Berlin Diary (61 page)

B
ERLIN
,
May
13

Astounding news. The headlines at five p.m.:
“LIÈGE FALLEN! GERMAN LAND FORCES BREAK THROUGH AND ESTABLISH CONTACT WITH AIR-FORCE TROOPS NEAR ROTTERDAM!”

No wonder a German officer told me today that even the
Oberkommando
was a little taken aback by the
pace
.

The air-force troops were the parachutists and those landed by plane on the beach near The Hague beginning with the first day of the campaign. It was these men who took part of Rotterdam (!) including the airport, though they had no artillery and the Dutch should have had plenty, being a wealthy people. How a German land force has travelled clear across the southern part of Holland to the sea is a mystery to all of us here. It would have to be a motorized force, and in Holland there are scores of canals and rivers in their path. One supposes the Dutch would have blown up the bridges.

“SWASTIKA FLIES FROM THE CITADEL OF LIEGE,”
say the headlines tonight. Apparently the German army which had forced the Albert Canal circled down to Liège from the northwest, where it was most weakly held, the Belgians having expected the main attack from the opposite direction. Liége held out for twelve days in 1914. If it has fallen now in four, that looks bad for the Allies.

The foreign radio stations continue to tell of German parachutists dropping all over Belgium and Holland and seizing airports and towns. (Here we can get no information on the subject whatsoever.) It’s a new form of warfare and it will be interesting to see what effect it has, if any, on a long, hard campaign, if this is to be one and not another German walkover.

Last night Premier Reynaud of France announced that German parachutists found behind the lines in anything but a German uniform would be shot on sight. Tonight the Wilhelmstrasse told us it was informing the Allied governments that for every German parachutist shot, the Germans would execute ten French prisoners! Nice pleasant people, the Germans. That takes us back a thousand or two years. But keep in mind that this is merely a part of Hitler’s new technique of terror.

I passed some time at the Embassy today. Everyone depressed at the news and most think—on the fourth day of the offensive!—that it is all over with the Allies. I tried to recall how black August 1914 must have seemed to Paris and London as the Germans swept on the capital and the French government fled to Bordeaux. Tess said on the telephone last night that the Swiss were calling up every available male. When will it be Switzerland’s turn? I asked her to try to book on the first ship home and take the baby. She won’t. Her arguments: she has my Geneva office to run, she doesn’t like the family to get too far apart, and now that the war is becoming a war, she wants to see it.

B
ERLIN
,
May
14

We’re all a little dazed tonight by the news.

The Dutch army has capitulated—after only five days of fighting. What happened to its great water lines, which were supposed to be impassable? To its army of over half a million men?

An hour before we learned this from a special communiqué, we were told of Rotterdam’s fall. “Under the tremendous impression of the attacks of German dive-bombers and the imminent attack of German tanks, the city of Rotterdam has capitulated and thus saved itself
from destruction,” read the German announcement. It was the first news we had that Rotterdam was being bombed and was at the point of being destroyed. How many civilians were killed there, I wonder, in this war which Adolf Hitler “promised” would not be carried out against civilians? Was the whole city, the half million or so people in it, a military objective so that it had to be destroyed?

Having broken through at Liège, the Germans claimed tonight to have pierced the second line of Belgian defences northwest of Namur. They must be very close to Brussels. Tanks and airplanes, especially airplanes, are doing the job for the Germans. How criminal of the British and French to have neglected their air forces!

A little tired of the way the German radio announces each new victory. The program is halted, there are fanfares, then the communiqué is read, then a chorus sings the current hit: “We March on England.” For the big victories the two national hymns are added.

B
ERLIN
,
May
15

Very long, stunned faces among the foreign correspondents and diplomats today. The High Command claims to have broken through the Maginot Line near Sedan and that German forces have crossed the Meuse River both at Sedan and between Namur and Givet, farther north. To anyone who has seen that deep, heavily wooded Meuse Valley, it seems almost incredible that the Germans could get across it so quickly, provided there is any army at all defending the western bank. But both sides speak of big tank battles
west
of the Meuse.

Almost all of my friends have given up hope; not I,
yet. It must have looked even darker in Paris in August 1914, when nothing appeared to stand in the way of the German army and the capital. Our military people remind us that the main battle has not yet started, that the Germans have not yet run up against the bulk of the French and British armies. And the Belgians still have a half-million men in the fight. The line today held by the Allies is roughly: Antwerp, Louvain, Namur, then down the Meuse to Sedan, with the Germans across the river at several points.

There was increasing talk from Rome today that Italy, now that the Germans appear to be winning, may jump into the war this week-end. Tess phoned this morning from Geneva to give me this news. Again I urged her to leave with the child, and at last she seems willing. She and Mrs. V., with her two youngsters, will strike out across France for Spain. From Lisbon they can get the Clipper to New York. Worried all day about this. If Italy attacks France, going across to Spain from Geneva will be unpleasant, if not impossible.

It seems the reason the Dutch gave up yesterday was that the Germans bombed the hell out of Rotterdam, and threatened to do the same to Utrecht and Amsterdam. Hitler’s technique of helping his armies by threatening terror or meting it out is as masterful as it is diabolical.

His High Command, for instance, tonight threatened to bomb Brussels unless all troop movements, which the Germans claim their reconnaissance planes have observed there, cease immediately. “If the Belgian government,” says the communiqué, “wishes to save Brussels from the horrors of war, it must immediately put a stop to troop movements in the city and the work on fortifications.”

A nice war.

B
ERLIN
,
May
15

Worried about Tess and the baby. If Italy goes into the war in the next day or two, as some think, escape for them in that direction is out. Today there are reports of more German activity along the Swiss border. The Nazis may break into Switzerland any moment now. The trouble is the French won’t let the Americans out through France. They are not issuing transit visas at the moment. Yet the American government has advised Americans in Switzerland to leave immediately for Bordeaux, where they’ll be picked up by American ships. Most of our consulate people at Geneva have sent out their own women and children with their diplomatic passports through France. I believe Hitler will bomb Geneva to destruction just out of personal hate for the League and what Geneva stands for.

Will Brussels be bombed, after last night’s German threat? P., always well informed on German intentions, thinks Hitler will bomb Paris and London to daylights within the next forty-eight hours.

I just saw two uncensored news-reels at our press conference in the Propaganda Ministry. Pictures of the German army smashing through Belgium
and Holland. Some of the more destructive work of German bombs and shells was shown. Towns laid waste, dead soldiers and horses lying around, and the earth and mortar flying when a shell or bomb hit. Yelled the German announcer: “And thus do we deal death and destruction on our enemies!” The film, in a way, summed up the German people to me.

Towards sundown Joe [Harsch] and I took a walk in the Tiergarten and agreed: The savage destruction by high explosives and steel of the other fellow is a beautiful thing and the fulfilment of a high aim in Germanic
life; blow up his home and his wife and his children. But let him do the same to you—then he is a barbarian destroying the innocent. The film, we recalled, switched back to Freiburg, where the Germans now claim some thirty-five people, including thirteen children (though Goebbels forgot to mention the children until twenty-four hours after he had announced the bombing and the number of victims), were killed by Allied bombs. Said the announcer angrily: “Thus do our brutal and unscrupulous enemies bomb and kill and murder innocent German children.”

“It’s the old story,” I said to Joe. “The German always wants it both ways.”

How would I get through the war without the Tiergarten, one of God’s great parks? We remarked on what a deep green the grass had today and argued about the respective merits of mowing grass, as at home, and letting it grow long, for hay, as here. Curious that the lawn-mower is almost unknown on the Continent. The foliage around the little stream in the middle of the park was so luxuriant today, it reminded me of the Barbizon paintings. Or of a Normandy lily pond by Monet. Missing was only a stately lady clad in
fin de siècle
garb sitting very upright in a rustic boat in the middle of the pond.

Picked up on the shortwave Roosevelt reading a special message to Congress. He came through very clearly. In great form, I thought. He proposed we build 50,000 (!) planes a year and deliver Allied orders immediately. He said Germany now had 20,000 planes to the Allies’ 10,000 and was still building them faster. This is a truth obvious to all of us here, but when we used to report it we were accused of making Nazi propaganda. Roosevelt received the greatest ovation I’ve ever heard in a broadcast from Congress. It makes you
feel good that they’re waking up at home at last.

How long before we’re in this war, as at least a mighty supplier to the Allies—if there’s still time? The Germans say we’re too late. The
Herald Tribune
came out today, according to the BBC, for a declaration of war on Germany. This led some of the American correspondents at dinner tonight to speculate as to what chances we who are stationed here would have of getting out, were diplomatic relations to be severed. The majority thought we would be interned. No one liked the prospect.

We’re on the eve tonight of a great battle, perhaps the decisive battle of the war, on a front stretching for 125 miles from Antwerp through Namur to a point south of Sedan. It looks as though the Germans were going to throw in everything they have, which is plenty. Their drive through Belgium appears to have been halted yesterday on the Meuse River and the Dyle Line farther north. But it is only a pause before the great final attack. Hitler must win it, and all the battles in the next weeks or months, or he’s finished. His chances look very good. But great decisive battles in history have not always been won by the favourites.