Is Anybody Hungry?

Who said Europe was hungry? Just a lot of hogwash for Uncle Sap, said Captain Joseph Patterson's New York Daily News. The News had sent Robert Conway, one of its local men, on a junket to Iceland; he had gone on to Europe on his own. From Rome he sent home a story which the News headlined:

FRANCE, ITALY

EAT, DRINK,

MAKE DOUGH

It was perhaps a new low in journalistic irresponsibility for the newspaper whose circulation is at a new U.S. high (2,300,000). Wrote Conway:

"It is timely and vital that the American public be given the simple facts regarding the grossly exaggerated talk of shortages in Europe. . . . France is better off than England, and Italy infinitely better off than France. [Even in England] I found it possible to eat well and cheap in London, Canterbury and other English towns. I found a similar situation in Paris. . . . One may go from restaurant to restaurant and glut oneself even in London. . . .

"The poor in Italy have rations equivalent to the diet enjoyed in 1937 at the peak of Mussolini's prosperity era. . . . [Italy] is a veritable land of plenty, while in all three countries black-market restaurants supplied steaks, eggs, fruits and other delicacies at prices equivalent to those of restaurants in New York."

Well-stuffed Correspondent Conway concluded: "The fact is that I was not so well fed in America at any time since rationing started after Pearl Harbor."

Next day News Editorial Writer Reuben Maury twisted out a strange moral to this strange report.* The U.S. had to cut down on beer to send grains to Europe: "We suspect a prohibition angle to all this." Maybe, he continued, it would do Europe good to starve. Said the News:

"After the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) Europe enjoyed a long period of relative quiet. That war devastated large parts of Europe, killed off millions of people and left starvation and disease . . . and there was no rich Uncle Sam across the ocean to crash through with food. . . . Won't this postwar charity and generosity of ours encourage Europe to go on staging big wars? . . ."

* Same day the News gave a scant two paragraphs to an A.P. report of hunger raids on 60 Hamburg bread stores, and a British medical officer's report that the first definite signs of starvation were apparent in the city.

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