"REPORT ON ENGLAND"

Ralph Ingersoll of PM has just published his articles on England in book form, entitled "Report on England." These dispatches were written from England in November, and caused quite a stir by their claim that "Hitler had London in September, but didn't know it." Mr. Ingersoll wasn't there at the time, and the general consensus is that those who were there didn't know it either. The evidence he adduces is that on September 8 water mains were "smashed right and left, all over town." "The streets were full of rubble, blown up from direct hits, filled with glass and brick and furniture, plaster, piping. . . . Whole telephone exchanges were out all over town. . . . No traffic--neither fire engines nor ambulances--can get through."

A check of the newspaper dispatches reveals that Mr. Ingersoll exaggerates wildly.. But of course they have been severely censored. Yet there is the recent statement of Mr. Mallory Browne of the Christian Science Monitor, who was in London at the time and has since returned to the United States, that on September 8 "1 personally rode around a large part of central London in a car and experienced no difficulty whatever in getting through. I made free use of the telephone without any difficulty, and heard of no one who had any such trouble . . . there was not even a temporary interruption of the water service at that time except in one relatively small area."

The conclusion is inescapable that Mr. Ingersoll was more concerned with making a good news story than reporting facts. Apparently he intended to show that Hitler had shot his bolt; and failed, that the English had taken the worst Hitler could offer, and survived. It would be nice to believe this, but apparently we would just be kidding ourselves.