[Ed: Despite the claims of harmony and the smiles, Ciano is not happy. He knows Italy is not ready for war and fears it will be a disaster for the nation.]
Count Ciano returns to Rome disgusted at the attitudes of Ribbentrop and Hitler. “They have betrayed us and lied to us. Now they are dragging us into an adventure which we do not want and which may compromise the regime and the country as a whole.” Count Ciano returned to Italy convinced that the Germans had already decided on war and that nothing could be done to deter them. “I am certain that even if the Germans were given more than they ask for they would attack just the same, because they are possessed by the demon of destruction”, Ciano wrote in his diary.
Berlin reports a 100 percent agreement between Germany and Italy, but the Italian press has no knowledge of an agreement.
The German Ambassador, Count Johannes von Welczeck, left Paris unexpectedly tonight in answer to a summons from Berlin. No comment on his departure was obtainable at the German Embassy, but at a time when German leaders evidently are taking stock of their own strength and that of the other European powers, they desire to have a first-hand account of the present situation in Paris, and the attitude of the French Government before the storm that is gathering in Eastern Europe.
Count von Welezeck had a conference this morning with Premier Édouard Daladier and Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet, but the conversation, as far as the official reports related, concerned the espionage case involving Otto Abetz, who has been accused by Paris newspapers of being a Nazi financial agent. Recently, when Herr Abetx endeavored to come to Paris to press a libel suit against a Paris newspaper, the French passport authorities turned him back at the Swiss border. Premier Daladier told Count von Welezeck today that while no specific charges have been made against Herr Abelz by the French Government he was nevertheless regarded as at least temporarily undesirable.
Whatever other matters Count von Welczeck may have discussed with the Premier and M. Bonnet, he went away well apprised of French official opinion on the question of Danzig, for that attitude has not changed from one of determined resistance against intimidation. Chancellor Adolf Hitler no doubt desires Count von Welczeck’s estimate of what the French would do if they failed to get strong support from Russia, Rumania, and Britain in the event of a German quarrel with Poland. The Ambassador recently had been making courtesy calls in expectation of his retirement shortly, but he had intended not to leave Paris until Fall and has not been contemplating a holiday visit to Berlin.
Walter Funk, Germany’s economics minister says the United States has hampered trade for political reasons. He hails the Reich’s common sense approach to economics.
Up to a late hour tonight the British Government had received no information from its own sources regarding today’s Berchtesgaden talks.
Several British newspapers told their readers today there would be no war this year and charged that intensified German propaganda and military activity was merely a part of a “war of nerves” intended to force another “Munich.” One newspaper, the Left Wing Reynolds News, alleged that Prime Minister Chamberlain was “ready for a sell-out over Poland, and might call another conference, if tension reached the proper intensity, similar to the meeting last year at Munich which led to the dismemberment of Czecho-Slovakia.”
“There is strong reason to believe,” the newspaper said, “that if Hitler presents the Poles with an ultimatum over Danzig, the Premier will suggest a four-power conference of Britain, France, Germany and Italy to settle the problem.” It added, however, that “even right-wing Tory circles” were becoming alarmed at the danger of such a course and were beginning to realize “that concessions in Danzig would lead to the sacrifice of the Polish Corridor and certainty of war.”
Two former Cabinet Ministers, Anthony Eden and Alfred Duff Cooper, who resigned because of disagreement with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, tonight are wearing the army uniform.
The British cargo ship Treworlas ran aground in the River Thames at Poplar, London. She was later refloated.
Danzig and Gdynia, two rival ports within sight of each other and both within the Polish customs frontier, are now the scenes of a dramatic armaments race that is plainly visible even to the casual observer and that bodes ill for the future. Gdynia is so crowded with ships that almost a dozen freighters are anchored in a long row outside in the Baltic under the protection of a Polish fleet of “defense vessels,” while more freighters can be seen approaching from the distance. Many of the vessels crowding the harbor are, of course, purely commercial vessels because the turnover of the port of Gdynia now far exceeds Danzig’s, which is the latter’s most telling complaint.
Eqypt’s King Farouk accepts the resignation of Premier Muhammad Mahmud and his Cabinet. The Premier gave ill health as his reason for resigning.
A bomb explosion outside the Jewish Hospital tonight injured fourteen Jews, ten of them seriously. The report of the explosion was so loud that residents of several quarters of the city simultaneously reported the news to the police, believing the outrage had occurred in their immediate vicinity. A large hole was torn in the sidewalk and in the stone wall of the hospital. Despite the conflicting evidence of witnesses, police believe that the bomb was hurled by Arabs from a speeding car. An Arab chauffeur suspected of being a government informer was shot dead this morning in Ramallah, an Arab town outside Jerusalem.
Twenty-two people are known to be dead and many dozens more injured when the crack streamlined transcontinental train City of San Francisco was derailed and wrecked last night in the Humboldt River canyon forty miles west of Elko in the eastern part of Nevada. Seventeen bodies were brought to Reno tonight. As rescue crews removed the dead and injured from the twisted steel jumble of cars which had jumped the track and an embankment and plunged into the rockstrewn river bed fifteen feet below, a Eureka County coroner’s jury returned a verdict that the derailment had been a work of sabotage.
The disaster, the first to occur to a modern transcontinental luxury train, came as the 149 passengers were sleeping or enjoying the various diversions offered on the smart flier. All but three of the seventeen cars of the $2,000,000 train, operated from Chicago to San Francisco on a thirty-nine hour run by three railroads, left the track. Five cars became a tangled mass through which the rescue workers had to cut with torches to remove the victims. E. F. Hecox of Sparks, Nevada, engineer of the streamliner since it began operating three years ago as a joint venture of the Southern Pacific, the Chicago & North Western and the Union Pacific Railroads, was driving it at fifty to sixty miles an hour over Southern Pacific tracks above an embankment in the steeply palisaded canyon.
Suddenly, according to the story he told today, he felt his Diesel-engine locomotive leave the track about 100 feet before it reached a railroad bridge crossing the narrow canyon above the nearly dry riverbed. The locomotive remained upright and hurtled on for a thousand feet, dragging after it, also upright, the two power cars immediately behind. The baggage car, just behind the power units, and all but five of the thirteen passenger cars of the train, one of the two longest streamliners in the world, turned over. In the jolting as the steel structures were crunched under the succeeding impacts, the line of passenger cars bellied at the bridge. Five cars in the center broke through the steel girders, demolishing the crossing, and plunged down the embankment into the Humboldt.
A foreign policy of “No war, except in defense of our country, our freedom and democratic institutions,” was urged today by Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, at the unveiling of a monument to Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, his Rough Riders and other soldiers of the Spanish-American War. The monument, a bronze plaque with a medallion bearing a relief portrait of Colonel Roosevelt, is fastened into a huge boulder on a hill overlooking Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. It was at Montauk, New York, on August 14, 1898, that Colonel Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and other veterans of the Cuban campaign disembarked from the transport Miami. The memorial was erected by the Montauk Historical Society on a site dedicated last year at a reunion of Spanish-American War veterans.
Six Indiana National Guardsmen, all non-commissioned officers and enlisted men, were killed late today by the explosion of a shell which they had brought in from the artillery range of the Fort Knox, Kentucky army post, believing it a “dud.”
After losing to the Philadelphia A’s, 12–9 in game 1, the 2nd game is mercifully called after eight innings with the New York Yankees beating the A’s 21–0 to equal the Major League record for lopsided shutouts. Joe DiMaggio and Babe Dahlgren each have a pair of home runs, one each inside-the-park. Red Ruffing collects 4 hits along with pitching a four-hitter. Cotton Pippen takes the loss; the A’s will waive him next month to the Tigers. With the win yesterday and the 23–2 win on June 28, the Yankees have now scored 18 or more runs against the A’s three times this year. The next team to top 17 runs three times against one team will be the 2005 Yankees against Tampa Bay.
The Boston Red Sox split a doubleheader with the Washington Senators, winning their seventh in a row, 9–1, then losing the nitecap, 6–3, before 30,000 patrons at Fenway Park. Ted Williams, Red Sox freshman outfielder, hit safely for the eighth consecutive time at bat today. Williams had a perfect day with three for three in each game, including a 420-foot homer, a triple, four singles and three walks. He had hit doubles in his last two times at bat yesterday.
The St. Louis Browns trailed the Detroit Tigers into the eighth inning today, but staged a seven-run uprising to take the deciding game of the series, 11–7.
The New York Giants hit three successive solo home runs in the 4th inning, with Alex Kampouris, pitcher Bill Lohrman, and Joe Moore connecting. It is the 2nd time in two months that Moore has followed back to back home runs with one of his own. Zeke Bonura adds a 4th solo home run to set a Major League record, since tied, for solo shots in an inning. The Giants add 3 more home runs — Demaree (2), Bob Seeds — to beat the Philadelphia Phillies 11–2 in the opener of two. It is also the second time this season they have banged 7 homers, and rookie pitcher Bill Kersieck gives up all but one to tie the 20th century Major League mark. His four home run allowed in one inning also ties the Major League record. Bob Seeds, incidentally, is the only major leaguer to own a minor league team; he is owner and president of Amarillo (NM-West Texas League). Kersieck tosses another inning in game 2, a 6–2 loss on Carl Hubbell’s 4-hitter. Kersieck is relieved by Bill Hoffman, making his Major League debut, and the rookie goes 4 innings and allows 4 runs. He also notches 3 wild pitches, tying Nap Rucker’s record for a debut game. Steve Hargan will top both in 1965.
The Brooklyn Dodgers spent nearly five hours at Ebbets Field yesterday listening to the victory song of the Boston Bees and neither they nor the 21,795 fans were entranced by it. The Bees hammer out 30 hits in the two games of a doubleheader, sweeping the Dodgers, 13–6 and 8–2.
Dizzy Dean made one of his periodic comebacks today and, despite ten Pittsburgh hits, pitched the Chicago Cubs to a 5–4 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates to sweep the three-game series before 25,180.
A Pan American World Airways Sikorsky S-43 made a crash landing at Rio de Janeiro harbor, killing 14 of 16 aboard. It was the third serious seaplane crash this year. The other two involved Imperial Airways.
Japan warns Britons in China; serious outbreaks are seen because of insincerity in negotiations. Taking a cue from the army, the Japanese press at Peiping abandoned its pretense today that the anti-British movement was “spontaneous.” The campaign, intense for weeks in North China, was spread to Shanghai on the second anniversary of the outbreak of fighting here. Domei, the Japanese news agency, said: “Due to Britain’s insincerity in the Tokyo talks [where the Tientsin blockade dispute is being negotiated] there is a possibility of serious anti-British outbreaks” among 200,000 Japanese residents of North China.” It described the situation as “tense and dangerous.”
In Shanghai, terrorism feared in connection with the anniversary was checked by police precautions. Approximately 2,000 demonstrators, mostly Japanese, marched to the Japanese Consulate General to express thanks to Japan “for fighting Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists.” The demonstrators shouted anti-British slogans.
At the same time Japanese soldiers at Hungpao, just outside the International Settlement, distributed posters urging all Chinese employees of Britons to quit, all Chinere married to Britons to divorce them, expulsion of British missionaries from China, and confiscation of British banks and other property. The Japanese also held religious ceremonies to commemorate those killed in fighting here. In other occupied cities such as Hangchow, Nanking and Hankow the Japanese observed the day with athletic meets, parades and memorial services.
At Peiping a Japanese airplane flew low over the British Embassy and dropped leaflets saying: “Exclude Britain and build up a new order in East Asia.” When Embassy officials protested the Japanese Embassy spokesman replied, “it was a spontaneous outburst of Japanese feeling against the British which has spread from Japan.” The Japanese-controlled Chinese press at Peiping said the provisional government’s Board of Education had decided to deny diplomas to all Chinese students who persist in attending British schools conducted by missions there. Arrangements are being made to transfer more than 1,000 students thus affected to Chinese schools.
The Japanese military delegates to the British-Japanese conference left for Tientsin at 6 AM today as scheduled. Their departure does not mean a rupture of the conference because an officer of the general staff will continue the negotiations when Sir Robert Craigie, the British Ambassador, receives instructions from London. In a conversation with Britons yesterday the Japanese delegates denied their departure was an angry gesture or a move intended to break up the conference. They expressed good wishes for the success of the conference. They said they left reluctantly under the pressure of urgent military duties from which they had been absent a month. They explained the army’s primary interest was security, that they considered the economic questions before the conference strictly relevant to that issue. With the conference now engrossed in legal details the soldiers said they felt they should return to their duties.
Born:
Howard Tate, American soul singer and songwriter (“Ain’t Nobody Home”; “Get It While You Can”), in Elberton, Georgia (d. 2011).
Saul Steinberg, American businessman, founder of Leasco and CEO of Reliance Insurance Company, in Brooklyn, New York (d. 2012).
Ed Burton, NBA forward (New York Knicks, St. Louis Hawks), in Blytheville, Arkansas (d. 2012).
Naval Construction:
The Вое́нно-морско́й флот СССР (ВМФ) (Soviet Navy) Project 7-class (Gnevny-class) destroyer Sokrushitelny (Сокрушительный, “Destructive”) is commissioned.
History Diaries 