Great German Embarrassment

Never since the flight of Rudolf Hess had the Nazis' faces looked so red. But not since the flight of Hess had the reason for high Nazi flush been so obscure. Was it anger? Was it embarrassment? Or was it pride in a successful hoax?

The Nazis' No. 1 French war prisoner had escaped from Germany and reached Vichy and talked openly with Marshal Petain. Presumably the Nazis could yank him back to Germany again. But towering, mustachioed General Henri Honore Giraud, 63, escapist extraordinary, reputedly a German-hater, said to be an admirer of the military theories of General Charles de Gaulle, had become more than ever an old darling of France, and Quisling Pierre Laval was already having enough trouble with the French people.

This was not the first time Henri Honore Giraud had escaped from the Germans. In 1914, aged 35, he was wounded in a French bayonet attack near Charleroi and left for dead on the field. Captured by the Germans, he made his first escape via Holland to England, aided by his fluent German, variously disguised as a butcher, stableboy, coal man, and magician in a traveling circus. At one point he was helped by Nurse Edith Cavell. In 1915 he was back with the French Fifth Army.

This young man's feat paled by comparison with the elderly General's recent escape as it was recounted last week. This time the story sounded, and may have been, too good to be true.

In May 1940, General Giraud was rushed into the breach at Sedan when the notorious collapse of General Andre Georges Corap's Ninth Army command was already well under way. Typically, the last message heard from General Giraud before his capture was: "Headquarters surrounded by 100 tanks. Am destroying them."

Fancy Story. General Giraud was imprisoned with many other high French officers in Saxony's grim, moated Koenigstein Fortress on a mountainside 750 feet above the Elbe. There, it was said last week, he managed to obtain German maps, timetables. From gift boxes he assembled a suit of civilian clothes.* As to the actual escape, stories differed. One version said that for months, when the General and his fellow prisoners were given airings in the nearby fields, they casually picked strands of hemp, until finally they had enough to weave a long rope. Another version, attributed by Vichy to the General himself, was that his wife had sent him lengths of thread in every gift package, and these he had woven into rope.

Daring Old Man on Fleeing Trapeze. One night the General is supposed to have let himself down on the rope. It was too short. He (a 63-year-old) climbed up again, wove some more, later let himself down again all 60 feet to the moat. Posing as a Swiss traveling salesman, he spent eleven days on obscure roads and railroads leading to Switzerland, Occupied France and Vichy. His closest call came when the Gestapo searched a train on which he was talking with a German officer. He got the German into such a hot argument that the Gestapo did not wish to interrupt the officer with inquiries.

Whose Giraud? Speculation was high this week as to why General Giraud had reported to Marshal Petain, whom he has always disliked since they had violent differences during the 1925-26 Moroccan campaign against Abd-el-Krim; why Vichy publicized the almost incredible details of an old man's escape with a young man's techniques.

Perhaps General Giraud, out of touch with French actualities, had the unlikely theory that Vichy might be able to give him a command helpful to the United Nations. Or perhaps the Germans and Vichy had some use for General Giraud more in line with the actualities.

* His reply to a food parcel sent by the Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies of New York revealed in his own handwriting that he was, literally, Germany's prisoner No. 1.

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