Planes, Men, Medicine, Soap

Grizzled, schoolmasterish Sir Walter McLennan Citrine, head of a British Labor Party mission to Finland, returned to London last week and immediately called a press conference. "If the Finns can get delivery in the next two months on aircraft now earmarked for them by foreign countries," said he, "it is quite in the cards for them to become masters of the air."

This was cheering news for friends of Finland, who read each day of savage Russian attacks on five fronts (see col. 3), but Sir Walter's if was big. Although British, French, Italian, Swedish and U. S. planes have been fighting in Finland, they have not been enough to prevent the Russians from bombing Finnish cities almost at will. Military experts estimate that it will take only 500 planes to give the Finns equality in the air, and about 250 had been allotted by the Allies up to last week--although not all of these had been delivered. Whether the rest of the quota had been promised by other countries, or whether the Allies had upped their allotment, Sir Walter did not make clear.

But that aid to Finland was gathering momentum was clear. Following a meeting of the Allied War Council (see p. 22), the Manchester Guardian's diplomatic correspondent came out flatly with the statement that "the Allies are moving toward intervention in the Finnish war." At Whitehall, a Government spokesman blandly ignored correspondents' questions as to whether the Guardian's statement represented the official British view, but in the House of Commons Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went out of his way to damn Russian air attacks on Finnish towns and to announce that further Allied aid "now is on its way."

Two hundred volunteers promptly signed up to go to Finland, and it was reported that a force of 5,000 was being recruited.

> Britain and France arranged to transport Italian "volunteers" and airplanes, which had been refused passage through Germany, across France by train and thence to Finland in British ships.

> From Copenhagen to Finland went 62-year-old Colonel Valdemar Tretow Loof, who had just resigned from the Danish Army, to take command of 600 Danes already there, incorporate them into a Danish battalion. His acceptance by the Finns ended a squabble between the Finns and the Danish volunteers, who had been commanded by a Finnish major. Besides these infantrymen, the Danes have a ten-plane air wing in service with the Finns (its ace flier, Lieut. Fritz Rasmussen, was recently shot down in action), 13 surgeons and 40 nurses with the hospital service. Last week Copenhagen began recruiting a labor battalion of blacksmiths, masons, carpenters, metal workers, farm hands. Nearly 10,000 signed up, at $60 a month, before the recruiting office had to close for clerks to catch up with the applications.

> An unrevealed number of Poles, veterans of September's stampede, left France for Finland. With them were some Polish-American mechanics who had volunteered too late to help Blitzkrieged Poland.

> Three hundred Finnish-American volunteers reached Finland from Sweden, crossing the Haparanda-Tornea bridge which, a few days earlier, a Communist had been caught trying to mine.

> Stockholm reported that three ships loaded with German material for Russia were on their way to Finland. Berlin hotly denied that Germany was helping Russia.

> Altogether, about 8,000 volunteers have already joined up with the Finns, according to Sir Walter Citrine. Of these, about 5,500 are Swedes, 1,000 Norwegians, 600 Danes, and the rest Frenchmen, Dutch men, Belgians, Poles, Americans, a few Estonians who crossed the Gulf of Finland in fishing boats under the nose of the Russian fleet.

> Of U. S. aid to Finland (see p. 69) Sir Walter was sharply critical. He said the U. S. was lagging far behind other nations in quantity of material, in the speed with which it is being delivered. Furthermore, said he, Russia has been getting U. S. gasoline and gunpowder (see p. 17). To prove it he produced a cartridge which had been part of some captured Russian material, said it was filled with Du Pont powder.

> As the first large shipment of medical supplies from the American Red Cross reached Helsinki (ten ambulances, 123,496 dressings, 2,000 sheets, operating gowns, tents, drugs, clothing), the New York Evening Post's ambulating Columnist W. L. ("Young Bill") White took occasion to explain to his fellow Americans what the Finns think of them. Wrote he:

"They know we sympathize with them . . . and they are grateful about this and also very mad and bewildered by it as well. We are buying them medical supplies, food and clothing. . . . Now it just happens that there is plenty of food in Finland and enough warm clothes and an ample supply of aspirin, and while of course it would be nice to have more, the Finns just now are thinking about other things. ... I have to explain that my country, in addition to being generous and sympathetic toward Finland, is also tenderhearted and wants to make sure that none of this money will be used in such a way as might cause injury or discomfiture to a Russian aviator flying over the working-class section of a Finnish town. ... I always try to explain this point of view without making my countrymen look like a bunch of sentimental whacks."

> In Washington, Federal Loan Administrator Jesse H. Jones told reporters that at the head of the list of purchases made by the Finns with their $10,000,000 U. S. loan was soap. "They said they wanted to clean up the Russians," he explained. "I don't know whether they were being facetious about it, but that's what they told us."

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