No So Cozy

Not So Cozy

The Germans hate to be caught off guard by a sudden offensive thrust at an unexpected point. It confuses them and upsets their own carefully laid plans. Last week the British surprised them outside Paris, and they bawled their displeasure to high heaven.

In the Paris industrial region the Germans had it pretty cozy. British air power had battered the French coast and pounded many a target in the provinces-power stations, chemical works, coke ovens, refineries, railroads and rail yards. But Paris had not been molested. At Billancourt, on the Seine just outside the city, lay the great Renault plant, which in the time of France's late 40-hour week employed 30,000 workers. Now it clanged away, making tanks, engines, planes and trucks for the Germans-the Russians had found some Renault-built tanks abandoned by the Nazis on the Eastern Front. At Billancourt, also, were the smaller Farman and Salmson works; they, too, made war materials for the Nazis.

Altogether it was one of the busiest and safest of German war arsenals, safer even than many industrial centers in Germany, which the British had bombed freely. It was pleasant at Billancourt to see the work go on and the product flow out, without interruption except for the shooting of a saboteur now & then.

Apparently the British did not dare to attack Billancourt. Was not Admiral Darlan awaiting just such a provocation to bring the French Fleet* within the sphere of collaboration? Of course the British had broadcast warnings to the workers of Billancourt that they might bomb the district. But that, thought the Germans, was probably only a clumsy British attempt to wage a war of nerves.

"He Will Come Again." When the British bombers converged on Billancourt from various directions last week, they encountered no defense except spotty machine-gun fire from the ground. Wave on close-packed wave of bombers plastered the Renault plant and the two smaller works for two solid hours. Some planes were so low when they delivered their loads that they caught a few splinters from their own bombs; even the heavy bombers were just out of machine-gun range. The bombardiers could see factory buildings falling apart "like houses of cards." They dropped leaflets saying to the French workers of Billancourt: The British pilot is your friend. Now that he knows where to strike, he will come again.

Navy Commandant Jules Fontaine, chief of Admiral Darlan's secretariat, happened to be in Paris. From the roof of a five-story apartment building in nearby Auteuil, Commandant Fontaine saw a sight he had never thought to seethe night sky reddened by a score of great fires in the Renault plant. Scuttling back to Vichy the next day, he described the roar and crackle of flames, the screams of people trapped in the debris, and said that the ruins were still smoking when he left. The raiders sent some 200 planes in all, Commandant Fontaine estimated, and they dropped about 2,000 demolition bombs, plus innumerable incendiaries.

Next day British reconnaissance planes impudently took low-altitude photographs of the ruins. The photographs showed heavy damage all over the Renault plant. Especially hard-hit were the tank assembly shops (microscopic scrutiny of the pictures disclosed wrecked tanks inside), the main gas tank, the power station. The only unscathed sections were the tire-making shop, which was not in the target area, and the Diesel assembly shop.

The Plot That Failed. Nevertheless the British had killed French workers. This was the opening for Nazi propagandists. But they, like the military defenses, were caught off guard. They bemoaned "a blood bath with no military objective" -an accusation belied, not only by the British photographs of the industrial damage but also by Commandant Fontaine's eyewitness account of it. They pointed out that the Luftwaffe had spared beautiful Paris-which looked silly in the face of Vichy admissions that the British had not hit Paris proper. The casualty figures were contradictory: Commandant Fontaine put the number of dead at 600; the Germans raised this to 2,000 plus; at week's end Vichy reduced it to 365.

The collaborationists in Paris and the men of Vichy wrestled manfully with the mess. Collaborationist Jacques Doriot's newspaper called for an immediate French declaration of war against Britain. Marshal Petain, proclaiming a day of national mourning for the dead, declared: "The bloody attack . . . striking only at the civilian population, will arouse general indignation and take on the character of a national catastrophe." These sentiments Ambassador Gaston Henry-Haye echoed in Washington to a totally unimpressed Sumner Welles, who called the raid "legitimate" and who three days before had said that the U.S. would recognize Free French New Caledonia. The British seemed quite sure that the sad and sensible people of Occupied France would understand and approve what they had done. De Gaullist circles in London assured them of that. All over France men had died for minute, perilous acts of sabotage that could not have accomplished in years what the British had done in one night.

*Russian news agency Tass reported this week that Vichy had given Germany 40 warships and "many" submarines that were under construction at the time of the armistice. Tass said that an agreement for gradually transferring a large part of the French Navy had long ago been reached.

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