Blitz Between Covers

The first eyewitness book published in the. U. S. about Britain in its recent months of trial by bomb last week appeared. It was Report on England: November, 1940 (Simon & Schuster; $1.50), expanded from a series of newspaper stories written by Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, editor of Manhattan's afternoon tabloid, PM. He flew to Britain last fall, spent two weeks listening to air-raid alarms, looking at shelters, talking with newsmen, firemen, doctors, pilots, officials --including Winston Churchill, Ernest Bevin. Then he flew home.

A sensational piece of reporting was Ingersoll's first story, in which he claimed that "in the month of September . . .

Hitler took London and didn't know it." Later pieces were less exciting. Nonetheless, Ingersoll's articles may have brought PM an additional 25,000 circulation, and raised its sales just over 100,000, although half the gain was later lost. In addition, from 31 other newspapers which bought the articles, PM collected something over $5,000.

Like the newspaper series from which it was compiled, Ingersoll's book shoots most of its news bolt in the beginning. Its best quality is its wide-eyed observation of ordinary details: how it feels to wait in line for a food-rations book, how London's balloon barrage looks from the ground (". . . all the balloons point in the same direction, as cows do in a field on a windy day").

Its most startling statement--that nothing could have saved London in September if for the next five days Hitler had been willing to lose 200 planes a day--raised a furor in Britain when it was published in Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express. A Canadian correspondent was deputed by Empire newsmen to challenge Ingersoll's story. The Daily Express said editorially that it did not agree with Ingersoll's view.

Britons last week were much fonder of another book about the Blitzkrieg: Their Finest Hour, a collection of reports by TIME'S London Correspondents Walter Graebner and Allan Michie. Their book consists largely of firsthand accounts of men who served at Dunkirk, in the Navy, in the R. A. F., etc. Up to last week 7,000 copies had been sold, the equivalent of a sale of more than 20,000 in the U. S.

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