"Explains Everything!"

In Joseph Stalin's most dramatic move since the last Moscow "purge trial," the biggest gun of the Soviet press this week opened up against Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh.

The official Communist Party organ Pravda ("Truth") charged: "He [Lindbergh] had an order from English reactionary circles to prove the weakness of Soviet aviation and give Chamberlain an argument for capitulation at Munich in connection with Czechoslovakia. The bribed liar, Lindbergh, fulfilled the order of his masters. That explains everything!" Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh, according to Pravda, were "cordially and sincerely received by the Soviet people" when they visited Russia in 1933, but last August "nobody invited him [to Russia] and if he was permitted to come it was because Americans had requested it."

Inferentially, U. S. Embassy Charge d'Affaires Alexander Kirk, with whom Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh stayed in Moscow and who handled the arrangements, was suspected. Pravda charged that on the Lindberghs' return to England the Colonel told "guests of Lady Astor" that "Germany possesses such a strong air force it is capable of defeating the combined air fleets of England, France, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia."

To refute what the Colonel was supposed to have affirmed, Pravda supplied a deposition signed by eleven leading Soviet airmen who called Charles Augustus Lindbergh a "stupid liar, a lackey and a flatterer of German Fascists." "According to information in the highest quarters in London, Paris and Prague," said the Soviet airmen, "the Soviet air fleet is quantitatively at least equal to the combined German and Japanese air forces and is qualitatively much superior."

In a backhanded reference to the present "purge" in the Soviet fighting services (see col, 3), the eleven accusers wrote: "Soviet aviation, according to Lindbergh, has been left without leadership and is now in a condition of chaos. It is hardly necessary to deny such an obvious lie. . . . Lindbergh performed such a nonstop flight into the realm of calumny and slanderous fabrications that he at once beat all the records of Baron Munchausen. . . . For a long time he has not made any aviation records and as a flier he does not represent anything worth while. . . . The few flights which he is now making in his little plane are now performed in this country by any member of the Aviation Club, any peasant, worker or student."

While the cables were flashing this from Moscow, Colonel Lindbergh was flying northward from Paris. He alighted in thick weather at Rotterdam, refused to comment.

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