ESCAPEE FROM FRANCE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 3, Issue 264, 29 January 1941, Page 2

ESCAPEE FROM FRANCE

HOPES TO FORGET HORRORS

Major Stuart Benson, aged 63* American sculptor, author and soldier, is going to Tahiti to work and to try to forget the Battle of France. He arrived in Sydney in an American freighter alter escaping from France, where he Avas an ambulance driver in the American Field Service.

"I have been rejected by- every army fighting because of my age, so I am going back to art," he said. As a major in the American Expeditionary Force from 1917-19, Major Benson won the Legion of Honour, Croix dc Guerre and Croix de l'Etoile Noire.

Describing his adventures with the American Field Service in France, Major Benson said: "The Red Cross on ambulances and hospitals was marked too plainly. That one-time badge oi' safety has become a pretty target in "the Nazi philosophy. Near Crevecour I saw a French pursuit 'plane come out to engage 60 Nazis. He shot down a bomber and a group of parachute troops baled out. I don't like to kill things or see them killed, biU I yelled with exultation as that Frenchman shot down three of the parachutists. '- U I saw a truck with five deadj French soldiers,, a tank crew which, had come from Amiens. They had surrendered to the Germans, who took away their arms and then shot them through the head with re-> vol vers. You could see the powder marks on the backs of their heads. The German shock troops did not take prisoners. We picked up a peasant woman with 17 machine gun bullets in her body. She had been tending cows in a field, quite alone,when a German machine gun plane swooped down and gunned her." Campaign in America. After the collapse of France Major Benson went back to America to speak on behalf of the British cause cm'the national radio network. Berlin radio immediately launched a violent - attack against him, and branded him as "an unmitigated liar." "I wanted to wake up my countrymen to the dangers of Nazism and to campaign against Mr Hoover's plan for sending American food-« stuffs to France," Mftjor Benson said. "A friend of mine, now a cle Gaulle supporter, was asked to run a ship from an African port to Marseilles with 6000 head of mutton. He agreed to do so, providing the mutton went to the French people. A careful check of that cargo revealed that 95 per cent went to Germany and the French got 5 per cent,"