INTERNATIONAL: Home Sweet Home

The first news in five months brought by American correspondents from inside the Axis reached the U.S. last week. It came from correspondents, diplomats and other citizens caught in Axis countries on Dec. 7. They sent their cables from Portugal, where they were awaiting exchange.

Both Your Houses. Diplomats, news correspondents and their families were in the first of three trains bringing 132 U.S. citizens and 120 Latin Americans from concentration points in Germany. Hungry, dirty, bedraggled, they were impressed by the blow to German morale that the U.S. entry into the war had caused; cheered by briefly caught evidences of goodwill among French peasants. In a field, as their train sped past, a lone man had stood merrily waving the Stars & Stripes.

Converging on Lisbon at the same time were 125 Americans from disillusioned, heartsick Italy. The two groups, exchanged for Axis nationals rounded up in the Americas, were soon to sail for home. By then the argument over which country it was best to be out of might be settled. First accounts last week gave the edge in dullness to Germany, the lead in human misery to Italy.

Hitler's, Blunder. Completely isolated from all news of the outside world, those who had been interned in Germany had picked up only odds & ends of information. A.P.'s balding Louis Lochner deflated the myth of the effectiveness of German propaganda. The ''greatest blunder" of Hitler's career, Lochner said, was when he "took upon himself the odium of declaring war upon the U.S." Having for months told the German people that "we won't let ourselves be provoked" by the U.S. pre-war attitude, Hitler then had to confront his people with war against a nation whose entry into World War I had once before turned the tide against them.

No longer, says Lochner, do the German people believe that their leader is "out smarting" the rest of the world; no longer do they believe in "great victories." The 2,500,000 German casualties, of which 750,000 are dead (Lochner's estimate), is too obvious a sign of German vulnerability.

Fascists' Abortion. U.P.'s Rome Bureau Chief, rotund Reynolds Packard, in his first dispatch from Portugal, reported an abortive attempt by extreme pro-German Fascists to kidnap Mussolini and "elimi-nate" his son-in-law, Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano. The Fascist regime, said Packard, is split by one group demanding closer collaboration with Germany and Vichyfrance and another fearful that the closer Italy works with both the slimmer are the chances of Italy's claims on French Tunisia, Djibouti, Savoy and Nice.

Mussolini's "Cratoplutes." A "sadder and wiser" Italy than the one he had known when he marched with Italian troops in Ethiopia was what New York Timesman Herbert Matthews left behind. He minimized the chance of revolt in Italy, but found it "difficult to conceive of a Government with less popular consent than Fascism has today."