FADING HOPES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 June 1942, Page 3

FADING HOPES

IN GERMANY & ITALY BUT NO EARLY COLLAPSE LIKELY. VIEWS OF RETURNING ALLIED NATIONALS. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) NEW YORK, June 2. The Swedish liner Drottingholm arrived bringing a large number of returning American diplomats, officials and pressmen from Europe. They included Admiral Leahy from Vichy. Mr Reynolds Packard, manager l of the United Press of America in Rome, said that fear of an Allied invasion led Italy to hold a mobile army of 1,000,000 in readiness to rush to any sector if attacked. Italy, therefore, was not sending additional forces to Russia. The fighting spirit is entirely missing from the Italian army. Every Italian soldiei* spoken to echoed the wish, “May this war end soon.” Mr Frederick Oechsner, manager of the United Press of America in Berlin, said that most of the Germans take the viewpoint that even success in Russia this summer would fail to bring the victory once pictured by Hitler. He said there is no indication that the Nazi system had reached breaking point, but there is increasing tension, and the cracks are widening. Sabotage and go-slow are ever on the increase in both Germany and the occupied countries, in factories, ships, and even in offices. Mr Oechsner said that in his opinion the external military 'pressure would finally cause the downfall of the Nazis, A big internal crack-up was unlikely in the immediate future.

Captain Adolph von Pickhardt, United States naval attache at Berlin, who was interned for five months, said that so far air raids on inland Germany had not affected German morale, but the Ruhr area was another story. He said the Germans still hoped to win because they felt they were politically more unified and consequently their production was better organised. Mr Pickhardt said he believed the German people still held the same regard for Hitler, but were disappointed by American entrance into the war.* Germans scorned Italy, but were surprised by the success of the Japanese. Those aboard the Drottingholm provided a variety of backgrounds. They included persons just out of concentration camps and other prisons. Some had'been sentenced to death and reprieved by the exchange of Germans imprisoned in America. For the 1 majority of the returning travellers, the meals aboard constituted the first good food for many months.