A SPECTATOR
'S NOTEBOOK
THE unanimity of the conviction that an answer to the flying bomb will soon be found is complimentary to our scientists. In fact, various answers are already forthcoming, involving nothing more revolutionary than adaptation and developmetat of normal R.A.F. technique. The bombing of the bases and the destruction of the doodle-bugs (the R.A.F. has a genius for nomenclature) in the air have reduced the dangers of the new weapon to compassable pro- portions. To go too far in the direction of underrating it would be foolish. The formula "casualties and damage have been reported" often covers something appreciable in damage and loss of live, though nothing, of course, comparable anywhere with the German raids of three and four years ago. The ordinary course of life remains entirely unaffected. Whatever the doodle-bugs may have achieved, either in Goebbels' imagination or in -reality, they were quite incapable of disturbing the Englishman's week-end gardening. For the decision to launch this haphazard and indiscriminate weapon now there are, of course, plenty of explanations. First, Germans had been promised retaliation for what the R.A.F. has done to Berlin and other cities, and some attempt had to be made to redeem the promise. Second, it is equally necessary to divert atten- tion if possible from the military situation in France ; in this Goebbels appears to have been temporarily successful. Third, now that invasion is an accomplished fact there is an obvious prospect that the ground on which the launching-platforms stand will soon be in Allied hands ; it is therefore now or never for the secret weapon. Fourth, the Germans obviously hoped that our bombers would be diverted wholesale to attacking the launching platforms ; the mass raid on Berlin on Tuesday is sufficient conunentary on that. The Air Ministry is encouragingly confident of the capacity of the R.A.F. to deal with the situation, but the possi- bility that the Germans have a few machines with larger ex- plosive-carrying capacity ready or nearly ready cannot be excluded. The public's duty is to avoid scrupulously, any undue exposure during warnings.
* * * * Since I dwelt last week on the conflicting reports regarding the food situation in Normandy, I have been watching the various cor- respondents' messages further. It seems clear that Normandy, always a prosperous dairy-farming country, has been living well in spite of German occupation. The rest of France is in a very different state ; the Germans possibly were rather disposed to conciliate a population immediately behind their Atlantic Wall. But the French administrators when they take full control will have a difficult problem on their hands. The Normandy that lives well is the Normandy of the countryside, not of the towns. Bayeux, I believe, has been complaining fiercely of the prices its citizens have had to pay the peasants for milk and butter, and Cherbourg will probably have the same story to tell. Nothing is more difficult to handle than this kind of rural profiteering, for to fix maximum prices means often enough cutting off the supply, or else stimulating the creation of a black market. This problem may face the new French administration with its first stern test.
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"[He] changed his plans, and on July 12 appeared off St. Vaast de /a Hague on the eastern shore of the Cotentin. . . . The bridges at Careman and St. Lo had been broken down, and without a single day's rest -the army reached Caen on the 16th. . . . Meanwhile the fleet had not been idle. The whole coast from Roche Masse and
Cherbourg to Ouistreham had been pillaged and burnt" Not, it is clear, Montgomery's campaign, for the month is July, not June. Nor are the military movements quite identical with the last fort- night's.. Actually the campaign described—Edward III's, with Crecy as its first great battle—was fought six centuries ago. In two years' time, if it is thought tactful to the French to recall that particular piece of history, we shall be commemorating the first great Normandy campaign, with the same place-names promit*nt as today, and the same sea-power as the controlling factor. The men of that cam- paign, moreover, were as much ancestors of General Homer Bradley's countrymen—many of them at any rate—as of Gene, di Montgomery's.
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Lord Davies will be greatly and widely regretted. He was a remarkable idealist, and his business success, as a director of Ocean Coal and Wilson's, the Great Western Railway, the Midland Bank, and other similar concerns, prevented anyone from writing him off as a well-meaning enthusiast. Enthusiast he certainly was —for Wales, and particularly for health and education in Wales ; for world peace, and particularly for the League of Nations Union and the New Commonwealth, which he founded in order to propagate his belief in the need for force behind law. When I saw on Sunday.a note by Lord Cecil recalling that D.D. (as his friends used to call him, in perpetuation of his David Davies days) had ardently advocated the choice of Constantinople as the seat of the League of Nations, it struck rte as a curious coincidence that only the previous day I had been reading an unpublished letter addressed by the late Lord Rosebery to a friend some forty-five years ago, in which the ex-Premker wrote (from a yacht in the Mediter- ranean), "London is, but Constantinople was clearly intended by the Creator to be, the capital of the world."
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I wrote last week of the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence on which an Arnerican negro soldier was' condemned to death by a court-martial on a, charge of rape alleged to have been committed in a village near Bath. I am glad to see that General Eisenhower, as Commander-in-Chief, has disallowed the sentence. The wording of his decision is curious—" General Dwight D. Eisenhower has disapproved with [? of] the finding of guilty' in the sentence of death imposed on Technician Fifth Grade Leroy Henry... because of insufficient evidence." The natural inference would be that the prisoner was to be regarded as "not guilty," but that seems not to be the case. There will apparently be a new trial, with the death-sentence ruled out.
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Our, commentators, the B.B.C.. and otherwise, do not seem very strong historically in ,the matter of Elba. We have been told variously that Napoleon was imprisoned there, .that he was exiled there, and, by a perhaps intelligible confusion with the next stage of his remarkable career, there was a .ccinfident reference to the Hundred Days on Elba. Actually the Emperor, who abdicated at Fontaineblea. u in April, 1814, stayed in Elba till March xst, 1815, more than three hundred days. He was no prisoner ; he ruled the small island while he remained there. He left it for the Hundred Days of restored power, followed -by a less voluntary departure to a more distant island. Elba pritsed into the hands of Tuscany on his fall; and became part Of United Italy in x86o.
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