Hello Mama!

In Buenos Aires you can pick up a telephone any day in the week between 10 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon and ask for Berlin. The long-distance operator will say: "You will get it right away." Or you can go downtown to the stone-fronted office of Italian Cables to send a message to Germany, Italy or Japan. Argentina has restricted the embassies of all warring nations to 100 code words per day, but there are no restrictions on plain-language communications with any country in the world, Axis or otherwise.

How many times a day or a week someone tells his "Mama" in Berlin or Hamburg that "little Kurt" is all right and will leave the hospital next Wednesday, no one knows. But Allied authorities think that too frequently "Mama" is the German Navy, "little Kurt" is an Allied ship loading in some South American harbor with goods for the U.S. or Britain. Many ships have gone down just after leaving port; for Nazi U-boats, South American waters are a fruitful hunting ground.

Last week the Inter-American Hemisphere Defense Committee, set up in neighboring Montevideo to watch over United Nations interests in South America, took steps toward stricter control of Argentina's communications. A Committee resolution recommended control of communications from all American republics "to any American republic which has not severed relations with the Axis or ... taken steps to control communications." If accepted, the proposal meant that Argentina would be placed in a "communications quarantine" which would practically complete her isolation from other hemisphere nations. Without Argentina's consent, her direct communications with Axis Europe cannot be censored. But all messages to & from her sister republics would be under strict supervision.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.