WIFE'S STORY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 303, 23 December 1939, Page 7

WIFE'S STORY.

SAVED HUSBAND.

PRISONER IN SPAIN.

SOFXS FOR HXB RELEASE.

(From Oar Own Correspondent.)

SAN FRANCISCO, November 24,

No story for yean has caused ths popular interest of that unfolded by Mrs. Harold Edith Dahl, a 31-year-01.l blonds singer, whose thrilling letter and picture of herself in an evening gown ■aved her captured husband, Harold, from execution, when ahe returned to the United States and vowed to continue her fight for his release from a Spanish prison and restoration of American cit-i----senship. Revealing that Dahl, a. Champaign, Illinois, aviator, who was captured while flying for the Loyalists during the Spanish civil war, was faced with the prospect of remaining in prison until the end of the European war at least, his wife was a lonely figure when the liner Exorchorda docked in Boston Harbour. She said she planned to plead with the State Department in Washington for intervention in Dahl'i behalf and then would seek restoration of-his citizenship. Dahl automatically forfeited his citizenship when he enlisted to fly under the flag of Loyalist Spain. Discussing her letter and picture sent to General Francisco Franco, urging him to commute her husband's death sentence, Mrs. Dahl said: "I told him my husband wai young and that war flying was his profession. I told him, which was true, that my husband would have flown on either side with equal readiness so long as he was paid for it. Franco replied, offering me safe conduct if I wanted to visit Harold in prison, but my passport would not permit my irbinir through the lines." She was fashionably dressed, with an expensive fur piece over her coat as she went ashore'from the Exorchorda at the army base in Boston. Mrs. Dalil said she had not heard from her husband for

more than two months, and her last three letters to Franco, begging for the flyer's release, had gone unanswered. In his last letter to her, she said, Dahl said he did not expect to get out of prison until the European war ended. "I wrote to General Franco and told bim I knew my husband was ill and that 1 wanted to get him out of wartorn Europe," said Mrs. Dahl. "Now I am glad to be back in America, where I can take up my cause with high officials in Washington." Addresses Nation.

Distaste for publicity, she said, had kept her abroad. "If I had come here and gone on with my professional work," she explained, "people would have said I was capitalising on Harold's predicament." °

"One night, three years ago, I met my husband," she said in a broadcast. "From the moment we met we were in love. He was an aviator and had been out of work looking for a city job. He was offered a job training aviators in the Spanish war, and b-i thought we could be married despite the handicaps. The fact is, we were young and in love, and why not go to Spain even if danger faced us.

"Ten days la*er we were married and off to Europe we went blithely enougb. We found ourselves in Paris and »e wandered around the streets of the French metropolis. I discovered that I could not get a visa for Spain, but we arranged for him to go to the war fronr He left and said be would send for me later. Directly after he had gone 1 thought it was a terrible situation for us to be parted. Later, my husband wrote to me that he was fighting in the air, and every night I could see his 'plane being shot down and Hived iu continual terror until I received a letter from him.

"I consoled myself, but one day I received a telegram saying Harold was 'killed in action.* Those three words continually dinned in my ears, and I realised that my life was not worth living with Harold dead. I did not desire to live and I kept saying. 'My darling, they have killed you.' Then an envelope was pushed under my door and I found he had been captured by Franco's men. "I knew it was the firing squad for hitn. I wrote to General Franco to ask my husband's life to be spared. At length General Franco replied saying

Harold's life would be saved. Afterwards my husband wrote elating he had been tried and pardoned, and that he would be with me very soon.

"I got work singing in London, and when the European war broke out I lost my job, and now I am back in the United States. I am going to work very hard to contact the authorities in Washington, and I feel convinced that as a result" of my efforts I will see him [hack in America with me soon."