Berlin Diary (82 page)

“No, I wasn’t kidding,” I said, a little taken back by his dead certainty. “Do you mean you think the invasion will be completed and England
conquered before Christmas, captain?”

“I shall be home with my family this Christmas,” he said.

We have lunch here at Boulogne, the food fair, a bottle of Château Margaux, 1929, excellent. After lunch our party goes out to loot a little more with the marks. In a perfume shop I pick up a conversation with an engaging little French sales-girl after I’ve convinced her by my accent that I’m an American. She says the Germans have cleaned out the town of silk stockings, underwear, soap, perfume, coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, and cognac. But she is mainly interested in food. “How will we find enough to eat this winter?” she asks.

About four p.m. we start back for Brussels, driving some distance inland through Saint-Omer, Lille, Tournai.

B
RUSSELS
,
August
16

In a couple of fields along the way this afternoon, we saw what looked under the camouflage like barges and pontoons loaded with artillery and tanks. But there was certainly not enough to begin an invasion of England with. However, two or three German
officers in our party keep emphasizing what we saw and hinting that there is much more that we didn’t see. Maybe. But I’m suspicious. I think the Germans want us to launch a scare story about an imminent invasion of Britain.

L
ATER
. 2
a.m
.—To bed now, and the German anti-aircraft guns still pounding away at the British bombers. The noise started shortly after midnight. Can’t hear or feel any bombs. Suspect the British are after the airport.

B
RUSSELS
,
August
17

A little annoyed at not getting back to Berlin today. I feel depressed in these occupied cities. And the Germans won’t let me broadcast from here.

I went out to call on Mme X, a Russian-born Belgian woman, whom I’ve known for twelve years. She has just been through a frightful ordeal, but you would never have suspected it from her talk. She was as charming and vivacious and beautiful as ever. When the Germans approached Brussels, she set off in her car with her two young children. Somewhere near Dunkirk she got caught between the Allied and German armies. She took refuge in a peasant’s house and for several days lived through the nightmare of incessant artillery bombardment and bombing. Fortunately there was enough food in the house so that they did not starve. The children, she said, behaved beautifully. When it was over, she related simply, she found enough gasoline in the barn to get back to Brussels. The banks were closed and she had no money, but the German army, seizing her car, paid her a few thousand francs in cash, so that she could buy food.

Her chief worry, she said, was about Pierre, her husband,
but even that had turned out better than she had expected. Though a veteran of the last war and a member of Parliament, he had volunteered the first day of the war and gone off to fight. She had heard nothing from him until last week when word had come that he had been captured.

“He’s alive,” she said softly. “I’ve been lucky. We both might easily have been killed. But we’re both alive. And the children. I have been fortunate.”

Pierre, she had heard, had been put to work on a potato farm near Hamburg.

“But Hitler announced a month ago he was releasing all Belgian prisoners,” I said.

“One must be patient,” she said. “He is alive. He is on a farm. He cannot be starving. I can wait.”

From my talks with Belgians and French in the last few days it is encouraging that they both place their last desperate hopes on the British holding out. For they now realize that if Hitler wins they are doomed to become a slave people. Despite the stiff prison sentences being meted out by the Nazis to anyone caught listening to a foreign radio station, they all keep their sets tuned in to London, their hopes ebbing and flowing with the news they get from the BBC. They have all asked me desperately: “Will the British hold out? Have they a chance? Will America help?” The fact that all the newspapers in occupied territory are forced to publish only German propaganda often throws them into fits of depression, for Goebbels feeds them daily with the most fantastic lies.

On the Channel the Germans would not let us talk with the German pilots, but this afternoon Boyer and I, sitting lazily on the terrace of a café, struck up a conversation with a young German air officer.

He says he’s a Messerschmitt pilot who took part in the big attack on London yesterday and the day before. (The planes we saw going over from Calais then were London-bound.) He does not appear to be a boastful young man, like some pilots I’ve met.

He says quietly: “It’s a matter of another couple of weeks, you know, until we finish with the RAF. In a fortnight the British won’t have any more planes. At first, about ten days ago, they gave us plenty of trouble. But this week their resistance has been growing less and less. Yesterday, for example, I saw practically no British fighters in the air. Perhaps ten in all, which we promptly shot down. For the most part we cruised to our objectives and back again without hindrance. The British, gentlemen, are through. I am already making plans to go to South America and get into the airplane business. It has been a pleasant war.”

We ask him about the British planes.

“The Spitfires are as good as our Messerschmitts,” he says. “The Hurricanes are not so good and the Défiants are terrible.”

He gets up, explaining he must see a comrade in the hospital who was wounded yesterday and rushed here for an operation. Dick Boyer and I are impressed and depressed. Dick has just arrived over here and does not know the Germans very well.

“I shall write a story about what he said,” Dick remarks. “He seemed absolutely sincere.”

“That he did. But let’s wait. Flyers, you know, have large horizons.”

L
ATER.—
Dick and Fred Oechsner and I are having a night-cap in the bar of the Atlantis about midnight when there is a dull thud outside.

“A bomb, close,” the Belgian waiter thinks.

We go outside, but do not see anything. When Dick comes in later, he reports it pulverized a house in the next block and killed everyone in it. Out towards the airfield we can hear the
flak
pounding.

A
BOARD A
G
ERMAN ARMY TRANSPORT PLANE
, B
RUSSELS TO
B
ERLIN
,
August
18

The morning papers of Brussels interesting. The Belgian paper has this headline over the story of the bomb we heard last night:
“L’IGNOBLE CRIME ANGLAIS CONTRE BRUXELLES!”
The Germans make the Belgians print such headlines. But I’m more interested in the High Command communiqué in the German-language paper, the
Brüsseler Zeitung
. It reports that in Friday’s air battles over Britain the English lost 83 planes and the Germans 31. What was that our sincere little Messerschmitt pilot told us about seeing practically no British planes on Friday and that there was no opposition from the RAF?

At the Brussels airport I note that we have been taken to the field in a roundabout way, so that we approach it some distance from the main hangars. But our plane is not yet ready and there are a dozen German army officers scrapping as to which two of them shall be taken on our plane back to Berlin, and I take advantage of the commotion to stroll over towards the hangars. Two of them have been freshly bombed, and behind them are large piles of wrecked German planes. The British attacks, then, were not so harmless.

To note down the contents of a poster I saw placarded all over Brussels yesterday: “In the village of Savanthem near Brussels, an act of sabotage has been committed.
I have taken fifty hostages. In addition, until further notice there will be a curfew at eight p.m. Also all cinemas and all other kinds of pleasure centres will be closed until further notice.”

It is signed by the German commandant. It is good news. It shows the Belgians are resisting. Noon now and coming into Berlin.

B
ERLIN
,
August
20

An air-raid alarm last night, the second in a week, though we have not had a half-dozen since the war began a year ago, and the Berlin population, unlike that of northern and western Germany, has been utterly spared the slightest inconvenience from the war.

The sirens sounded forty-five seconds before I was due to broadcast. I was sitting in the studio with a German announcer (who I notice lately follows a copy of my script to see that I don’t cheat). We heard the alarm, but saw no reason for not going on with our work. A frightened English lad, one Clark, seventeen-year-old son of a former BBC official, who with his mother has turned traitor and is working for the Nazis, pounded on the studio window and shouted: “
Flieger Alarm!
” The German with me fortunately was not frightened and motioned him away. Our broadcast then began. Afterwards I was a little surprised at the excitement in the control room, since the people in Belgium
and France take a nightly pounding without thinking much about it. Part of the excitement, it developed, was due to the fact that the broadcaster of the news in Spanish had made for the air-raid shelter at the first sound of the sirens and missed his broadcast, which was to have begun as soon as I finished mine. When I returned to the radio offices from the studios, one of the office boys,
who at night becomes an all important air-raid warden, tried to hustle me down to the cellar, but I refused. We listened to the anti-aircraft guns from a balcony and watched the searchlights, but they couldn’t pick up the British planes which kept over the factory districts to the north.