WORLD BATTLEFRONTS
THE PRESIDENCY Preface to War
The telephone in Franklin Roosevelt’s bedroom at the White House rang at 2:50 a.m. on the first day of September. In more ways than one it was a ghastly hour; but the operators knew they must ring. Ambassador Bill Bullitt was calling from Paris. Mr. Bullitt told Mr. Roosevelt that World War II had begun. Adolf Hitler’s bombing planes were dropping death all over Poland.
Mr. Roosevelt telephoned to Secretary of State Hull at the Carlton Hotel, also to Under Secretary of State Welles, Secretary of War Woodring, Acting Secretary Edison of the Navy. Acting Secretary of the Treasury John Hanes was roused. Lights went on in all Washington’s key executive offices. Before breakfast time, the President was ready with the only gesture he could think of in the face of world disaster: a plea to Germany, Poland, Britain, France, Italy to refrain from bombing “open” cities and noncombatants. Within a few hours the heads of all these nations replied, in a chorus that sounded sickeningly cynical, however truly meant: they would each do as Mr. Roosevelt suggested so long as their antagonists did likewise. Mussolini took the occasion to reiterate Italy’s neutrality.
That day Franklin Roosevelt’s press conference was a grave business. One question was uppermost in all minds. Correspondent Phelps Adams of the New York Sun uttered it: “Mr. President, can we stay out of it?” Franklin Roosevelt sat in silent concentration, eyes down, for many long seconds. Then, with utmost solemnity, he replied. “I not only sincerely hope so, but I believe we can, and every effort will be made by this Administration to do so.”
Sept. 11, 1939
BATTLE OF BRITAIN Death and the Hazards
Winston Churchill is tough. The first important thing he does when he is awakened at 7:15 every morning is light a cigar. His mind requires and retains whole libraries of facts. His spirit loves good food, good drink, pretty and witty women. His body tolerates terrific burdens. He wears out whole squads of secretaries. He talks down platoons of men who have hated and now love him. He is no umbrella-fancier, and he carries a cane not to support his 65-year-old body but to prod, strike and point with. He is persistent. The way he got the unwilling Lord Beaverbrook into his Cabinet was to call him up every two hours, day and night, for 36 hours. He knows no fear. During air raids, he often rushes into the gardens of No. 10 with no protection but a “battle bowler.”
He loves life and liberty so much that he has nearly killed and thoroughly enslaved himself a hundred times over in the past six months. Dorothy Thompson calls him “the great life-affirmer.” This week Miss Thompson praised him as a man of action–“as soldier, war correspondent and public servant in high places. One sometimes has the feeling that the man has skipped a century, harking back to less pedestrian and comfort-loving times, to older and more tested virtues. He restores to the leadership of Britain the nobleman, in its exact sense of being a man and being noble.”
Sept. 30, 1940
STRATEGY A Dictator’s Hour
The crucial spring of his career came last week to Adolf Hitler. He could see it in sheltered, sun-struck places around the Berghof where lilies of the valley, violets, Alpine roses, blue gentians and wild azaleas bloomed, and in the green showing through the white on the Untersberg’s slopes across the way. But he could feel it even more strongly in his bones: spring, when armies march. If the campaigns Hitler launches this spring are as successful as those he launched a year ago, he will almost indisputably soon be master of at least half the world. For Hitler this spring is destiny.
He must have been keenly aware of that fact one morning last week when he stretched a tentative toe into his green-tinted bathtub, while he gazed at his face with its little mustache and flopping hair, as he covered his chin with lather (at the Berghof the great dictator is his own barber), while he sipped his Chinese tea, spooned his porridge and chewed his morning toast.
There must have been an extraordinary meeting that morning in his pine-paneled workroom, with his aides. If his blue eyes were sharper than April sky, and if he rubbed his hands with queer, excited jerks, that was only natural. Excitement makes him thrive and happy. Moreover he was about to compose his own words of destiny.
April 14, 1941
Sermon in Pearl Harbor
With release of the Roberts Commission Report on Pearl Harbor, a trickle of now-it-can-be-tolds began to flow. Best of the first:
On the fateful Sunday morning, the Chaplain of a battleship in Pearl Harbor was busy on the afterdeck with a couple of assistants, running up the bunting in preparation for divine service. Their polite murmurs were suddenly interrupted by the roar of the Jap. The Chaplain dropped his bunting, ran to an anti-aircraft gun and began preaching lead to the Japanese. A few minutes later he was heard to intone: “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition; I just got one of the sons of bitches.”
Feb. 2, 1942
ALL YE FAITHFUL Time Correspondent Teddy White was aboard a U.S. bomber as it made a Christmas Eve visit to the Japanese troops in China. Afterward he cabled the following dispatch: We crossed the Mekong and the Salween en route to the Japanese lines with lights out, our formation tight, the interlocking ships black against the rising moon behind them. Tengyueh lay absolutely still within the rectangular walls of its valley, with not a glimmer of light anywhere. But the brilliance of the moon traced the outlines of the walls and the main streets in clear sharp shadows.
No Surprise. For a moment we thought we had surprised the Japanese. Then suddenly machine guns began to scratch the heavens with fire. We were hedgehopping, coming directly out of the moonlight. Every Japanese gunner seemed to get the bead on our bombing run as we skimmed low. The tracers’ red, blazing prongs of light flashed by our windows. I was up in the nose with the squadron bombardier, Lieut. George Stout, and it seemed as if we were darting through a corridor of flaming sheaves.
As soon as we dropped our bombs, Lieut. Colonel William E. Basye, the flight leader, dipped his ship off the line of fire, wheeling furiously to get away. Behind us the other ships were getting hell. One machine-gun battery was blazing all-out at us–and then there was a puff of smoke from a bomb, and no more machine gun. Basye circled the town once more, getting a view of our work. Bombs had dropped, in a first-class string, right down the main street. Basye banked steeply so that every gun in our flight could be trained on the machine-gun batteries, and then we let them have it. A flat, scarlet sheet of flame poured down from every turret, every gun of our planes. I could feel our ship rattling, re-echoing the clatter of the guns. Down below one Japanese battery suddenly blinked out–whether from prudence or from our fire we could not tell. Empty cartridge cases were flying about like corn in a popper. “This is the most fun I get out of a raid,” Stout yelled.
Bayse ordered the radioman to tune in San Francisco. The first strains of Christmas carols began to penetrate the static of our tight earphones. The static cleared away briefly and a ringing male tenor took up Come, All Ye Faithful.
Jan. 4, 1943
FOREIGN NEWS
GERMANY The Betrayer
Fate knocked at the door last week for Europe’s two fascist dictators. Mussolini, shot in the back and through the head by his partisan executioners, lay dead in Milan. Adolf Hitler had been buried, dead or alive, in the rubble of his collapsing Third Reich. Whether or not he had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage or had “fallen in his command post at the Reich chancellery” (as reported by the Hamburg radio, which said that he had been succeeded as Fuhrer by Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz), or was a prisoner of Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler as a political force had been expunged. If he were indeed dead, the hope of most of mankind had been realized. For seldom had so many millions of people hoped so implacably for the death of one man.
If they had been as malign as he in their vengefulness, they might better have hoped that he would live on yet a little while. For no death they could devise for him could be as cruel as must have been Hitler’s eleventh-hour thoughts on the completeness of his failure. His total war against non-German mankind was ending in total defeat. Around him, the Third Reich, which was to last 1,000 years, sank to embers. The historic crash of what had been Europe’s most formidable state was audible in the shrieks of dying men and the point-blank artillery fire against its buckling buildings.
All that was certain to remain after 1,000 years was the all but incredible story of the demonic little man who rose through the grating of a gutter to make himself absolute master of most of Europe and to change the history of the world more decisively than any other 20th century man but Lenin. Seldom in human history, never in modern times, had a man so insignificantly monstrous become the absolute head of a great nation. It was impossible to dismiss him as a mountebank, a paper hanger. The suffering and desolation that he wrought was beyond human power or fortitude to compute. The ruin in terms of human lives was forever incalculable. It had required a coalition of the whole world to destroy the power his political inspiration had contrived. How had it happened? If it was necessary to exterminate Hitler and his works, it was equally necessary to try to understand him.
Clearly so absurd a character, so warped and inadequate a mind, despite its cold-blooded political discernment, could not in so short a time have worked such universal havoc if it had not embodied forces of evil in the world far greater than itself.
May 7, 1945
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
GREAT BRITAIN Dearly Beloved
A million watched; millions listened to the warm young voices, the sonorous old voices. Billions of words about it were printed, and closely read. In Accra, where the equatorial sun beats down on the white church steeples (relics of a vanished Danish empire), parties were held in celebration. Paris noted it, and Panama. In heedless Manhattan, thousands got out of bed at 6 a.m. to hang over radios. Shanghai and Hankow had never seen so many weddings; Chinese brides deemed it lucky to be married on the day that Elizabeth, heiress to Britain’s throne, became the wife of Philip Mountbatten.
This wedding, on a dark day of a troubled, distracted and most uncertain time, carried over six continents and seven seas a brightness so simple it was hard to understand. Its appeal was too nearly universal to be explained by such words as “glamor,” “publicity,” “sentimentality,” or even by harsher and more present words, such as “power” or “wealth.” Of the millions who spoke and wrote of it, perhaps a London linotyper came closest to saying what it meant.
On the morning of the wedding, the linotyper, on his way home from work, paused amid the happy, shabby throngs. He answered a question, musingly: “I’m a good trade unionist, but the royal family means something. My father saw Victoria once, as close as you and me are now. Those two are getting married–they carry it on. I suppose it’s having something steady in your life. And God knows there isn’t much that’s steady these days.”
Dec. 1, 1947
SPORT Rookie of the Year
It was only a month since Speedster Enos Slaughter of the St. Louis Cardinals, galloping into first base, had spiked First Baseman Jackie Robinson. Jackie, the first avowed Negro in the history of big-league baseball, looked at his ripped stocking and bleeding leg. It might have been an accident, but Jackie didn’t think so. Neither did a lot of others who saw the play. Jackie set his teeth and said nothing. He didn’t dare to.
Last week the Brooklyn Dodgers faced the Cards again, and this time the pennant–and the Dodgers’ none-too-healthy 4 1/2-game lead–was at stake. The Cards were fighting back, late and hard. In the second inning, Jackie Robinson was spiked again–this time by trigger-tempered Catcher Joe Garagiola.
Next inning, at the plate there was a face-to-face exchange of hot words between Robinson and Garagiola–the kind of rough passage that fans appreciatively call a “rhubarb.” Umpire “Beans” Reardon stepped between the two and broke it up. That was the end of it; no fisticuffs on the field, no rioting in the stands. But it was a sign, and an important one, that Jackie had established himself as a big leaguer. He had earned what comes free to every other player: the right to squawk.
Sept. 22, 1947
MUSIC Jim Crow Concert Hall
One of the greatest concert singers of this generation is Marian Anderson, Philadelphia-born Negro contralto. Since she skyrocketed to fame in Salzburg four years ago, the music-lovers and critics of the world’s musical capitals have counted it a privilege to hear her sing. Last week it looked as though music-lovers in Washington, D.C., might be denied this privilege. Reason: Washington’s only large auditorium, Constitution Hall, is owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who are so proud they won’t eat mush–much less let a Negro sing from their stage.
Last January, when contralto Anderson’s manager tried to book Constitution Hall for a concert in April, D.A.R. officials said they were sorry but the hall was taken. When alternative dates were suggested, the D.A.R. frostily replied that all the dates were taken. While irate Washingtonians formed a Marian Anderson’s Citizens’ Committee and held a mass meeting attended by 1,500, Violinist Jascha Heifetz, who arrived in Washington on a concert tour, said he was “ashamed” to appear in Constitution Hall under the circumstances.
March 6, 1939
WOMEN Leg Panic
U.S. women, who are credited with having the shapeliest legs in the world, last week faced the horrifying knowledge that soon they would have to go silk-stockingless. Raw-silk imports from Japan had ended. There was just no more silk for stockings.
Aug. 11, 1941