Innocent Abroad

When the U.S. Army sent six topflight industrialists on a tour of the western front recently, what it hoped to get to spur lagging U.S. production was a series of urgent eyewitness accounts of U.S. soldiers' performances and needs in the field. What it got from one of the eyewitnesses last week was quite another thing.

Frederick Coolidge Crawford, loquacious, sparkish president of Cleveland's potent Thompson Products, Inc. (aircraft and automotive valves, pistons and bearings) and board chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers, was the witness whose evidence turned out unexpectedly. On the basis of some ten days spent in touring France, Belgium and Luxembourg, Crawford reported thus:

"I had been told France had suffered economically under German occupation. I saw fat horses drawing farm wagons, many with rubber tires. We went to the Ritz hotel . . . the big brass doorknobs and all the decorations were there."

Collaborationists, said Crawford, are not necessarily quislings or traitors but industrialists who "expanded their production for the Germans" or who got "in trouble with radical labor leaders." The underground was made up largely of Communists, young people and characters from the underworld who robbed ten peaceful French families for every train they blew up. A "conservative" French friend told Crawford that France was so prosperous under the Nazis that "if these conditions had continued a year and a half longer, too many people, perhaps half of them, would have been willing to settle for things as they were."

Next day, the New York Herald Tribune coldly took Tourist Crawford to task for his talk. "We used to have the American who applauded Mussolini because he ran trains on time. . . . Now we have Mr. Crawford . . . who believes France is a land of luxury because the Ritz Hotel. . . still has its big brass doorknobs. With this type of innocent abroad . . . there is not much that can be done."

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