Moral Cement

When France crumbled, amateur tacticians who had been doping the war by counting airplanes, calipering tank armor and timing inundations awoke with a nasty start to the realization that morale is more than a mere word in patriotic orations, that morale is often the simple and terrible difference between victory and defeat. They remembered that lesson as they breathlessly watched bombed Britain, weighed its morale, found it good.

Last week their attention was abruptly called to Berlin by three significant symptoms:

1) The first of a new batch of 75 trainloads of Berlin children, expected ultimately to total 30,000, chuffed out to the safety of the eastern provinces to join the 60,000-odd Berlin youngsters, 42,000 little Hamburgers, mixed thousands of tots from other bombed cities already there.

2) Nazi spokesmen burst into howls of rage at being strafed, shrieked that the nocturnal raiders were "night gangsters," their bombings "organized terrorism."

3) The censorship betrayed a certain nervousness by establishing a "cable curfew" barring the transmission of any military news between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. (bombing hours).

As Berliners learned from sleeplessness and air-raid-shelter misery that two can play a cruel game, the world pricked up its ears, wondered: the Nazis can give it; but can they take it?

After the fall of France, when they realized that it would not be long until Hitler began to bomb Britain, the British began to bomb Germany seriously. The first bombing (as distinct from pamphlet) raid on Berlin occurred Aug. 25. Of the 23 bombing raids on Berlin up to this week, nine have taken place since Oct. 1, when lengthening nights made it easy to make the 1,100-odd-mile round-trip flight in darkness. Then R. A. F. raids on Berlin left the "manifestation" stage, began to work up toward the deadly thoroughness that long ago forced evacuation of thousands of nonessential inhabitants of the industrial Rhineland and Ruhr, some to as far as the country districts around German-held Paris. Berlin "the unbombable" reeled under bombs. It hurt. And Adolf Hitler, who has always claimed it was the German home front and not the Army which collapsed in 1918, knew that danger well.

Berlin is no more Germany than London is Britain; but many German industrial and commercial towns suffered worse than Berlin. (The British estimated that 20% of Germany's productive capacity had been destroyed and Hamburg's plight was revealed by advertisements for workmen to help rebuild the city.) Yet southern and eastern Germany was largely unbombed and weighers of German morale found that, on the credit side, Germany had other offsetting good news:

Though the Reich will omit its Erntedankfest (Harvest Thanksgiving Festival) as a war measure, German bellies had reason to be thankful. It was reported by Minister of Agriculture Richard Walther Barre that the German grain harvest was only 2% below normal; root crops had broken all records (e.g., the potato yield: 2,203,000,000 bushels); only fruit, after a freezing winter, was seriously short. Even if the Germans were padding these figures for home consumption, Britain's authoritative Economist grimly admitted that Germany's food situation was all too satisfactory, warned against the inexplicably widespread tendency glibly to assume the contrary. (In occupied territories, on the other hand, the food situation worsened steadily: they were in for at least thin times, perhaps even relative starvation, this winter.)

Berlin announced that the incurably inventive Teutonic mind had not been idle: now out of the experimental stage was a process whereby coal, through hydrogenation and catalysis, came out "butter." The Reich Air Ministry, at Hitler's own suggestion, stirred up a weird brew of grape sugar, soybeans, cocoa, meat and kola-nut extract, cast it into a "Luftwaffe bar" for tired pilots. Quick freezing was being rapidly developed to offset shortage of metal and glass preserving containers, although few German shops have the refrigerators necessary to keep such produce. Eight types of practically nonalcoholic (between .3% and .48%) beer were being developed, presumably to conserve grains for war uses. There was even a Buck Rogers-like story of Army automobiles filling their gasoline tanks at water fountains, by means of a concentrated gasoline tablet.

Winter-relief collections, being one of the few "voluntary contributions" which are reasonably voluntary, provide some index of popular feeling. When German moppets turned in their red-&-white collection boxes after the first Sunday's campaign, their contents totaled a thumping 22,412,092 marks, up 95.5% over last year and indicating that the Germans:

1) expected a winter of severe hardship;

2) still were willing to stick together. It meant that millions of Germans who were not behind Hitler in anything else were cemented together in the dreary but compelling thought: "We lost the last war and starved for 20 years; what will happen to us if we lose this one?" Unlike British morale, it was merely negative; but it was enough for the moment.

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