UNFLATTERING VIEW

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 May 1941, Page 2

UNFLATTERING VIEW

TAKEN OF LINDBERGH IN FRANCE. SAID TO HAVE BEEN USED BY GERMANS. Only those who were in Paris at the time of Lindbergh’s great trans-Atlan-tic flight can appreciate the tremendous enthusiasm of his welcome and the intense disappointment of the French at the really shabby way he treated them. With tact the French hid the rudeness Lindbergh displayed in almost openly disdaining the honours the French wanted to do him, not only in 1927 but later when he made a sudden landing at Les Ormeaux, near Paris. All he would allow was a small entertainment on the latter occasion by a number of French flyers. Lindbergh did not shine at that party, said one who was present. A French journalist in London puts much of Lindbergh’s strange attitude to the account of loyal observance by the British Press of Lindbergh’s desire for privacy when he came here to seek refuge. Like so many “front page” heroes who ask for silence, Lindbergh did not like it when he got it and found himself just plain MiAnybody, said the French critic. But the Germans had sized him up in a trice, and when he visited Germany lavished medals on him and made him feel the British had neglected his greatness. “If the newspapers of his own country have quoted him aright,” said the French newspaper correspondent, “and Lindbergh has been able to declare that France and England are responsible for the war, then he can be safely left to the judgment of the citizens of the United States. .When the history of the war comes to be written it will be found that the Germans used Lindbergh also to fly their first signals of distress when they made him reiterate before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee that he believed the war would end by compromise. It will not end by compromise but by victory of the democracies.”