for the generous gifts received through the Red Cross, the Bundles for Britain, the British War Relief in America, and from cities and individuals. People who might have been cold have been clothed with garments sent from America. People have been fed from mobile canteens and rescued in ambulances sent from America. And last but not least, the American Army and Navy and Air Force are making friends here. Some of our soldiers helped in the harvesting, and since then they have preferred to go back to visit the families with whom they worked rather than to go to the town in their time off. Such men as have been stationed for any length of time in an area have found hospitable people. Hospitality is not a matter of sharing food these days, for the British, high and low, live on a food ration. If they give any of their rations to our men, they have to go without and sometimes they do. But there is so little excess they cannot do it often. For everyone—man, woman, and child—on this island is working and needs must eat his ration.

The work of the women is what I was asked to come here to study. I haven't the time to tell you tonight in detail all I have seen, even along these lines, or my full impressions. But I hope to have the chance to tell the American people later. I have seen that the women are working side by side with the men in the military forces, in industrial jobs, and in addition, they are doing countless numbers of jobs in civilian defense, as volunteers with the Women's Voluntary Services. They work, as well, in many of the long-established organizations like the Red Cross, the Y's, the Women's Institutes which in the rural areas make the wheels go round.

One valuable thing that seems to have been learned is not to duplicate work, but to leave to each organization the field that it can cover best, realizing that there is plenty of work to be done and that it is only a matter of finding where you can best function as an organization or as an individual. I have seen no woman who is not doing a real job, requiring in many cases a full eight hours' work a day, as well as carrying on full-time or in a modified way whatever her job had been before the war.

The working woman in some cases is confiding the care of her child or children to the day nurseries in the cities, or to the full-time nurseries in the country. Sometimes this is done for the good of the child, sometimes because the mother needs the added money to keep the family going while the man is away in the service, and also because the country needs her work.

To the mothers, wives, and sweethearts of our men, whom I have been seeing in different parts of Great Britain, I can only say that the men are doing their part extremely well in adjusting to a climate which is traditionally in November somewhat rainy, and so has given them plenty of rain and mud to cope with under conditions which require a saving of fuel and therefore an endurance of cold which we know nothing about in the United States of America. Added to this, they have had to learn to live under blackout regulations, of which no one in the US
has the slightest conception. A blackout here is a total blackout. The countryside loses all of that friendly feeling which twinkling lights that shine out of a window give you as you walk along a country road in the dark. Here, a country road is a dense blackness. A passing car is a black object with two tiny lights. In the cities you carry a shaded torch. And should your torch gleam too brightly, a policeman—he is called a bobby over here—will soon tell you what changes you must make. This is a quality of blackness which no one who has not known it can possibly imagine.

But your men folks will keep their American sense of humor, their buoyancy of spirit. They have good times. They sing as they play and as they march. I have been to hospitals, and even those who are going home because for some reason or other they will not be able to fight again have the courage to face it with a smile, whatever their burden may be. American women can be proud of their boys over here. I imagine most of them would tell you that they would give a great deal to be home again. But every one of them, I am sure, will do his part and do it gallantly to win the war.

I hope our women in the United States will be worthy of the boys over here. I hope that we will be worthy of the women of Great Britain. Wistfully, a woman said to me when I happened to mention that I had seen one of my sons: “Mine is in the Near East and I haven't seen him for three years.” Great Britain's sons are scattered far and wide, and so are ours. Let us resolve that we will do our part, giving whatever we have to give with the main object in view: the winning of the war as quickly as possible so that we may save as many lives as possible.

The women of Britain are helping to win the war. In fact, they are a very vital factor in the manpower of the nation. And they know, also, that they will be a very vital factor in making the peace and in carrying on the crusade which will certainly have to be carried on in the future.

Women may have had a feeling in the past that they did not have
an equal responsibility with men in world affairs. The women of the future cannot have that feeling, because the writing on the wall is clear: That if there is to be peace in the world, women as well as men will have to decide to work and sacrifice to achieve it. The price of peace in the future may be sacrifices of material comforts in the years immediately after the war. Men, who have fought the war, and women, if they have given all they have to the war effort, may be tired when peace comes. But we cannot afford to be too tired to win the peace if our civilization is to go on. It cannot go on if wars continue, and I surmise that women will be a very potent factor in working out the necessary changes in existing economic systems, as well as changes in social conditions, which alone can bring real freedom to the people of the world.

The young people in high school and in college today—as well as those in the armed forces and industry and on the farms—will be a great factor in making these decisions of the future. If we decide to be selfish and to think of ourselves alone, for a time we may be able to achieve something which appears temporarily desirable. It seemed to be a desirable world we were creating in the United States in the 1920s. But the '30s were not very happy for many men, women, and young people. Like a Greek tragedy, the war moved forward in the wake of poverty. And disease and material and spiritual attrition inevitably fell upon nation after nation.

Our hope for the future, I believe, lies in the acceptance by women and young people of their responsibility. I think we failed before because we could not think on international lines. We did not have a broad enough vision. And the peoples of the world left their business in the hands of self-seekers, who thought of themselves and their temporary gains, but now and in the future you—the women and the youth of all the united nations—will have to awaken and accept full responsibility. It is no easy burden to assume. But if we win the battle over ourselves, the vision of God's world—ruled by justice and love—may become a reality.

35.

“Wartime Conditions in Great Britain”

Wednesday, December 9, 1942, 10:15 p.m. (NBC Red Network)

ER: I have already talked a number of times on the radio about various phases of my trip to Great Britain, but I am glad of this opportunity to give a more detailed account of the situation there as I saw it.

Great Britain is a small island, so small that one of our boys inquiring as to how long it would take him by train to go from one point to another, when told what the distances were in every direction before he reached the sea, drew a long breath and said, “Gee, you tumble off quickly in any direction, don't you?” The whole area of Great Britain could be contained in any one of several of our states with ease. They are eighteen miles at some points from an enemy who has very good planes, is industrially well developed, and has one of the best trained and equipped armies in the world.

Three years ago, Great Britain was entirely unprepared to repel any real effort at invasion. Today, one gets the feeling that one is living in a fortress. Everywhere along the coast there is protection and the Home Guard is a very active body of people who are prepared to spring to arms
in their own defense at any moment, quite aside from the regular army which is in Great Britain. Most of this army is in training but is available for defense at any point. There is now a network of sea and air defense such as was not dreamed of at the time of the Battle of Britain. But this little island has fronts all over the world where her men are fighting side by side with the men of the Dominions and, now, with the men from America.

The population of the whole island is some 46 million people, so it is perfectly obvious that they have had to use every bit of manpower that was available, and that includes the women and the young people of the nation. They have had to face many things which we, thank God, do not have to face. Up to the time of the beginning of the war, food for Great Britain came from every part of the world, and they only grew 47 percent of the food which they consumed. The Ministry of Agriculture has succeeded in raising that to nearly 60 percent, but they still have to obtain a great deal of their food supply from outside their own country, mainly from the United States, Canada, and South America. This means transportation, and transportation has to be taken up sometimes with getting an army to Africa and keeping it supplied with food and ammunition after it gets there.

In Great Britain, nothing must be made which is not necessary because labor and materials are precious. Great Britain is on a strict rationing system for food, for instance, because no one should have more than he needs to eat. It is probably true that a number of people in Great Britain whose diet was slim in the past may have a better-balanced diet than ever before. Every child under fourteen, Lord Woolton, the minister of food, told me, must have a pint of milk a day, and they pay for it when able. Otherwise, they get it free. Every young woman with a baby gets this same amount, but many other people in Great Britain use powdered milk, powdered eggs, and dehydrated food from the United States. And the roast beef of old England, for which she was
justly famous, has practically disappeared from the table. One fresh egg a month is the civilian ration, as I discovered when we were breakfasting in one of our American Navy stations, and I happened to have beside me a young girl who was a private in the Army Auxiliary Service. I heard a little gasp as a plate was put down before her, and, on asking her what was the matter, she replied, “Oh, two months' rations all at once.” I looked down to see that two fried eggs had been placed before her, from American Army rations, of course.

The people of Great Britain have learned to eat what they can get and to bear it without much complaining. They have learned to get only the clothes which their coupons allow them to have, and these cover only the necessities of life. You are lucky if you had enough left from prewar days to give you a few extra things to wear. If you are bombed out, some of the secondhand clothing, which the people of America have sent over, will be given to you at a distribution agency without your having to produce coupons to obtain them.

You will be telling me soon that none of this seems to have much relation to anything happening over here, and that you do not quite understand why it is of interest to you. My answer is that I think we have something to learn from the fact that people have lived on this island and developed protective devices which make life possible, and can still smile and look hopefully toward the future. They do discuss food. It does make a tremendous difference. For instance, if you bring some friend a gift from this country, say a box of hard candy or of chocolates, they thank you as they might have thanked you in the past for a diamond bracelet. Some bobby pins or a cake of soap are a gift from heaven.

You may laugh, but my short time spent over there has sharpened my appreciation of many of the things I used to take for granted over here. I walk down the street on a bright, sunny day and find myself repeating, “What a wonderfully blue sky and how marvelous the sun is.”
I will order a meal in a restaurant and remember that, over there, I had to choose carefully because I could not have both eggs and meat or fish at the same meal. I could have one and only one.

We haven't had to undergo bombing and I pray that we will never have to. Nevertheless, I have a very great admiration for the people of Great Britain, who have developed such steadfastness and calm during the concentrated blitzes that now they pay no attention to a sporadic raid here and there. In Dover, where shelling and enemy air sorties are frequent, we were being shown about the grounds near the houses which the Wrens occupy. The Wrens correspond to our Waves and do many things in the Navy to release men for other service.

The day we were there, the director's office in one of the buildings was having a new roof put on and they casually pointed to a hole in the ground and said, “That is where the bomb dropped yesterday.” And then they showed me a tree between two buildings which had been badly scarred by the passing of a shell which had gone beyond through the shelter filled with girls. “We were very fortunate,” my guide said, “only one girl's head was grazed by the shell.”

The children in the streets, of course, can tell you whether the drone of a motor overhead is an enemy machine or one of their own. And they can tell you whether a bomb dropping is an incendiary bomb or something more harmful. Yet nobody seemed excited or even disturbed. Some people go into the shelters built into the cliffs if they think it is going to be a bad night, primarily because they want to be able to sleep and be ready for work in the morning, but not because they are afraid.