The Luftwaffe Intercepts

The British Overseas Airways station at London knew the weather had roughened over the Bay of Biscay. But it was nothing unusual for the regular flight of the big Douglas liner from Lisbon. Then, suddenly, came the voice of the Dutch pilot over the radio: "I am being followed by strange aircraft. Putting on best speed. . . . We are being attacked. Cannon shells and tracers are going through the fuselage. Wave-hopping and doing my best." Then silence.

Next day a Berlin communique claimed an enemy transport downed over the Atlantic. London announced the Douglas overdue and presumably lost, with a four-man crew and 13 passengers, including Actor Leslie Howard. For the first time one of the unarmed commercial planes of the Lisbon-London services, running regularly since 1940, had been shot down. Why?

The vanished Douglas had taken off from Portela airfield outside Lisbon, an international junction shared by Allied and Axis planes. The afternoon transport from London used to bring English newspapers for the German Embassy. Over this line, via Switzerland, passed information on war prisoners. The planes using Portela enjoyed an unwritten guarantee of safe conduct.

Britons regarded last week's breach of the safe conduct as an incident in a Nazi hunt for Winston Churchill, en route to England from North America and North Africa. For Leslie Howard, this probability had made a fine curtain.

Suddenly G.B.S. remembered the author's work, paid it an offhand compliment: "[Mr. Cole's] book is good enough for the occasion and better; and nothing I have said about it must be taken as a disparagement. . . . He is, if anything, too modest, for the enormous success of socialism in Russia has been a triumph of Fabian tactics over revolutionary catastrophism. . . . The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics can now be quite properly called the Union of Soviet Fabian Socialist Republics."

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