Object Lesson

One sweltering night last week some 200 Senators and Representatives assembled in secrecy in the Caucus room of the Old House Office Building. In the darkness a film unreeled--without titles, without voices, with few sound effects. The Congressmen saw Nazi tanks push against concrete tank barriers, push them over as if they were so many tombstones. They saw dive bombers fire buildings with incendiary bombs. They saw nearly 100 parachute troops leap from three huge transport planes at an astonishingly low altitude. The film was an official German movie of the invasion of the Lowlands. There were few Germans shown in it--mostly a vast collection of tanks, planes, armored trucks. It was a picture of mechanized war, in which the visible human beings were a mass of dead bodies, a fierce-looking group of captive French Senegalese troops.

Congressmen were not exactly shaken by the movie. But some of them were mad. Somebody remembered that Norwegian Parliament members had been shown gory German pictures of the Polish invasion just before Nazis invaded Norway. Alabama's Joe Starnes huffed that it was "pure propaganda and I'd like to know whose." Newsmen had no trouble finding out who had arranged the showing--dumpy, bespectacled Ross Collins of Meridian, Miss., who for 15 of his 18 years in Congress has been plumping for mechanization of the Army. For 14 of those years drawling Representative Collins made no progress, used to complain: "I don't seem to have convinced anybody but Hitler."

When Hitler began to mechanize the German Army in a big way, Representative Collins plumped harder than ever, buttonholed his colleagues to tell them one story over & over: a group of U. S. Army officers, razzing a visiting German general a few years ago about Germany's plans for world domination, pointed out Germany's small forces, the enormous man power of the rest of the world. Snapped the baited general: "The wolf does not care how many sheep are in the pasture."

Fortnight ago a newsreel company got hold of the German film, decided it was too grisly for public consumption. Army officers saw it, invited Representative Collins to take a look. Each Nazi demonstration of the weakness of flesh against battle wagons convinced Collins that the picture would show Congressmen how mechanization worked, as his words never could. Two days after they had seen the film, Representative Collins, stubborn as Cato, asked for the floor to deliver his favorite speech. This time colleagues filled the Congressional Record with flowery praises and apologies. Representative Collins' text: The wolf does not care how many sheep are in the pasture.

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