SAW NAZI METHODS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 2, 3 January 1941, Page 6

SAW NAZI METHODS

BITTER MEMORIES

AN AMERICAN SCULPTOR

(By Trans-Tasman Air Mail, from "The Post's" Representative.)

SYDNEY, December 26,

Major Stuart Benson, 63, American sculptor, author, and soldier, is going to Tahiti to work and try to forget the Battle of France. He arrived in Sydney in an American freighter after escaping from France, where he was an ambulance driver in the American Field Service.

"I have been rejected by every army fighting because of my age, so 1 am going back to art," he said. As a major in the American Expeditionary Force from 1917-19, Benson won the Legion of Honour, Croix de Guerre, and Croix de I'Etoile Noire.

Describing his adventures with the American Field Service in France, Major Benson said: "The Red Cross on ambulances and hospitals was marked too plainly. That one-time badge of safety has become a pretty target in the Nazi philosophy. Near Crevecour, I saw a French pursuit plane come out to engage 60 Nazis. He shot down a bomber, and a group of parachute troops baled out. I don't like to kill things or see them killed, but I yelled with exultation as that Frenchman shot down three of the parachutists.

ACTS OF ATROCITY

"I saw a truck with five dead French soldiers, a tank crew which had come from Amiens. They had surrendered to the Germans, who took away their arms and then shot them through the head with' revolvers. You could see the powder marks on the backs of their heads. The German shock troops did not take prisoners.

"We picked up a peasant woman with 17 machine-gun bullets in her body. She had been tending cows in a field, quite alone, when a German machinegun plane swooped down and gunned her."

After the collapse of France Major Benson went back to America to speak on behalf of the British cause on the national radio network. Berlin radio immediately launched a violent attack against him and branded him as "an unmitigated liar."

- "1 wanted to wake up my countrymen to the dangers of Nazism and to campaign against Mr. Hocver's plan for sending American foodstuffs to France." Major Benson said. "A friend of mine, now a de Gaulle supporter, was asked to run a ship from an African port to Marseilles with 6000 head ol mutton. He agreed to do so, providing the mutton went to the French people. A careful check of that cargo revealed that 95 per c 'nt. went to Germany," and the French got 5 per cent."