We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  Obviously Fry was too volatile to be trusted with information about Jay’s work on behalf of the British. In his ignorance and obsessed with his own status, Fry was seething about Jay’s arrival and wrote to his wife on 5 January that the New York committee ‘seem like a bunch of blithering, slobbering idiots’. Moreover, to Jay’s annoyance, he continued to act as if he were in charge of the office. It may be that Jay was not giving the organization the detailed supervision that it needed, but his behaviour was hardly that of the dictatorial ‘bullying, pig-headed’ bungler portrayed by Fry.86 Part of the problem was that Fry, apart from being egotistically protective of what he saw as his little empire, was interested only in artists and intellectuals. Jay, inevitably, was concerned with the wider anti-fascist struggle, and was keen to organize the passage into Spain of British military personnel and International Brigaders on the run from the Germans.87 When Jay Allen went into Vichy, he was surprised, having been told that Marshal Pétain was ‘ga-ga’, to find him, on 13 January 1941, in a period of considerable lucidity. The result was the first interview given to a foreign journalist since he became head of the French state. After the formal interview, Pétain, whom Jay found to be anything but senile, took him to one side. The Marshal then poured out a heartfelt, indeed venomous, critique of his Foreign Minister, Pierre Laval. He went on to recount how he had summarily dismissed Laval and subsequently suffered intense German pressure to reinstate him. The bulk of the published interview, however, consisted of Pétain justifying the French capitulation in June 1940 and praising the ‘progress’ made since. In February, Jay toured French North Africa. In Algeria, he interviewed the Governor General, Admiral Jean Marie Abrial, and produced an anodyne article merely reporting the Admiral’s words.88

  In fact, such articles were a cover for his efforts to make contact with people who were helping the Rescue Committee, particularly his old friend Randolfo Pacciardi, who had commanded the Italian Garibaldi Battalion in the International Brigades. The British Special Operations Executive were keen to get him to London to take part in the creation of an Italian Legion to fight alongside the Allies and thereby help undermine the Fascist regime. Pacciardi was in a Vichy prison, and the British had hatched a scheme to get him out and across the desert to the harbour of Oran in Tunisia. Jay’s job was to buy a boat that would take Pacciardi at an appointed time out to a waiting British submarine. When Jay went to interview Marshal Pétain, whom he had met many years earlier, he asked him for help in seeing the ‘good works’ the Vichy Government had achieved in Oran. Delighted, the Marshal said he would provide him with a military police captain as his guide, a four – door open touring car, and six MPs on motorcycles to escort him. With sirens blaring, they went around the town, with the captain showing Jay all the ‘good works’ achieved by the Vichy regime. When they reached the harbour, Jay saw a cluster of fishing boats at the water’s edge and asked the captain if he might interview these simple fishermen about their good lives under Vichy. The captain, delighted that Jay was so interested, urged him on. In full view of the smiling captain and his men, Jay proceeded to buy a boat in which Pacciardi that very night would rendezvous with the British submarine. He pulled out a roll of bills and counted out the substantial sum required for so risky a mission. He shook the fisherman’s hand, waved to the captain and returned to the touring car. And off they went, sirens blaring once more, to finish the tour of Pétain’s ‘good works’.89

  Things came to a head between Jay and Fry in mid-February 1941 when Jay visited Fry’s office at the Centre Américain. Jay’s version of the confrontation is not known. According to the anything but reliable Fry, there was a shouting match in which

  He [Jay] said he would like to break my neck. He promised to do the utmost against me as soon as he got back to New York...All during our conversation he boasted how important he was and how successful (‘...I’m a bit of a success...’) and promised to have me fired out on my ear the minute he got back. He said he had never hated anyone so much in his life, that I was slippery and dishonest, that I was a ‘careerist’ (what is a ‘careerist’?), that I was ‘washed up,’ that he would ‘show me’...It was a regular tornado he let loose in my office...Miss Palmer says he is a genius, but I am inclined to think he is slightly nuts.

  In mid-March, to the unconcealed delight of Fry, Jay was caught by the Germans. He had crossed the demarcation line without permission and went to Paris, where he met several people under Gestapo surveillance. He was then followed as he travelled back south and arrested as he tried to cross back into Vichy France. He believed that he had been denounced by an American official with fascist sympathies who had bumped into him on the Champs-Elysées. When arrested, Jay was carrying incriminating notes with the names, ranks and serial numbers of the British troops he had located. To avoid them falling into the hands of the Gestapo, he told the border police that he was sick and needed to go to the bathroom, where he tore up the notes and flushed them down the toilet. When the Gestapo arrived, he handed over notebooks full of relatively innocuous journalistic scribblings. Nevertheless, Jay was accused of spying, sentenced to death, and imprisoned at Chalon-sur-Saône.90

  When he received the news, Fry wrote to his wife with gloating schadenfreude: ‘Suppose they torture him? Will he be able to keep his mouth shut about us and our work? Or will he break down and talk when the matches are pushed up under his fingernails and the fire bites into his flesh?’ Ten days after Jay’s arrest, an operation that he had discussed earlier with Randolfo Pacciardi had ended in catastrophe. The idea was to set up a shuttle to take Spanish and Italian anti-fascist refugees from Oran to Gibraltar, but the Vichy police had got wind of it and set a trap. Bursting with self-satisfaction, Fry wrote to his wife: ‘Naturally I was kinda pleased. It was too perfect an end for a boasting, blustering fool not to give observers the moral satisfaction of seeing someone reap his just rewards.’ With breathtaking insensitivity, he went on:

  I feel sorry for him not so much because of the discomforts he must be suffering as for the ludicrousness of his career here: it was loudmouthed, spectacular, reckless and brief, and it ended suddenly and foolishly. He must be bursting with hatred for me right now and so, I suppose, are his backers at home. But the fact remains that I was right and he was terribly, incredibly and stupendously wrong.91

  Admiral William D. Leahy, the American Ambassador to Vichy, and a strongly conservative admirer of Pétain, was irritated by Jay’s activities. His initial response was to leave him to rot in Gestapo custody. However, he was shaken out of his lethargy by a telegram from the State Department informing him that ‘A very great amount of anxiety has been created in various circles here because of the arrest of Jay Allen. Mrs Roosevelt is personally interested in the matter as well as many other prominent persons’, and urging him to report what the Embassy could do to expedite his release. Leahy consulted the French authorities and replied nonchalantly to Washington: ‘You will appreciate since Allen went to the occupied zone without any authorisation whatsoever and since he is in the custody of the German authorities, the French are in no position to help in obtaining his release.’ He reported that he had asked his first secretary, Maynard B. Barnes, ‘to take every appropriate step which in his judgement will facilitate obtaining Allen’s release and he is also endeavouring to obtain permission for a member of the Embassy staff to visit Allen. Under the circumstances I can see nothing further that can be done.’ Barnes requested the American Press Association in Paris to write to the German occupation authorities requesting that ‘all consideration possible be given to the fact that Allen was merely doing what any enterprising newspaper correspondent would like to do’.92

  In fact, Jay had been doing rather more than that, as was acknowledged by Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador in Washington. It was hardly surprising then that, despite the Press Association doing what Barnes suggested, Jay remained in captivity. A week later, Leahy reported complacently to the State Department that Barnes had written to the Germ
an Embassy that

  it was my understanding that the general practice of the military authorities at the line of demarcation is to impose only mild penalties on those persons who clandestinely cross the demarcation line and that I also understood that of the 60 or more persons arrested in the same vicinity as Allen on the day that he was arrested nearly all have been released either upon the payment of a fine or the completion of a short prison sentence.

  Leahy’s perception of Jay was that he was an irritant and he was unaware that, for the Germans, he was a prisoner of some significance – a man whose journalistic activities during the Spanish Civil War had significantly helped the Republic. Leahy was happy to accept assurances from the Germans that Allen ‘would not be subjected either to worse or better treatment because of being a newspaperman or an American’. In fact, Jay was being repeatedly interrogated by both the Gestapo and Vichy police, who wanted him to admit to being a British agent.93

  Barnes kept pressing the German Embassy in Paris without success. The response, a clear delaying tactic, was that ‘if the American Government intends to express to the Government of the Reich a special desire concerning the case of Mr. Allen’ it should do so through the American Embassy in Berlin. It was clear to Cordell Hull that Jay was ‘being subjected to more severe treatment than that accorded other persons similarly situated’. Washington formally requested the German Government both to permit a US diplomat to visit Jay and to expedite his early release. Berlin’s delays were further related to the arrest in the United States of various German seamen and two propagandists, Dr Manfred Zapp and Günther Tonn. Since Zapp was a close friend of the Nazi Foreign Minister Joaquim von Ribbentrop and Hitler himself had taken an interest in his case, the idea of a prisoner exchange began to take shape. However, things were further complicated by the existence of a French arrest order for Jay on charges of espionage. The French alleged that, while in Vichy, Jay had paid a journalist to steal a compromising ministerial document. On 23 June, for the illegal crossing of the demarcation line, the Germans sentenced Jay to four months’ imprisonment, for which only one of the three months already served would be counted. In consequence, Jay was moved from Chalon-sur-Saône to the altogether harsher prison at Dijon. Finally, in mid-July an agreement was reached on a prisoner exchange. That the State Department pursued the case at all and that Attorney General Robert H. Jackson permitted the prisoner exchange was thanks in large part to the Herculean efforts of Ruth Allen. Because of the complications regarding the French accusations, Jay was kept in captivity until August 1941.94

  On 24 August, shortly after his return, Jay was interviewed by Rex Stout for ‘Speaking Liberty Series’ on the NBC Red Network for the USA and South America. He related how he had been arrested:

  Five months ago, last month, I had crossed over from Free France into the Occupied Zone. The Nazis caught me as I was getting out. A peasant, who had got me in, was to smuggle me out, and when I was looking for him (I learned later he had been arrested) I was picked up by a German customs guard on the demarcation line. These guards are very efficient, they use police dogs and they have a nasty habit of planting land-mines in places where they suspect people are slipping through. I crossed over because I wanted to see what the Nazis were doing in Occupied France. I found out all right in four and a half months in their prison. There, in a military prison in Chalons I found out more than I could have possibly uncovered had I been free.

  Perhaps most significantly in terms of his own state of mind, he said that, while in prison, he was constantly asked whether Americans knew what the Germans were doing in France, and commented: ‘I used to tell my fellow jail-birds that we were waking up, but now that I’m home I wonder if it is true.’ When he was asked if Weygand would be able to resist pressure to throw France actively into the Axis camp, he replied: ‘I’m a reporter, not a crystal gazer but my considered opinion is this: resistance to the Nazis, to Franco–German collaboration in North Africa as well as in France itself comes from people who steadfastly refuse to believe that Germany can win, and their resistance is precisely as strong as hope for a democratic victory is strong.’95

  He soon began to work on a book about his experiences with the title My Trouble with Hitler. It was going to be published by Harper, but his inveterate perfectionism consistently delayed the project. He also went on a speaking circuit with the Colsten Leigh agency and the book was often mentioned in the publicity for the lectures. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on 7 December 1941, brought the USA into the war, Jay wanted to work again as a war correspondent. However, his friend Robert Sherwood, now in government service, asked him to ‘do a job for the Army during the invasion of North Africa, specifically the invasion of Morocco’. Although he would have preferred to be working as a newspaperman, he accepted. Indeed, as Luisi del Vayo wrote to Louis Fischer,

  Jay left very mysteriously in an unknown direction. The whole thing was decided apparently in hours and without leaving him more time than to call the friends on the phone to tell them good-bye. Friends’ commentary was: at least that settles the book! He sounds very happy and excited, suffering only a little bit of not being able to give more details.96

  When, on Sunday 8 November 1942, Operation Torch saw Allied forces land in North Africa, Jay found himself the head of the Psychological Warfare Branch of the US Army in Morocco. Admiral Leahy, who in July 1942 had become Chief of Staff to Roosevelt, was not pleased. He had enormous sympathy for Pétain and disapproved of Jay’s activities. In his diary notes for 20 October 1942, Admiral Leahy wrote:

  Robert Sherwood of the Office of War Information called to discuss a report which I received from the State Department that Mr Jay Allen was scheduled to go to North Africa, Mr Allen was imprisoned in the occupied zone for travelling without the proper visas. He was then working with General George C. Patton. Mr Allen had initiative and energy, but he lacked discretion.97

  Officially, Jay was attached to General Eisenhower’s headquarters in Algiers with the rank of ‘assimilated’ colonel. He was actually working under General George C. Patton in Morocco. He coincided there with his friend, Herbert Southworth, who was already in the services working for the Office of War Information. That coincidence aside, war service in North Africa would not be a happy experience for Jay. As he put it himself:

  His distaste for the State Department’s policy of appeasing the Vichy crowd, in the persons of Darlan and Giraud, he could not hide, but insists he took orders and followed them ‘like any soldier’. He was particularly outraged by what he calls the ‘virulent anti-Semitism’ of our commanders, coupled with an attitude which he says approached adulation of the Arabs.

  He was appalled by a senior officer who told him that he did not understand what was wrong with the ‘Nazzees’. More shocking was his discovery that Vichy prison camps held members of the French resistance and ex-International Brigaders. The American high command were not interested in doing anything about this because they accepted the Vichy French explanation that they were dangerous communists. Jay was most shocked by the experience of his close friend, Colonel Arthur ‘Michel’ Roseborough, of the OSS, stationed in Algiers and in charge of liaison with the French underground. Colonel Roseborough was under orders not to communicate with the Gaullist underground because they were reds. He worked in his office all day doing meaningless things. As Jay related later to his son, the Colonel went to the officers’ club and got stinking drunk every night, and then staggered to his office and secretly communicated with the Gaullists. Drunkenness, so called, was his cover.98

  On 17 December 1942, Eisenhower’s friend and aide, Captain Harry C. Butcher, recalled an alarming report from Jay to General Patton regarding the pro-German attitudes of the Vichy French commander in North Africa, General Charles Auguste Paul Noguès and his staff. He claimed in the report that the American policy of appeasement towards Darlan went ‘beyond the limits required supposedly by “military expediency” and that our continued support of discredited Vich
y-minded generals and bureaucrats would cost us the confidence of the French people on whom we would have to depend during the invasion’.99 In January 1943, just before Franklyn D. Roosevelt was due to meet Churchill at the Casablanca conference, Jay expressed his concerns about American relations with the pro-Fascist Vichy elements to General Eisenhower, who dismissed him with the brusque statement that there was a war to be won. Jay resigned from the OWI and returned to the USA in February 1943, ‘not because he failed to carry out orders he thought morally wrong and politically inexpedient but because his personal sentiments made him a marked man with men, many of them old associates of his, at headquarters.’100

  After the US embargo on the Spanish Republic and appeasement of the dictators, it was another step on the road to Jay’s total disillusionment. His son was shocked by his demeanour: ‘When I saw him, I knew something was very wrong. And it got worse.’ He was no longer interested in finishing the book, since the war was no longer his war, the war that had started on 18 July 1936 in Spain. As his son put it: ‘He had suffered too many defeats. He fought for justice and peace. He fought well. And he was shot down. He said to me more than once, “Michael, don’t get on the barricades too soon!” By which I know he meant, “Do not get shot down too soon.”’ Nevertheless, when he returned to the United States, despite the beginnings of a deep depression from which he would never entirely recover, he undertook another lecture tour and argued his point vigorously, ‘hundreds of times, over the radio and in magazine articles’. He commented later: ‘it wasn’t very glorious but perhaps there was some small contribution in all this to the awakening that eventually came about’.101

  Hemingway wrote to him about the time that he returned from North Africa. Apparently, Martha Gellhorn had offered to edit the manuscript My Trouble with Hitler, and had put off starting a novel until it arrived. Despairing of the endless wait, she began her novel. Hemingway wrote: ‘I would have been glad to do it and read several chapters of the manuscript with great interest and admiration.’ However, his other commitments prevented him taking it on: ‘I thought there was wonderful stuff in it and I would have been very proud to have been any use to you in preparing it for publication. But it was impossible for me to undertake it at this time.’ The next sentence was a priceless example of Hemingway’s insensitivity: ‘I write you now about something of importance’ – this being his need for Jay to provide some information about the pro-Franco activities of Edward Knoblaugh, who had appeared in Havana claiming to be a friend of Jay. Having just told Jay that he could not help with his book because he was busy, he wrote: ‘Also, Jay, will you please let me have this at once, no matter how many other things you have to do.’ Jay immediately complied.102