“The commander is busy. I just wanted to see the children. Now we go.”
As they got into the car, looking back at a window where three little faces peered out at him, he said: It’s not much of a house. Not like your mansion in the Grunewald! It’s just a cracker box. The German pay scale isn’t like the American. I thought you’d be interested to see how they live. He’s a good U-boat officer and they’re happy. He’ll have a command in two years. Right away if there’s war. But there won’t be war. Not now.”
“I hope not.”
“I
“I guess so.”
As they drove into the small coastal town, Pug said, “Say, I could stand a beer. How about you? Is there a good place?”
“
“He’ll survive.”
“Yes. Englishmen are good at that.” Grobke laughed with transparent pleasure at keeping the American naval attache from the famous correspondent.
Young men in turtleneck sweaters and rough jackets sat at long tables in the dark, smoky, timbered cellar, bellowing a song to concertina accompaniment played by a strolling fat man in a leather apron. “Jesus Christ, I have drunk a lot of beer in this place, Henry,” said Grobke. They sat at a small side table under an amber lamp. Pug showed him pictures of Warren, Byron, and Madeline. After a couple of beers, he told of his worry over Warren’s involvement with an older woman. Grobke chuckled. “Well, things I did when I was a young buck! The main this is, he’ll be an aviator. Not as good as a submariner, but the next best thing, ha ha! He looks like a smart lad. He’ll settle down.”
Pug joined in a song he recognized. He had no ear and sang badly off-key. This struck Grobke as hilarious. “I swear to God, Victor,” he said, wiping his eyes after a fit of laughter, “could anything be crazier than all this talk of war? I tell you, if you left it to the navy fellows on both sides it could never happen. We’re all decent fellows, we understand each other, we all want the same things out of life. It’s the politicians. Hitler is a great man and Roosevelt is a great man, but they’ve both been getting some damn lousy advice. But there’s one good thing. Adolf Hitler is smarter than all the politicians. There’s not going to be any war over Poland.” He drained his thick glass stein and banged it to attract a passing barmaid. “
The barmaid clacked on the table two foaming steins from clusters in her hands. Grobke drank and passed the back of his hand over his mouth. “Suppose I tell you that I heard the Fuhrer
“
“Aha, you’re a little curious? I have a brother in the foreign ministry.
Victor Henry sat with his old portable typewriter on his knees, in the rosewood-panelled library. The magnificent antique desk was too high for comfortable typing; and anyway, the machine scratched the red leather top. It was not yet four in the morning, but the stars were gone, blue day showed in the garden, and birds sang. White paper, yellow paper, and carbons lay raggedly around him. The room was cloudy with smoke. He had been typing since midnight. He stopped, yawning. In the kitchen he found a cold chicken breast, which he ate with a glass of milk while he heated a third pot of coffee. He returned to the library, gathered up the top pages of his report to the Office of Naval Intelligence, and began reading.
Nazi Germany is a very peculiar country. The contradictions strike the observer as soon as he arrives. The old Germany is still here, the medieval buildings, the quaint country costumes, the clean big cities, the order, the good nature, the neatness, the “thoroughness,” the beautiful scenery, the fine-looking people, especially the children. However, there is an extra layer of something new and different: the Nazi regime. It’s all over the face of this old country like a rash. How deep it goes is a serious question. The Nazis have certainly put up a highly patriotic, colorful, and warlike facade. The swastika flags, new buildings, marching battalions, Hitler Youth, torchlight parades and such are all very striking. But what is behind the facade? Is there a strong potential for war-making, or is it mainly political propaganda and bluff?
This report gives the first impressions of an officer who has been in Germany four weeks, and has been digging for facts.
It is common knowledge that since 1933 Germany has been frankly and even boastfully rearming. Even before the Hitler regime, however, the army surreptitiously armed and trained in violation of the Versailles Treaty, with Bolshevik help. Once the Nazis took power, though the Russian contact was dropped the rearming speeded up and became open. Nevertheless, twenty years ago this nation was disarmed. Seven years ago it was still helpless compared to the Allies. The question is, to what extent has that gap been closed by Hitler? Building a modern combat force is a big-scale industrial process. It takes material, manpower, and time, no matter what vaunting claims political leaders make.
Two preliminary and interesting conclusions emerge from the facts this observer has been able to gather.
(1) Nazi Germany has not closed the gap sufficiently to embark on a war with England and France.
(2) The regime is not making an all-out effort to close the gap.
The next five pages contained ten-year figures — contradicting many intelligence reports he had read — of German factory production, of the expansion of industry, and of the output of machines and materials. He drew heavily on his own reading and inquiries. He presented comparisons of French, British, and German gross national products and of strength on land, sea, and in the air, during this decade. These numbers indicated — as he marshalled them — that Germany remained inferior in every aspect of war-making, except for her air force; and that she was not pushing her industrial plant very hard to catch up. Contrary to popular opinion all over the world, there was no feverish piling of arms. This emerged by a comparison of plant capacity and output figures. He described in passing the desolate peace that fell over the Swinemunde navy yard at the usual quitting time. There was not even a second shift for constructing U-boats, the key to German sea warfare. He argued that the edge in the air would rapidly melt away with the present British speedup in making airplanes and buying them from the United States. As to land war, the swarming uniforms in the city streets were quite a show; but the figures proved that France alone could put a larger, longer trained, and better equipped army in the field.
On a U-boat, passing through the squadron’s tiny flag office, he had seen scrawled on the outside of a mimeographed report some figures and abbreviations that he thought meant: operational, 51 — at sea, 6; in port, 40; overhaul, 5. These figures met the intelligence evaluations of the British and the French. Grobke had claimed seventy-four operational boats, a predictable overestimate when talking big to a foreign intelligence officer. But even exaggerating, Grobke had not gone as high as a hundred. Fifty U-boats were almost certainly the undersea strength of Nazi Germany, give or take five, with perhaps only thirteen under construction. In 1918 alone Germany had lost more than a hundred U-boats.
Then came the crucial paragraph, which he had typed with many pauses, and which he anxiously read over and over.
What follows gets into prognostication, and so may be judged frivolous or journalistic. However, the impression that this observer has formed points so strongly to a single possibility, that it seems necessary to record
