Berlin Diary (68 page)

Some of my friends thought that was being a bit optimistic—from the Allied point of view. Maybe. But I’m not so sure.

First American ambulance driver to be captured by the Germans is one Mr. Garibaldi Hill. The Germans have offered to release him at once. Only they can’t find him.

Word from our people in Brussels today that there is food in Belgium for only fifty days.

Ran into one of our consuls from Hamburg. He says the British have been bombing it at night severely. Trying to hit, for one thing, the oil tanks. He claims they’re dry. It seems that the Germans took all the anti-aircraft guns from Hamburg for use at the front. Hence the British came over without trouble and were able to fly low enough to do some accurate bombing. The population got so jittery that the authorities had to bring some of the guns back.

B
ERLIN
,
June
1

Though the public is no more aroused about the great victories up on the Channel than they have been about anything else in this war, the newspaper headlines today do their best to stir up interest. Typical is the
B.Z. am Mittag
today:
“CATASTROPHE BEFORE THE DOORS OF PARIS AND LONDON—FIVE ARMIES CUT OFF AND DESTROYED—ENGLAND’S EXPEDITIONARY CORPS NO LONGER EXISTS—FRANCE’S 1ST, 7TH, AND 9TH ARMIES ANNIHILATED!”

The mass of the German army which liquidated the Allied forces in Flanders is now ready for new assignments. There are two courses open to the German High Command. It can strike across the Channel against England or roll the French back on Paris and attempt to knock France out of the war. From what I gather in military circles here, there seems to be no doubt that the German command has already chosen the second course and indeed moved most of its troops into position facing what is left of the French along the rivers
Somme and Aisne. General Weygand has now had ten days to organize his armies along this line, but the fact that he has not felt himself strong enough to attempt an offensive northward from the Somme against the fairly thin German line—a move which if pushed home would have saved the Franco-British-Belgian armies in Flanders—has convinced the German generals, if they needed convincing, that they can crack his forces fairly easily and quickly break through to Paris and to the Norman and Breton ports.

I learn from a High Command officer that God at last has given the British a break. They have had two days of fog and mist around Dunkirk and as a result the Luftwaffe has been unable to do much bombing of the transports busily engaged in taking off British troops. Today the weather cleared and Göring’s bombers went back to work over Dunkirk beach. Says the High Command tonight in a special communiqué: “The rest of the defeated British Expeditionary Force tried today to escape on small craft of all kinds to the transports and warships lying off shore near Dunkirk. The German air force frustrated this attempt through continuous attacks, especially with Junker dive-bombers, on the British ships. According to the reports received so far, three warships and eight transports, totalling 40,000 tons, were sunk, and four warships and fourteen transports set on fire and damaged. Forty English fighter planes protecting the ships were shot down.”

No mention of the German air losses, so I assume they were larger than the British—otherwise Göring would have mentioned them. The Junker-87 dive-bomber is a set-up for any British fighter.

The Germans claim today that the battleship
Nelson
, flagship of the British Home Fleet, has been sunk with the loss of 700 of her crew of 1,350. So far as I can
make out, the only source for this is an alleged dispatch from the A.P. in New York. But a naval officer tonight insisted it was true. He said the ship was sunk on May 11.

B
ERLIN
,
June
2

Those British Tommies at Dunkirk are still fighting like bulldogs. The German High Command admits it.

Its official war communique today: “In hard fighting, the strip of coast on both sides of Dunkirk which yesterday also was stubbornly defended by the British, was further narrowed. Nieuport and the coast to the northwest are in German hands. Adinkerke, west of Furnes, and Ghyvelde, six and a quarter miles east of Dunkirk, have been taken.” Six and a quarter miles—that’s getting close.

In the air the Germans again make mighty claims. The official communiqué: “All together, four warships and eleven transports, with a total tonnage of 54,000 tons, were sunk by our bombers. Fourteen warships, including two cruisers, two light cruisers, an anti-aircraft cruiser, six destroyers, and two torpedo boats, as well as thirty-eight transports, with a total tonnage of 160,000, were damaged by bombs. Numberless small boats, tugs, rafts were capsized….”
²³

Despite the lack of popular enthusiasm for this collossal German victory in Flanders, I gather quite a few Germans are beginning to feel that the deprivations which Hitler has forced on them for five years have not been without reason. Said my room waiter this morning:
“Perhaps the English and French now wish they had had less butter and more cannon.”

And yet the picture this capital presents at this great moment in German history still confounds me. Last evening, just before dark, I strolled down the Kurfiirstendamm. It was jammed with people meandering along pleasantly. The great sidewalk cafés on this broad, tree-lined avenue were filled with thousands, chatting quietly over their
ersatz
coffee or their ice-cream. I even noticed several smartly dressed women. Today, being the Sabbath and a warm and sunny June day, tens of thousands of people, mostly in family groups, betook themselves to the woods or the lakes on the outskirts of the city. The Tiergarten, I noticed, also was thronged. Everyone had that lazy, idle, happy-go-lucky Sunday holiday air.

One reason for this peculiar state of things, I suppose, is that the war has not been brought home to the people of Berlin
. They read about it, or on the radio even hear the pounding of the big guns. But that’s all. Paris and London may feel in danger. Berlin doesn’t. The last air-raid alarm I can recall here was early last September. And then nothing happened.

B
ERLIN
,
June
3

BBC just announced that the Germans
bombed Paris this afternoon. Maybe the Allies will drop a few on Berlin tonight.

Donald Heath, our chargé d’affaires, was called to the Wilhelmstrasse this noon and handed a copy of a press release in which the German government stated it had information from confidential sources that the British secret service planned to sink three American liners—the
President Roosevelt
and
Manhattan
now en route
to New York with American citizens, and the
Washington
en route to Bordeaux to bring back a further batch of American refugees. The Germans informed the American government through this press release—a curious diplomatic procedure—that strict orders have been dispatched to all German naval commanders instructing them not to molest any of the three American ships.

An official statement in the release said: “The Reich government expects the American government to take all necessary measures to frustrate such a crime as the British contemplate perpetrating.”

The German “theory” is that if the ships are sunk the Americans will blame the Germans. Something very suspicious about this. What is to prevent the Germans from torpedoing these American vessels themselves and then crying to the skies that the British did it and that Berlin had even gone out of its way to warn Washington beforehand that the British would do it. Submarine periscopes are very difficult to identify.

B
ERLIN
,
June
4

The great battle of Flanders and Artois is over. The German army today entered Dunkirk and the remaining Allied troops—about forty thousand—surrendered. The German High Command in an official communiqué says the battle will go down in history “as the greatest battle of destruction of all time.” German losses for the western offensive, as given out tonight, are said to be: dead—10,252; missing—8,467; wounded—42,523; planes lost—432. All of which is very surprising. Only three days ago the military people tipped us that the losses would soon be given out,
and that they were approximately 35,000 to 40,000 dead; 150,000 to 160,000 wounded. But most Germans will believe any figures they are given.

The communiqué speaks of Allied losses: 1,200,000 prisoners, counting the Belgians and the Dutch. And a whole navy destroyed, including five cruisers and seven destroyers sunk, and ten cruisers and twenty-four destroyers damaged. It also claims the German navy did not lose a single vessel.

Paris says 50 killed, 150 injured in yesterday’s German air-raid. BBC says the Parisians are demanding revenge. But no planes came over here last night; none so far tonight….

I’m worried about Tess and Baby. She called this afternoon, said she’d at last got passage on the
Washington
, but that it would not call at Genoa. She must get it at Bordeaux. But she’s advised not to cross France with the French in their present panicky mood. The railroad near Lyon which she must take has been bombed twice this week by the Germans. And she would still prefer to stay on.