We Saw Spain Die (61 page)

Barnes kept pressing the German Embassy in Paris without success. The response, a clear delaying tactic, was that ‘if the American Government intends to express to the Government of the Reich a special desire concerning the case of Mr. Allen’ it should do so through the American Embassy in Berlin. It was clear to Cordell Hull that Jay was
‘being subjected to more severe treatment than that accorded other persons similarly situated’. Washington formally requested the German Government both to permit a US diplomat to visit Jay and to expedite his early release. Berlin’s delays were further related to the arrest in the United States of various German seamen and two propagandists, Dr Manfred Zapp and Günther Tonn. Since Zapp was a close friend of the Nazi Foreign Minister Joaquim von Ribbentrop and Hitler himself had taken an interest in his case, the idea of a prisoner exchange began to take shape. However, things were further complicated by the existence of a French arrest order for Jay on charges of espionage. The French alleged that, while in Vichy, Jay had paid a journalist to steal a compromising ministerial document. On 23 June, for the illegal crossing of the demarcation line, the Germans sentenced Jay to four months’ imprisonment, for which only one of the three months already served would be counted. In consequence, Jay was moved from Chalon-sur-Saône to the altogether harsher prison at Dijon. Finally, in mid-July an agreement was reached on a prisoner exchange. That the State Department pursued the case at all and that Attorney General Robert H. Jackson permitted the prisoner exchange was thanks in large part to the Herculean efforts of Ruth Allen. Because of the complications regarding the French accusations, Jay was kept in captivity until August 1941.
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On 24 August, shortly after his return, Jay was interviewed by Rex Stout for ‘Speaking Liberty Series’ on the NBC Red Network for the USA and South America. He related how he had been arrested:

Five months ago, last month, I had crossed over from Free France into the Occupied Zone. The Nazis caught me as I was getting out. A peasant, who had got me in, was to smuggle me out, and when I was looking for him (I learned later he had been arrested) I was picked up by a German customs guard on the demarcation line. These guards are very efficient, they use police dogs and they have a nasty habit of planting land-mines in places where they suspect people are slipping through. I crossed over because I wanted to see what the Nazis were doing in Occupied France. I found out all right in four and a half months in their
prison. There, in a military prison in Chalons I found out more than I could have possibly uncovered had I been free.

Perhaps most significantly in terms of his own state of mind, he said that, while in prison, he was constantly asked whether Americans knew what the Germans were doing in France, and commented: ‘I used to tell my fellow jail-birds that we were waking up, but now that I’m home I wonder if it is true.’ When he was asked if Weygand would be able to resist pressure to throw France actively into the Axis camp, he replied: ‘I’m a reporter, not a crystal gazer but my considered opinion is this: resistance to the Nazis, to Franco–German collaboration in North Africa as well as in France itself comes from people who steadfastly refuse to believe that Germany can win, and their resistance is precisely as strong as hope for a democratic victory is strong.’
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He soon began to work on a book about his experiences with the title
My Trouble with Hitler.
It was going to be published by Harper, but his inveterate perfectionism consistently delayed the project. He also went on a speaking circuit with the Colsten Leigh agency and the book was often mentioned in the publicity for the lectures. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on 7 December 1941, brought the USA into the war, Jay wanted to work again as a war correspondent. However, his friend Robert Sherwood, now in government service, asked him to ‘do a job for the Army during the invasion of North Africa, specifically the invasion of Morocco’. Although he would have preferred to be working as a newspaperman, he accepted. Indeed, as Luisi del Vayo wrote to Louis Fischer,

Jay left very mysteriously in an unknown direction. The whole thing was decided apparently in hours and without leaving him more time than to call the friends on the phone to tell them good-bye. Friends’ commentary was: at least that settles the book! He sounds very happy and excited, suffering only a little bit of not being able to give more details.
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When, on Sunday 8 November 1942, Operation Torch saw Allied forces land in North Africa, Jay found himself the head of the
Psychological Warfare Branch of the US Army in Morocco. Admiral Leahy, who in July 1942 had become Chief of Staff to Roosevelt, was not pleased. He had enormous sympathy for Pétain and disapproved of Jay’s activities. In his diary notes for 20 October 1942, Admiral Leahy wrote:

Robert Sherwood of the Office of War Information called to discuss a report which I received from the State Department that Mr Jay Allen was scheduled to go to North Africa, Mr Allen was imprisoned in the occupied zone for travelling without the proper visas. He was then working with General George C. Patton. Mr Allen had initiative and energy, but he lacked discretion.
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Officially, Jay was attached to General Eisenhower’s headquarters in Algiers with the rank of ‘assimilated’ colonel. He was actually working under General George C. Patton in Morocco. He coincided there with his friend, Herbert Southworth, who was already in the services working for the Office of War Information. That coincidence aside, war service in North Africa would not be a happy experience for Jay. As he put it himself:

His distaste for the State Department’s policy of appeasing the Vichy crowd, in the persons of Darlan and Giraud, he could not hide, but insists he took orders and followed them ‘like any soldier’. He was particularly outraged by what he calls the ‘virulent anti-Semitism’ of our commanders, coupled with an attitude which he says approached adulation of the Arabs.

He was appalled by a senior officer who told him that he did not understand what was wrong with the ‘Nazzees’. More shocking was his discovery that Vichy prison camps held members of the French resistance and ex-International Brigaders. The American high command were not interested in doing anything about this because they accepted the Vichy French explanation that they were dangerous communists. Jay was most shocked by the experience of his close friend, Colonel
Arthur ‘Michel’ Roseborough, of the OSS, stationed in Algiers and in charge of liaison with the French underground. Colonel Roseborough was under orders not to communicate with the Gaullist underground because they were reds. He worked in his office all day doing meaningless things. As Jay related later to his son, the Colonel went to the officers’ club and got stinking drunk every night, and then staggered to his office and secretly communicated with the Gaullists. Drunkenness, so called, was his cover.
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On 17 December 1942, Eisenhower’s friend and aide, Captain Harry C. Butcher, recalled an alarming report from Jay to General Patton regarding the pro-German attitudes of the Vichy French commander in North Africa, General Charles Auguste Paul Noguès and his staff. He claimed in the report that the American policy of appeasement towards Darlan went ‘beyond the limits required supposedly by “military expediency” and that our continued support of discredited Vichy-minded generals and bureaucrats would cost us the confidence of the French people on whom we would have to depend during the invasion’.
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In January 1943, just before Franklyn D. Roosevelt was due to meet Churchill at the Casablanca conference, Jay expressed his concerns about American relations with the pro-Fascist Vichy elements to General Eisenhower, who dismissed him with the brusque statement that there was a war to be won. Jay resigned from the OWI and returned to the USA in February 1943, ‘not because he failed to carry out orders he thought morally wrong and politically inexpedient but because his personal sentiments made him a marked man with men, many of them old associates of his, at headquarters.’
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After the US embargo on the Spanish Republic and appeasement of the dictators, it was another step on the road to Jay’s total disillusionment. His son was shocked by his demeanour: ‘When I saw him, I knew something was very wrong. And it got worse.’ He was no longer interested in finishing the book, since the war was no longer his war, the war that had started on 18 July 1936 in Spain. As his son put it: ‘He had suffered too many defeats. He fought for justice and peace. He fought well. And he was shot down. He said to me more than once, “Michael, don’t get on the barricades too soon!” By which I know he meant, “Do not get shot down too soon.”’ Nevertheless, when he returned to the
United States, despite the beginnings of a deep depression from which he would never entirely recover, he undertook another lecture tour and argued his point vigorously, ‘hundreds of times, over the radio and in magazine articles’. He commented later: ‘it wasn’t very glorious but perhaps there was some small contribution in all this to the awakening that eventually came about’.
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Hemingway wrote to him about the time that he returned from North Africa. Apparently, Martha Gellhorn had offered to edit the manuscript
My Trouble with Hitler,
and had put off starting a novel until it arrived. Despairing of the endless wait, she began her novel. Hemingway wrote: ‘I would have been glad to do it and read several chapters of the manuscript with great interest and admiration.’ However, his other commitments prevented him taking it on: ‘I thought there was wonderful stuff in it and I would have been very proud to have been any use to you in preparing it for publication. But it was impossible for me to undertake it at this time.’ The next sentence was a priceless example of Hemingway’s insensitivity: ‘I write you now about something of importance’ – this being his need for Jay to provide some information about the pro-Franco activities of Edward Knoblaugh, who had appeared in Havana claiming to be a friend of Jay. Having just told Jay that he could not help with his book because he was busy, he wrote: ‘Also, Jay, will you please let me have this at once, no matter how many other things you have to do.’ Jay immediately complied.
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Jay dabbled with his books on nineteenth-century Spain, on his experiences in the German prison and on the Spanish Civil War. On 20 March 1943, it was announced in the
New York Times
that Jay Allen, recently returned from N. Africa, had delivered a book to Harpers which would be published by summer 1943 under the title
The Day Will End: a personal adventure behind Nazi lines.
This was clearly ‘My Trouble with Hitler’. Nothing more was heard of it. Apparently, dissatisfied with the editorial changes that Harpers had suggested, Jay had withdrawn the manuscript and continued to work on it. He and Ruth moved to Seattle during 1944 to take care of his father and his father’s estate. His spirits were sustained by the hope that, when Hitler and Mussolini were defeated, something would be done about the Franco dictatorship. He hoped to return to a free Spain, not least to collect the
several thousand books that he had had to leave in Torremolinos when he had set off for Gibraltar in July 1936. His great hope was to see the Republic re-established and ‘to resume where we left off’. This he thought possible ‘if we keep our heads on our shoulders and realize that far more potent than the atom bomb for our defense would be a forthright, courageous policy of support, economic and political, in countries like Spain, where people have come to doubt our intentions’.
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When that did not happen, and the United States colluded in the survival of Franco, Jay essentially retired. What happened exactly remains a mystery but it appears that there were few commissions coming his way, because he seems to have been blacklisted. After his father died, he began to live off his inheritance. In 1946 he moved to Carmel, and remained there with frequent visits to New York.
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In many respects, Jay Allen, the courageous journalist, disappeared. The defeat of the Spanish Republic, the attrition of trying to alert America to the danger of fascism, his experience in a Gestapo prison, and the anti-leftist backlash that poisoned American life in the late 1940s, all conspired to drain away his optimism and determination to go on fighting for what he believed in. His son wrote an article in which it is impossible not to see a reference to a downcast and disillusioned Jay:

I knew men who fought to preserve the freedom of the Spanish Republic. Here were men who lived an ideal of democracy, freedom, opportunity. They saw a vision of a new Spain. And then Spain fell and with it their dreams. With the dreams were destroyed their lives. I was a small boy when that war was fought. Perhaps then the memory is stronger. My mind was less cluttered. I saw tragedy more clearly, so death was more vivid. Then there were those who sought to awaken America to the threat of Hitler’s fascism. They loved this country too much to see it betrayed to sordid fears and petty ambitions. They saw that our borders lay on the Rhine and that our hopes were centred in Paris as well as Milwaukee. But they too went down. Premature anti-fascists they were called.

Similarly, he was surely thinking of his father when he wrote of the pain of those ‘who nursed the sorrow of blunted goals. These were men who watched their most cherished desires disintegrate piece by piece.’
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It was a feeling that seemed to grow as Jay worked on a book about the Spanish Civil War in an attempt to explain what he and others had been fighting for. He wrote to Negrín, along with a lengthy series of detailed queries which revealed just how closely they had worked during the war: ‘My trouble has been due in part to something Ruth calls defeatism. I don’t care for her choice of words but – need I explain?’ He went on bitterly: ‘I made a serious mistake going to North Africa and passing up a fat lecture season in 42–43. I have never recovered financially from this. I had the quaint idea that I was serving my country. Imagine!’
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Explicitly, Michael Allen wrote of Jay: ‘My father was a journalist who breathed the air of Spain until it became his country too. Loyal to his nation and all her hopes, he fought for the Spanish Republic. At a very early age I saw the fullness of life reflected in my own home – the fullness that comes alone from dedication to some ideal beyond our limited beings.’
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