"We Can Take It"

"London's ability to carry on under a continuous hail of bombs, amid seething wreckage and raging flames, without a roof over the heads of people, without sleep and with the slenderest food supplies, is not due to British ability to 'take it' or proverbial toughness.

"Rather, this England approaches death with sensual pleasure and smacks its lips over every phase and bears every humiliation and every cynicism if only it can hope that, in dying, it may also drag its enemy into the abyss. The psychopath knows that in such cases pleasure in destruction parallels pleasure in self-destruction.

"Thus is solved the puzzle of British toughness and endurance."

This remarkable dissertation was printed last week in the Schwarze Korps, official organ of Adolf Hitler's Elite Guard. Very different was a British document on the subject of "taking it" which arrived by clipper in the U. S. last week for early release--a seven-minute news film prepared by the British Ministry of Information. Title: London Can Take It. The picture is an unvarnished record of what happens to London and Londoners when hundreds of tons of explosive and incendiary bombs are dropped upon them day and night, week in, week out. For U. S. audiences, the commentator was big, beefy Quentin Reynolds, war correspondent for Collier's weekly, whose favorite vantage point for watching air raids was the unsheltered roof of his apartment building (Lansdowne House, renamed "Arson House") in London's swank Berkeley Square. Of all the tough U. S. writers covering the Battle of Britain, "Quent" Reynolds was close to the toughest, yet in a letter printed in Variety last week he said: ". . . You can only make all this London business exciting if you haven't been here. I've seen too many women and kids pulled out of houses dead to get any exciting kick out of this. It's just horrible--not exciting. . . . The New York papers shouldn't send war correspondents over here; they should send sportswriters.

This is a new sport, but still it is a sport! It is called shooting fish in a barrel."

We Can Survive. Persuading the rest of the world that Britain not only can "take it" but can live through it was placed high among Britain's immediate war aims last week by fighting Prime Minister Churchill. Snubbing a move in Parliament to have the Government restate its post-war aims, so as to reassure Europe's remaining small nations that Britain would be a better master than Germany, Mr. Churchill bluntly explained that, in the eyes of some people, Britain's very survival is in question. This was a grave new low in British fact-facing. It faced the new fact that now, after seven solid weeks of hammering from the skies, at least some sections of British opinion required the vital assurance Mr. Churchill sought to give. London could take it --but for how long?

General Pestilence. Again last week, in the form of a denial, the question of the Government's removal from London was publicly raised. Also, for the first time, public health in the bomb-battered capital was openly discussed. In the New States man & Nation appeared a brutally frank piece by Ritchie Calder, young scientific and sociological journalist, friend of H. G. Wells. Wrote he:

"We are facing a winter campaign which will be waged not by the R. A. F. nor by the Army nor by the Navy, but by the doctors on the home front." Writer Calder quoted the British Medical Journal: " 'We can foresee with the approach of winter a state of affairs in respect of contagious and infectious diseases more devastating than the Blitzkrieg.' "

No one accused the Nazis of showering germs over London. Instead, disease bar rages were being fired by Londoners at each other in their dank, ill-ventilated, evil-smelling air-raid shelters, where hundreds of thousands huddled together every night -- young & old, sick & well, with only makeshift toilet facilities and no chance to perform personal hygiene.

Writer Calder pulled no punches. Said he: "The lice and flea population is multiplying and that is alarming doctors. . . . Doctors are concerned about the risks of cerebrospinal meningitis, the dreaded spotted fever. ... It has been epidemic for a year, although for obvious reasons little public attention has been drawn to it. Indeed in one week the figure was the highest in the records of British public health. . . .

"This is the cycle year for influenza. ... In every shelter I've been in during the past six weeks I've heard that hacking 'shelter cough' and the wheezy sleep of the bronchial cases." Writer Calder advanced a program of shelter-life improvement and said: "The War Office must see this not only as a social measure but as a first-class military issue." He called for immediate evacuation from London of women, children, aged & infirm; for reform of shelter life to include better sanitary facilities, daily inspection by medical officers and cleansing by trained squads, more light and warmth, bunks arranged to keep sleepers' heads apart.

Conditions in London's upper-and middle-class shelter districts were not so grim as Writer Calder described. But raw weather and lack of fuel last week ended the "sleep trains" which used to take those Londoners who could afford them into safe, quiet countrysides. As for London's slum areas -- where hunting cats prowled hills of rubble by day and humans crouched by night under railway and sewer arches--Writer Calder's war lilies were anything but gilded.

The once great Ramsay MacDonald's diligent but dull son Malcolm, now Health Minister, last week reported to the House of Commons the Government's plans. He noted that 489,000 (56%) of London's children had been sent away; that crowding in big shelters, such as the subway stations, was being diminished; bunks were being installed, sanitation improved, inspections made, first aid provided. But his report did not go un-heckled. A Laborite doctor cried: "If he [Health Minister MacDonald] can remain for ten minutes [in a subway shelter] without becoming sick, he can stand more as a layman than I could stand after 35 years of qualified medical service." Another cried: "Within a quarter of a mile of Parliament there are conditions that would make a primitive tribe in South Africa blush."

Replied Malcolm MacDonald: "Our present trials ... are not the death agony of Britain but rather the terrible but hopeful birth pangs of a new Britain."

Casualties, Courage. Bomb casualties for the terrible month of September were announced last week. Among a total United Kingdom population of 47,098,000 they did not sound so bad--6,954 killed, 10,615 seriously injured, bringing the war-long totals to 8,365 killed, 12,352 injured. But the majority of these casualties were women, and four-fifths of the total died in long-suffering, lambasted London. And the cold death figures did not begin to reflect the casualties of heart and mind, the tolls of fear and despair and sickness.

Among others trying to solve London's dormitory-shelter problem was Admiral Sir Edward Ratcliffe Garth Russell Evans. And significant of the increasing seriousness of the morale problem was a visit by King George and Queen Elizabeth last week to some of Sir Edward's choicest bombed areas, new and old. As common sufferers whose home (Buckingham Palace) had received a share of bombs, Their Majesties picked their way through debris, watched wrecking crews work, talked with A. R. P. wardens.

The Air Ministry's belated story of how invasion was stiff-armed on Sept. 16 seemed timed to bolster public courage--and details of it came to Aircraft Production Minister Lord Beaver-brook's newspapers from "neutral" sources in Spain at just the right moment. A change in the command of the Home Fleet also well suited the emergency.

The Air Ministry talked about unleashing new, hidden fleets of fighters and bombers--fresh proof that Britain could survive. Laborite Arthur Greenwood, Minister Without Portfolio in the inner War Cabinet, made public the first official promise that vengeance for Londoners--demanded now by billboards appearing in London--would be wreaked on Berliners. Said he: "What has been done to London will be doubled to Berlin."

But everyone knew that Britain's aircraft production was still half Germany's, that the Nazis could raid by thousands while the R. A. F. must still husband its scores and hundreds. Lord Beaverbrook's Sunday Express came flatly out with the admission that aircraft production had seriously declined due to bombardment.

"Wake Up, Sluggards," headlined the Express. Observers began to suspect that under their grim, gritty exteriors, Britain's war leaders--no masochists such as the Schwarze Korps described--were beginning to look anxiously and beseechingly toward the U. S. There, airplane production was still small. (This winter probably less than 400 U. S. planes a month can be built for Britain, which wants thousands.) Thence, not even 25 old Flying Fortresses were yet forthcoming. In Boston, Mass., Sir Walter Thomas Layton of the Ministry of Supply spoke an appeal that was clearly a warning. Said he: "

There is no doubt that if the war potential of North America is organized and thrown into the scale, the combined strength of America and the British Empire can certainly surpass and outlast that of Germany and her satellites.

"But in war, time is all important. Hitler has been held up by British resistance. If the tide of Naziism is to be rolled back, both Britain and the United States must act with speed. . . .

"The inspiring leadership of Mr. Winston Churchill transformed the situation [in Britain] almost overnight. For week after week the workers gave up their Sunday rest, and by working round the clock, the output of the war factories leaped up. Leisurely arguments about the dilution of labor were brushed aside, unexampled powers to order any man or woman, civilian or soldier, to his post, to commandeer or to move machinery or any other kind of property were willingly conceded by Parliament to the Government, and with one consent the nation as a whole settled down to pull out a full war stroke. . . .

"Here in the United States you are asked at this moment to shoulder the double burden of helping Britain in addition to your own urgent defense program. America's resources are vast. But great though they be, this double task will require unusual measures and some interference with ordinary life. . . .

"I believe that the American people are ready and anxious to make that sacrifice."

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