LONDON AND THE WAR

Evening Star, Issue 24056, 1 December 1941, Page 9

LONDON AND THE WAR

HITLERS HOSTAGES INDUSTRIAL SPURT FOR RUSSIA [From Our Correspondent.] September 16. It is not realised in this country under what terrible conditions 'people are living under Nazi occupation. A hand-to-hand struggle between German seamen and the population occurred some weeks ago in the Norwegian port of Aalesund. The German authorities were secretly deporting 70 fathers of young Norwegians who had escaped to England to join the Free Norwegian forces. The fact became known, and about 5,000 Aalesunders, nearly a third of the total population, demonstrated against the Assistant Chief of Police, who was supervising the deportations. Several demonstrators, elderlv women included, were arrested. The crowd tried to block the way to the bridges leading to the port, whereon the police called in naval ratings from a German warship lying in the port. The sailors were met with stones, and shots were fired. Whereon one of the hostages addressed the crowd, pointing out that their action could serve no useful purpose. He ended with “ Long live the King,” and called on the demonstrators to sing the National Anthem. The hostages then marched to the quay through a double row of singing Norwegians. The Prime Minister has emphasised the necessity, now that some of our own and much of America’s war supplies will go to Russia, for unrelaxed industrial efforts. Our factories must make good the equipment ive might otherwise have counted on for our own victory effort. Yet, looking back on what we have done in two years, we have some reason, to be proud. Briefly, \ye have in two years reached the level achieved only in the fourth year of the last war. By March, 1941, 480 ships had been built _ for the Royal Navy since the beginning of the war. In one week in that month ships totalling oyer 1,100.000 tons were returned to service after repair in British shipyards. The output in our machine-tool industry is six times that of the peacetime level. Last year we doubled by British production alone our power of bomb discharge on Germany at 1,500mile range. We have the biggest bomb ever dropped, with five times the blasting power ever before used. IMPRESSIVE FIGURES. We now have fighter planes operating up to 40,000£t. We began the war with machines at 1,000 horse power. We now have them at 2,000. The last week of August was a record for output of assembled aircraft, aircraft parts, and aircraft repairs. We have, in fact, in the seventh quarter of this war equalled our production of warlike stores in the fourteenth and culminating quarter of the last war- This achievement is tho more remarkable since it has been accomplished largely by new recruits to industry. .One-third more people are working now in war industries than a year ago, and a great many are trainees and newcomers. When these, come closer in practice to the skilled craftsmen who a year ago achieved. wonders after Dunkirk wc may well reckon on even better results. The women’s contribution plays an important part. One steel firm employs 90 per cent, women on work formerly done by men. A' gun factory has 60 per cent, women labour, only 5 per cent, of Whom had factory experience, and even our naval dockyards are increasing their existing 5 per cent, of women labour. PROPAGANDA BOMBS. We have heard nothing about air propaganda in Germany since those excessively naive efforts before the real war started in the West, when our IR.A.F. reconnaissance planes dropped : pamphlets on the Reich. Those efforts were untimely as well as naive. They put quite the wrong sort of viewpoint at a time when Germans were all cock-a-' hoop and confident of blitzkrieg victory. Latterly we have been dropping some more propaganda as well as bombs on Germany, including Berlin, and this, in contradistinction to" the earlier efforts, is both well phrased and well timed. The German people, no longer cock-a-hoop, and bitterly disillusioned by the prospects of a long war, are in a much more receptive mood now than when Poland was being overrun by .their Fuhrer. CANCELLED. Information has reached London that in September, 1940,-a large number of Hamburg dockers were brought to France. The idea was that when the invasion of Britain took place they were to be. rapidly transported to this country to unload war material. Many German ships were ready, too, in order to transport this material. Among them was the Europa, completely transformed, and with ports cut in her sides so that tanks could be rapidly loaded on to barges and thus taken ashore. A great many of these intended transports were, however, either destroyed or seriously damaged by R.A.F. bombers. Quite suddenly everything was called off and the dockers were sent hack to Hamburg. “ And now,” observes a report from some of them, “ we have the bombs here.” DUTCH TESTIMONY. A Dutchman who managed to escape from Holland five weeks ago has given a vivid account of conditions under the German yoke. Justice has disappeared, he declares, and none is immune from the insults of swaggering blackshirts. Nobody knows what his fate may be from day to day. Groups walking in the streets suddenly disappear. Relatives have no idea what has happened to them. People have been sent to concontration camps instead of their neighbours, if the latter did not happen to be at home when the Gestapo called. Prison conditions are bestially appalling. A casual remark may cause a man to be beaten up by the Gestapo, if not shot out of hand. A man who forgot his blinds were not drawn when ho returned home one night switched on the electric light for just a second, until he realised he had not blacked out. The light was on only for a second. Soon after there was a knock at his door. He answered it. A shot rang out, and the man fell dead from the bullet of a Nazi policeman. His action was upheld by tho authorities. So far from accepting the German “ New Order,” the Dutch talk of “ bijltjesdag ” —axe day—when accounts will be settled with the invaders. BELGIUM’S CASE. The Belgian Foreign Office has compiled an official account of what happened* in 1939-40. Though naturally in present ‘circumstances it avoids so far as possible anything like recrimination, it does set forth quietly the causes contributing to Belgium’s downfall. “ The chief cause was the great superiority which the Powers who were .the guardians of peace had allowed the Rowers to acquire.” That is indisputably the fundamental error

that led to this war. What still meedsto be stated is why this calamitous toleration was displayed, and by whom. Old Pilsudski, when Hitler marched into the Rhineland, put it in black and white to France—“ You cau stop him now in a fortnight; in five years’ time you may not he able to stop him at all.”' By the same token it was when tho Rhineland march passed unheeded byi Paris and London that Belgium de- j cided to back out of the. Locarno Pact. Beyond all this, however foolish the refusal to link up later with France and Britain, Belgium did make a sound pact with Holland for mutual defence, and, when the German avalanche came, fought bravely against impossible odds for a time. But it was a forlorn hope, and King Leopold’s urgent appeal for air assistance never reached us. Surrender was inevitable, though, possibly the King would have been wiser to get; away to England. GERMAN AGENTS IN U.S.A, One very startling revelation has already been made in the trial, how proceeding in New York, of a group of German* espionage agents. Americans have treasured nothing more jealously than their secret bomb sight, the Norden. This was kept a close secret even from us until the war was well advanced, when it was eventually communicated to our 11.A.F. experts. But it now appears that this precious secret was unravelled three years ago by one of these German espionage agents, and duly communicated at that time to Germany, who became the possessors of it for tho comparatively insignificant sum of £I,OOO. Some of the accused Germans secured posts in highly confidential war equipment workshops. There seems to have been no limit to their audacity, even to the extent of asking the American War Department point-blank the purpose _ of certain chemicals. It is an ironical thought that the Luftwaffe has been bombing London and other cities in this country with America’s “ secret ” sight. LOVE-A-DUCK! The exigencies of the epoch—and the margarine coupons—compel shopkeepers to use imagination nowadays in making Up their shop window displays. There is one famous haberdasher’s at the West End in whose windows is arranged a nice assortment of what the haberdasher calls “ steel helmets.” In other words, our old last-wqr acquaintance tho battle bowler, ■ alias tin hat.” These very durable, if slightly _ monotonous, sartorial adjuncts are priced at 15s 6d each. And to think how, iu 1914-18, we light-heartedly handled,' mishandled, mislaid, abused, and left around in the niud and the trench debris those now valuable souvenirs. I doubt whether any campaigner of that era, no matter what his racial astuteness, bethought him of collecting tin hats to retail a quarter of a century later at practically a quid a time. Any industrious scrounger, who possessed psychic powers, might have laid by a small fortune with - ease. Curiously enough, one never sees an old German, helmet for sale. Yet'these were much better than ours, whether considered from a utilitarian or a purely artistic standpoint.