Report on England

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 128, 5 December 1941, Page 6

Report on England

HEN the battle of London was at its height Ralph Ingersoll, editor of PM, the youngest, but already one of the most enterprising of New York’s newspapers, flew across the Atlantic to get the pictures with his own eyes. He remained a fortnight, and then, before his, impressions had faded, flew home again and committed them at once to paper. The result, "Report on England" (John Lane) has just reached New Zealand. Very wisely Mr. Ingersoll wasted no time polishing his Ms. but got it into print at the earliest possible date. He did not even arrange it all methodically, but threw it together more or less as it fell, which was as things happened ‘to him day by day. So he has afterthoughts and overflows, bits and pieces to dispose of at the end, and many questions left without answers, But it is a vivid picture he presents, a story that will at once amaze and thrill New Zealanders. We publish here some typical passages.

distinct from a human being -my position in England as the first American publisher to get myself on a ‘plane and fly 3,000 miles to see and talk and be with the British, meant that, instead of snooping and prying and sparring for facts and information, I met no one anywhere in any walk of life who did not seem to feel that for the little time I was with him the most important thing in this world was to tell, explain and show and make possible for me to see and hear what I wanted. Not-and this is most importantwhat he or she wanted me to see or hear, but what I wanted. Not even in the Ministry of Information, whose job after all was to sell me Britain’s point of view, did anyone anywhere try to sell me anything. Even my most challenging assertions-such as that enormous numbers of Americans believed the British Government would still sell out its people and appease the Fascists-were met and discussed frankly and thoughtfully. So were expressions of scepticism that a democratic revolution was really taking place in England. N a journalist-a journalist as * % * BROADCASTER’S TESTIMONY MURROW (London representative, Columbia Broadcasting Corporation) told me he had never seen anything like the way the English people took it, and praised their cheerfulness and complete confidence. They could take it and come back to win. He said he doubted if there ever had been anything like it. Hé said, "The English will drive you crazy. They are so slow. It takes them so long to get around to doing anything." But he said, "They do get around to it. I get worried about them. But they get around to it." Because I urged him, he told me about narrow escapes he had had. Several times he had been knocked down on the street, and houses around him had been blown down. He told me funny stories about how a friend had just come to town and was sitting in the apartment and he was describing the noises in London and saying, "An incendiary bomb goes like this: swish-swosh and then a plunk. And then another swishswosh and another plunk." And then as

if in echo came the sounds, " Swishswosh, swish-swosh, swish-swosh, plunk, plunk, plunk." And there were incendiary bombs on the roof upstairs. They went up and put them out with shovelfuls of sand. He told me what he thought about a lot of individuals-bad, indifferent, and good. How he felt about different phases of the war. He said that just for fun he asked his Home Office to make inquiries on whether the Germans would let him come to Berlin to broadcast and how he got. back this extraordinary answer: "We will be very glad to have Mr. Murrow represent Columbia Broadcasting Company in Berlin, providing he is willing to give us his word as a gentleman that after coming to Berlin he will not visit England again until after the war." * * * IN THE BBC CONCERT HALL WE stopped and peeped into the great BBC concert hall. This was really the first big shelter I saw. The seats were out of it and the whole floor and the whole stage were carpeted solid with human figures. It was also dark in the hall and it took a minute to grasp the scene and understarid it. Ed said, "The people are in their first sleep and that’s why they are so quiet." Later on in the night he said they would be more restless and there would be more ‘coughing and turning. It’s a strange feeling to be standing in the doorway and looking into a concert hall in which people are not listening to a concert but sleeping on the floor en masse. My first surprise was at how tight they were packed. Later on I got used to this. In all but the swankiest and daintiest shelters in London, people sleep packed tightly. Face against face. Elbows overlapping,

After a while, when my eyes got used to it, I could identify family groupsfather, mother, child, curved into one another like piled saucers set on edge. a ba * HOW MUCH DAMAGE? ] SAW a map, 10ft. by 10ft. square, marked with pinheads to show damage in London. I was allowed to look at it for several minutes. This is what I saw: Along the winding river where the docks and warehouses are-evidence of heavy continuous bombing. Around certain military objectives, such as power stations, termini -- concentrated bombing. ‘Two scores for those who believe German bombs seek military objectives. Over the rest of the area of the city of London, bombs scattered with an almost scientific evenness. The map looked as if whoever stuck the pins in it wanted to be sure that there was no square inch without at least one-positive proof that a major theme of German bombing is non-military in objective, aimed solely at terrifying the civilian population. As to the accuracy of the bombing of military objectives, here I make no qualifications. The aim is surprisingly, astonishingly, amazingly inaccurate. I am, as a result of what I’ve seen in London, extremely sceptical about all claims of severe damage to military objectives small in area. Yet in Holland and Belgium and France there is no doubt whatever that military objectives were utterly demolished-even military objectives as small as country crossroads. The secret of the difference, of course, lies in control of the air-treal control of the air, ability to do what it likes in thé air, can destroy anything above ground utterly and completely. An army that has not control of the air, but can only fly into it on a hit-and-run

basis or by night and at great altitudes even then, cannot destroy what it likes, must waste its energies and its ammunition in fantastic proportion. ES * * IN A TUBE HILDE MARCHANT, Ben Robertson and I walked down one tube, around the corner, and back the other. For exactly half a mile we walked, literally after each step having to find a place to put the next foot down without «stepping on something human. As you might pick rocks to make _ stepping-stones across a stream. As you walk into the tube the sounds of its humanity come to meet you-the breathing and the snoring and the coughing. The three sounds blend, but are distinguishable. As you walk into the tube the air seems to meet you, push gently, then shove, and finally almost to wrestle with you. Toward the middle of each tube it is so heavy and dense you really feel as if you could take handfuls of it and pack them into mud pies. Whether it was space or the time of night, most people in the tube seemed to be lying in positions that showed their faces. Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of walking past so many sleeping people-walking past them until they ceased to become merely a spectacle and began being human beings again. But walking past the people in the Liverpool Street tube made me cry. I thought, many people become children again when they are asleep. And all become individuals. They stop defending themselves from each other in their sleep, stop being frightened. The children kept stopping us. Most of the children have gone from London and there are not many in the shelters. But in the Liverpool Street tube there seemed to be a lot. Probably because it was so safe and people went a long way to make what was most precious to them safe. There were a lot of children in the Liverpool Street tube. They were very beautiful. Some put their arms around each other or around their mothers. There were several whole families of them, two, three and four children, and seeing them lie by each other in ascending size you could tell how far apart they had been born.: % * * CENSORSHIP FOUND in Great Britain, for instance, no evidence to believe that we in America had been either intentionally misled or confused, or that, con(Continued on next page)

What An American Editor Saw

(Continued from previous page) sidering all things, any unreasonable amount of news had been withheld. The news that we don’t get is contemporary news of military operations or military or civilian damage in England. I use the word "contemporary" because it appears the British policy to confirm any bad news several days later. ... ‘I admit to having been suspicious of the vagueness in which cables about damage to London were worded-suspicious that detail was omitted to conceal more extensive damage than was acknowledged. Ilaving been in London I now admit that * would not alter or circumvent the censorship in this respect even if I could. ... After I had been in London a few days I asked a dozen American correspondents to lunch and we discussed the censorship with no English present. Not one of the journalists there but had his or her inventory of gripes or complaints about this or that stupidity. A damn fool in Dover refused to let Robertson report a battle he saw in which two British ’planes were shot down and seven Germans. Another in London bottled the news that the King’s former resident had been hit and that the King had said, "Well, now I’m a real Londoner." Things like that. As one of the things I wanted to find out was how much news they-who knew infinitely more than I-had been unable to transmit to America, I did my best to egg them on. But instead of getting any startling revelations I got, believe it or not, a defence of the English censorship from the Americans who fought with it every day. It was the Americans who explained to me that to tell what bombs were falling at what addresses at what time might very conceivably improve the accuracy of the bombing of London--the last thing that anyone in that room wanted to be party to. The fact that there’s a censorship at all, and that it’s composed of so many individuals bright and dull, helpful and irritable, wise and foolish-and that any censor in doubt will prefer to censor too much rather than too little-has the

cumulative effect of dampening and flattening out copy — and undoubtedly conceals more than it means to. I did not write when I was in England, not because I wanted to put one over on the censor by waiting until I came back, but at least partially because I knew that I would have to argue about and justify a lot , that I wrote and it all seemed like too much work. The correspondents who write to the American newspaper readers every day do have to argue and justify, often lose the best phrases in their copy because a stupid man does not understand them. But the moral of all this is that the censorship that is at work to-day is really more of a chronic nuisance than a menace to truth and accuracy in news. * * Oz

SHOCK HEN the bombing began, Dr. Glover told me, he and some other psychiatrists had organised a clinic to be opened three days a week to receive from shelters and hospitals those individuals who were being broken down emotionally by the terror. He said that they thought they would begin with three days a week to see what happened. They thought it might be quite bad. "And was it?" I asked. Dr. Glover shrugged his shoulders. "It’s hard to believe," he said. "We closed it down because we had no patients." I asked him how he accounted for it. He said, "It is a very interesting thing. One can only speculate. But I believe it is because the experience of being bombed is so. universal."

I said I didn’t quite understand. He said, " Well, I will put it this way. In the last war when men were in the trenches in France and they had only a little rest behind the lines between bombardments, there was always far away behind them the peaceful countryside in France or England-if anything happened to them they knew that that was where they would go. So when :t

got too much for them things happened. A trigger finger became paralysed. A man lost his sight. But now these people in London, for instance, each day read that Scotland and the Midlands have been bombed. There are no green fields for them to go to in their imagination. Since there is no escape they accept reality and when they accept it they get used to it. " But," he added, "I’m not really sure that’s right. It is simply extraordinary but it is quite real. People are not made depressed or ill by being bombed." % * Ed BUSINESS AS USUAL USINESS as usual in London means just what it says. By day. Not by night, but by day. The night is something else again. But by day it’s business as usual. It really is. How can I make it clear? There is a sense of frustration about trying to convey some-thing-so commonplace. I know no better way than to reprint a letter-a business communication on the well-known letterhead of Selfridge and Co., Ltd. Those

who care to may call it a masterpiece of British understatement, of faultless commercial calm. Whatever it is, it is one of the few exhibits I have from London about which I can honestly and genuinely and without qualification say the word "Typical." The letter: Dear Madam: As you have doubtless read in the Press, on the night of the 18th inst. we were selected by enemy raiders as a "military objective,’ but fortunately the Store only received slight damage and had it not been for the delayed action bombs in the neighbourhood we should have opened as usual the following morning. The fact that, the authorities prevented us from opening caused a certain amount of inconvenience to our customers, which is much regretted, although in co-operation with our associate House, William Whiteley, we endeavoured to fulfil all provision orders and to deliver on time all rationed foodstuffs. If by any chance you were put to any inconvenience we feel sure you will appreciate that the circumstances were entirely beyond our control, but we are happy to inform you that every department in the Store (including the Provision Section) is now functioning quite normally, With compliments, Yours faithfully, SELFRIDGE & CO., LTD. ue * * WINSTON CHURCHILL Y first impression was that Winston Churchill was smaller, rounder, neater and redder than I imagined from his pictures. His eyebrows, his rusty hair, are thin red. I am quite tall myself, so that people sometimes look small / to me who do not look small to other people. The Prime Minister looked very small to me. I found his voice and conversation milder than I had anticipated. He sat down with his back to the fire and I sat alongside of him. One of the things I wanted most to bring from England was a first-hand message from the Prime Minister to the American people. And after all I am a journalist and there would be news in such a statement. I wasn’t to have my cake. As soon as I began asking him

questions, the Prime Minister said that this message must be a "private conversation." I tried to argue with him. Prime Ministers don’t argue with well! He turned me down gracefully but definitely, remarking reasonably that expressing oneself accurately was difficult and that when he had something to say publicly he liked to think a great deal about it and work it out in his own way. So we talked as one must talk with the President of the U.S., "not for publication." We talked for half an hour, I waited some minutes, chatting with his secretary. He was a dark, slim, young man in his middle thirties who said he had been secretary to Mr. Chamberlain before he was secretary to Mr. Churchill... I said Mr. Chamberlain wasn’t popular in America, and he said, "Ah, that’s a pity. I think he was very much misunderstood." I turned the conversation back to’ Mr. Churchill. I asked the secretary if he would tell me Mr. Churchill’s routine because I said I was interested in how a man ran a war. The secretary said, "He has an enormous amount of energy, you know. I think the thing about Mr. Churchill that has not been emphasised enough is his military knowledge and experience. It is very rare, you know, that a Prime Minister can talk to his generals on a basig of equality. Mr, Churchill has them in heré and he knows what they are talking about." I asked if they ever talked back and argued with him, He said: "Oh, my heavens, yes!" Everywhere I went in London people admired his energy, his courage, his singleness of purpose. People said they "didn’t know what Britain would do without him." He was obviously respected.. But few felt he would be Prime Minister after the war. He was simply the right man in the right job at the right time: the time of a desperate war with Britain’s enemies. Everyone remarked that he loved his job and that he had risen to his terrific responsibilities brilliantly. [REPORT ON ENGLAND. By Ralph Ingersoll, John Lane at the Bodley Head. Through Whitcombe & Tombs.]