FRENCH SABOTAGE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 September 1942, Page 4

FRENCH SABOTAGE

OCCURRENCES EVERY DAY ARMS FOR NAZIS. SLOWED DOWN AS RESULT OF ACTIVITIES. Sabotage continues to occur almost daily in France, states Egon Kaskeline, writing in the “Christian Science Monitor.” According to reports reaching London from the occupied territory, one of the three most important underground organisations alone has carried out more than 1200 damaging acts against aeroplanes, electric power plants, bridges, war materials and factories working for Germany. The severity of German retaliation has caused the French saboteurs to modify their methods somewhat. They are relying more and more on a kind of non-violent sabotage which is harder to detect than more direct methods, but which at the same time succeeds in slowing down armament production for Germany. Production orders, issued by the German authorities are delayed or deliberately misunderstood. Telegrams sent to the factories disappeared. Railway freight cars transporting essential parts to assembly centres are mysteriously dispatched to wrong destinations. French workers in armament plants show their inventive spirit in curtailing the production programme. These saboteurs will remove or destroy some identification tags or alter the specifications in a blueprint, and they will succeed in disturbing the assembly line in a big factory. Usually even the Gestapo will be unable to determine whether these disturbances were caused by accident or by ill-will. Inferior assembly work is often not revealed until the new truck taken to the road breaks down or until the new aeroplane crashes in flames. GESTAPO CONTROL WIDENED. However, if the organisations of French resistance have'improved their methods of hoodwinking Nazi supervision, the Gestapo likewise has not been idle. Gestapo control over French factories has been greatly extended, and the German police now work in close collaboration with the French secret police, the Surete Nationale. French factories are surrounded by German sentries, special German test offices have been set up, and many stool-pigeons, mostly plain-clothes agents of the French police, have been introduced to work at the assemblylines. As many French-made aeroplanes were destroyed while being tested, the German authorities ordered test flights to be made by French pilots, or, if French aviators were not available, by German test pilots accompanied by the French manager of the factory and by a delegate of the workers. When mass strikes occurred in one of the big French plants, the Gestapo arrested the strike leaders, and, at the same time, closed down all food stores in the neighbourhood of the factory. In many cases the starving workers were obliged to give in. The Germans who succeeded in crushing Communist agitation in their own factories and who, moreover, are themselves expert in the organisation of sabotage, are dangerous foes for the underground groups of the French factories.

If the Gestapo has been unable To destroy organised resistance, it has, nevertheless, succeeded in limiting the damage done by sabotage acts. In spite of the heroic resistance on the part of the French workers ’organisations, French factories turn out tanks, aeroplanes, guns, and ammunition for the German army in increasing numbers. It is very difficult to evaluate the. extent to which sabotage has slowed down France’s armament production in Germany’s service. Reports coming from France .estimate the loss in production through sabotage at about 20 per cent. The Nazis are also attempting to' check the influence of the underground movement by winning over French industrial workers to collaboration. In granting special advantages, especially higher pay, to workers in key factories or in coal pits, they endeavour to divide the French working class and Io create a privileged labour section. In the beginning, French workers remained uninterested in high overtime payments. In France today money cannot buy many essential goods. The Nazis, however, succeeded much better when they introduced overtime payment in the form of canned food. The French worker who knew that his wife and children were starving, was tempted by this possibility to improve his insufficient food ration. According to German reports, output in French factories has considerably increased since the Germans set up this system of payment, which speculates on the starvation of the French families.

REMOVAL TO GERMANY. Today the Nazis, helped by Vichy’s Chief of Government, Pierre Laval, are attempting to deal a crushing blow to the movement of resistance among the French workers. In evacuating hundreds of thousands of French workers whose factories will be closed down to German plants, Hitler not only finds much-needed manpower, but at the same time deals a blow at the network of underground groups which defy his power. Foreign workers will be more easily controlled in German factories, where, since 1933, close supervision of all labour has been set up. Yet the transplanting of French workers to Germany, which probably soon will become compulsory, is likely to be two-sided in its effects. While weakening the resistance movement in the French factories and diminishing the danger of sabotage, the Nazis at the same time will introduce many avowed enemies of Fascism in the heart of their war-production plants. The French underground organisations will be only too glad to extend the work of their sabotage groups right into the centre of Germany’s industrial power, and to propagate anti-Fascist ideals to the German worker.

The art of sabotage, of course, is a French invention, and it is in France that it has reached its highest degree of perfection. It was during the German occupation of France in 1870-71 that French workers threw their heavy wooden shoes (sabot) into the machines of French textile factories, thus originating both the word and the practice of sabotage.