Alarums

Tradition of the ancient bells of the Church of St. Mary-le-Bow in London is that anyone born within reach of their chimes is a Cockney. The chimes are also used during British Broadcasting Corp.'s medium-wave broadcasts in German, and lately in Germany anyone within reach of them has been in danger of having trouole with the Gestapo.

Not strictly on the verboten list, B. B. C.'s straight and accurate news broadcasts nevertheless are not music to Gestapo ears. Germans caught listening to them in groups of three or more, for example, may find themselves in concentration camps. The B. B. C. broadcasts should have been hard for Gestapo snoopers to spot, because they are usually spoken in flawless German, but the Bow Bell chimes proved a dead giveaway. Last fortnight B. B. C. decided to keep the Bow Bells at home for the Cockneys, substituted for German ears a softly ticking metronome instead.

That many German radio listeners should prefer un-Nazified B. B. C. news has been a source of surprise and indignation to Nazidom. In March the Nazis decided to fight fire with fire. "Our enemies," went the Nazi boast, "will soon realize that we are superior to them in the ether as well as in the air." On the day of the Memel occupation, Germany inaugurated medium-wave broadcasts in English, directed at England. The first "Heer iss Hamburg" bulletin depicted Nazi Memel as a "hurricane of happiness."

Finding its broadcasts getting nothing more than attentive laughter in Britain, the Nazi radio last month decided to provide more English news, jokes, gems from the London Times. London newspaper stories were hurriedly translated by German journalists in London, telephoned to Berlin, retranslated into more Munchausen English and waved back to Britain twelve hours later. When the laughter continued, the Propaganda Ministry grudgingly hired an Englishman, a member of Sir Oswald Mosley's Fascist Blackshirts, at 1,000 marks ($400) a month to do the job the British way. Attempting to get across in a me-to-you, or Boake Carter way, he remarked in his tryout broadcast: "I admit that I am a renegade, but I am still an Englishman, and I ask you to bear with me." That was the end of him. Now the job is handled by a German announcer whose mother was English.

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