 The Columbia Broadcasting System presents One World Flight. You are listening to the hour striking in the bell tower of the town hall of Copenhagen, capital of Denmark on the Baltic Sea. It is one of several authentic recorded sounds of foreign places and voices of foreign people to be heard in this third of a series of Columbia Broadcasts. A series based upon Norman Corwin's 37,000 mile global tour as first winner of the Wendell Wilkie One World Award. This is Norman Corwin. On a day last June, I flew from London to Paris in a British plane. When we crossed the French coast, I entered a part of the world which was not accessible to the man in whose memory this very flight had been established. Or at the time Wendell Wilkie circled the globe in 1942, France was occupied by the enemy. And so were the next two countries whose people are represented in the log tonight, Denmark and Norway. My stay in France was only a week, but that was long enough to see a cabinet fall, to meet a hundred assorted Frenchmen, and to be reminded of how beautiful a place is Paris. It's one of the few cities in the world which lives up to the best paintings done of it. You have to walk down its avenues and side streets and along the same to understand why Paris is not to be compared to any other city. You have to hear the musical speech of Parisian women to believe the accent is real. For example, in the recording which follows, I find myself as much taken by the voice of Madame Perret as by what she says. Madame Perret is Secretary General of the European Center of the Carnegie Peace Endowment, and here she is answering a question of mine about culture. Universal understanding can only be reached through a better knowledge of one another. And to achieve this, we must have international cooperation in all fields of education, science, the arts and so forth. You have to visit Paris to understand why writers and artists and peace conferences have always been attracted to it, and why it has inspired so many composers like our own Gershwin. Do you know his American in Paris? How many songs Americans have written about that town? April in Paris? The last time I saw Paris? Paris in the spring? The one world of music recognizes no boundaries. Italians, Englishmen, Germans, Spaniards, North, Central and South Americans all have claimed Paris as their own and set it to music. Even Frenchmen have done it. But Paris isn't like this today. It's still beautiful, but it will be a long time before the old gaiety returns. The war, while it left the city fairly intact, did things to its people. Too many Frenchmen died in the torture chambers of the Gestapo. Too many went hungry. Too many had experience with collaborators. Too many shivered in the cold. Paris, when I was there, was turbulent. On the day I arrived, there was a huge demonstration by communists, 200,000 of them, in protest over a recent attack on their headquarters. It was a peaceful demonstration. There was more of a holiday mood than one of tenseness about the city. In fact, one of the most forceful impressions of France today is the taking for granted of communists as fixtures on the political scene. The communists had just made gains in recent elections and were then the second strongest party in France. Coincident with my visit, the coalition cabinet of Georges B. Doe was formed, and one of the first men I interviewed was Maurice Schumann, official spokesman for B. Doe's party, the mouvement Republican Français. Mr. Schumann, who was very close to de Gaulle during the war, was especially sharp on the subject of Germany. He said, I think it's suicidal for both east and west to build Germany up in their respective spheres, for then Germany will unite, and German Union within is the inverse of unity without. I interviewed Mr. Schumann in his modest flat on Avenue Lioti, and during our conversation his infant son was crying in the next room. It was my misfortune that the recording machine, which went with us around the world, wasn't working on that day, or you should now be hearing a unique combination of father and son. Lee Bland, my colleague on the trip, took the machine to Frankfurt, Germany for repairs by American Army engineers, and so most of my talks in Paris, including those with spokesmen for the other two major parties, went unrecorded. The socialist Daniel Mayer seemed depressed. His party had just lost ground to both opponents. His outlook on world peace was reserved, but he was less gloomy about this than about French problems. The communist spokesman was the editor Floremon Bont, whom I interviewed in his office in the barn-like newspaper plant of L'Humanité. Mr. Bont said, the communists have been almost solely responsible for the rapid recovery of coal production in this country. What the French Communist Party can offer France and the world is quick recovery and full production in all industries. From dozens of other interviews, it seemed apparent that France was deeply preoccupied with internal problems of food, currency and production, and that within only a small area of government and the arts was there much thinking along global lines. Of course, even in introspective France, one could rely on scientists to think internationally. Frederick Joliot-Curri, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, was no exception to this rule. Monsieur Joliot-Curri said, Scientists and technicians do not and cannot belong to a detached age showing above practical contingent. As citizens and members of the dead community of creatives and workers, they must be concerned with the use of society makes of their discourse and with practical ways of directing this use towards peace and well-being of mankind. If you had trouble making some of that out, what Monsieur Joliot-Curri said was essentially, scientists cannot belong to a detached age soaring above practical contingencies, as citizens they must be concerned with the use society makes of their discoveries. Almost everybody I met in Paris had a story to tell that sounded more like an exciting novel. Michel Duclos, the underground fighter who admired my pocket camera and said, One of my comrades who were caught by the Gestapo taking reconnaissance pictures would be alive today, if they had had a camera as small as yours. Marie, the Polish girl who literally escaped from the Germans on her way to a gas chamber. Paul D'Amé, who was devoting his life to the internationalization of radio. Robert Carnet, the noted director, who was disturbed because he said, The French public looks down on films as a poor relative among the arts. Andre Siegfried of the French Academy, who said, I am quite set in my belief that art and politics do not mix. Paul Nelson, American architect and special consultant to the French Ministry of Reconstruction, who told me he was worried about fascism and the atom bomb, he said, For as long as there remains the vestiges of fascism anyplace, the people of France and of America and of the world are in danger. I don't think, Norman, that Bikini represented a great day for American influence. That word was Bikini. I asked him what he thought would make a great day for American influence. He replied with emphasis. The great day will be when the experiment will be centered on the utilization of atomic energy for the peaceful benefit of mankind. The big stick has no longer the same force as the productive tool. And then there was Natya, the blonde and beautiful French pianist whose father had died of malnutrition and cold, whose brother had been killed fighting the Nazis on the day before Paris was liberated, who herself had handled a gun in the same battle. Paris was full of people like that. They all wanted peace and they were brandishing their fists at nobody. The symbol of war in France as in other occupied countries had been the underground. The fighters of the underground were above ground now, sharing the toils of peace and reconstruction. The most eloquent voice of the resistance movement is Louis Aragon, about whom the American Saturday Review of Literature wrote recently, It seems clear today that Louis Aragon is the greatest poet of the war that has just ended. This man served with an armoured division, was captured by the Nazis, broke out of prison and fought on with the Marquis. For his exploits, he received the highest French decoration, the military medal. Beaming his comment on America, Mr. Aragon asked us not to forget the crimes of fascism. I speak for memory, I speak for active memories, against war, against fascists. For the sake of American warriors, we do not want to need every 25 years on French soil. Active memory in France and in America, conscious memory of inside and outside enemies. This was a call for something more active in the way of memory than a mere scrapbook of historical events or a sentimental remembrance of a time or a place. Here was the greatest poet of the war, calling for the kind of memory that motivates eternal vigilance. The vigilance which, by an old American definition, is the price of liberty. His point of view, shared by so many of those who fought hardest for France before and after it went down, remains today my most active memory of France. We drove to Le Bourget to take the plane for Copenhagen. It was reasonable to wonder whether this country, which had been invaded by Germany three times in 70 years, would have to beat down another such attack in the next 70. Whether the greatest security for France lay in a marginal line or in a power block or maybe in a type of defense which has not yet been given a chance to test itself. One world. We took off. We flew high. Clouds obscured the face of France and the corners of Belgium and Holland over which we passed and all but the coastal area of Germany. We caught glimpses of the North Sea and of the outlying Danish islands with their rich green fields, their tight, neat, red-roofed farmhouses, their herds scattered at pasture. Four-and-a-half hours from the time we left Paris, having flown over the territory of five different countries, we landed on Copenhagen's Castrop airfield, which the Nazis had seized without warning on that infamous day in May six years ago. Copper roofs, magnificent spires and towers, cobbled streets, bicycles, docks, bridges, Gothic dignity, the moderate antiquity of a city that was thriving 300 years before Columbus set out for America. For my part and on the basis of my brief stay, I would not quarrel with those who, forever busy with comparisons, have called Copenhagen the little Paris of Scandinavia. The little Paris was suffering from an acute housing shortage, just as Big Paris, London, New York and Los Angeles. The city seemed in good shape. There was rationing of certain commodities but nothing severe. Denmark perhaps suffered least of any of the occupied countries, a fact nobody would begrudge her. But whatever she went through was bad enough. When I asked a 60-year-old guide named Peter Madsen how he felt about things a year after the liberation, he didn't have to be glib to make himself clear. His very groping for expression had an eloquence all its own. The sense of relief at the defeat of the Nazis had not yet worn off. A phenomenon I was to find in other Scandinavian cities and in other homes. I asked Mr. Madsen whether he was fearful of another war, especially since there was considerable war talk at the time. He answered, Well, if I should tell you the truth, I don't believe there will be a war in the future. I don't believe why. Yes, sir, I should say that I mean that the people all over the world want to work for the peace. Everybody wants to work for the peace now. Mr. Madsen was more optimistic than two other Danes in high position. One, the finance minister, Thorkill Christensen, whose answer, coming after an ominous pause, reflected the deepest gloom. Do you feel that there is going to be another war? I'm very much afraid of it. You are. You think there is a real danger of it? I think there is. And what do you think is the best way of avoiding that? I think it's impossible to make an adequate answer to that in some few minutes. I asked the same question of Al Singh Anderson, a social democrat who was minister of defense at the time Denmark was attacked and who is now on the Foreign Affairs Parliament Committee. Do you believe, as do certain political observers elsewhere, that another war is inevitable? Yes, I do. Although I was not conducting a poll on the question, I had become curious by now to learn whether this attitude went straight through the government. I therefore put the question squarely to the highest Danish authority on the subject, the foreign minister Gustav Rasmussen. Mr. Rasmussen, do you think that the world is heading toward another war? No, I don't. I don't see any reason why a new large war should break out in our time and I don't believe it will. I asked Mr. Rasmussen whether Denmark, situated as she is in that vaguely defined zone between east and west, would join with any particular power block. The question was asked against the background of Winston Churchill's recent speech at Fulton, in which he proposed an Anglo-American block. Mr. Rasmussen replied, quote, Denmark is not prepared to participate in any combination of powers that might be regarded as a potential threat by other nations, unquote. I asked him what he thought might ease the tension and mutual suspicion then high between Russia and the West. He said, The frankness would be a great help. People should in general be less afraid of one another and be less afraid of one another's opinions. The more frankness with which they would state their varying opinions and views, the better. You will by now have noticed that the Danes speak in excellent English. This is typical of all educated Scandinavians. Not once in my travels through the three countries of the peninsula was I beyond the sound of English speech. The smaller countries of Europe are far more accomplished linguistically than we of the English-speaking nations. They have to be in order to get along in that polyglot continent. It's not unusual to find a Dane or a Norwegian or a Czech speaking four or five or six languages. They begin early as you can gather from this recording of a high moment in the reading of an essay in English by 12-year-old Per Alkacik, who is studying in the efterslickstil Skabetskola, an elementary school in Copenhagen. Everything in Denmark is much smaller than in America. In Denmark, we only have very small cities. The biggest, Copenhagen, has one million inhabitants and is therefore not bigger than your willing trees. Yet in Denmark, we have no painstakes except with young and disabled and they were not dangerous. As Per suggests, Denmark is a small country and unfortunately for me, my stay in it was correspondingly little. Its attractiveness, like those of its neighbors Norway and Sweden, is out of all proportion to its size. So, it seemed, were its burdens. At the time I was there, Denmark was having to support 200,000 unwanted German civilians who had poured into the country when the American and Russian armies trapped Germany in a giant pincers movement. The cost of maintaining these evacuees totaled 50% of the entire normal free war budget of Denmark and to them it was a bore and a burden. But the Danes were taking it well. They had found out that they could take it and that they could give it during the war when the Nazis learned to their cost that this plucky little democracy could resist with a vengeance. We left Copenhagen one evening around 9 o'clock and we flew due north along the arms of the North Sea known by the wonderful names of Kattegat and Skagerak. The northern sun blazed red in the sky and our Danish DC-3 pointed its nose straight toward it. At 10.15 p.m. Norwegian time, the sun was still bright and although it sank below the horizon a half hour later, we could easily make out in the lingering twilight the excitingly beautiful and complex Christiania fjord at the apex of which sits Oslo. I was in the capital of the country which for five years had given the fascists a workout such as they got in few occupied countries anywhere. Like Copenhagen and Paris, Oslo had not been damaged much in the fighting. The city is small and although it's not splendid in the same way as Big and Little Paris its natural situation gives it a distinction few cities are lucky enough to come by. You might say the city is substantial and modern in character. It was also crowded when we were there. Rationing of most commodities was severe. Currency was frozen. The people of Oslo were still convalescing from the deep wounds of war. They hadn't got over it yet. The secretary of Norway's labor party, Hakon Lee, explained to me. Especially the industrial population has suffered tremendously during the war. The psychological pressure has been much greater than any American can imagine. We discussed Norway's troubles which Mr. Lee felt to be almost entirely economic. Before meeting him I had heard some complaint on the grounds that Norwegians were at the moment disinterested in international affairs and I asked him what he recommended as a solution to this problem. His answer contains the phrase shoes again, S-H-O-E-S shoes which you might not make out. Maybe the best solution of this problem too is to give people a decent home. Shoes again. And that's their clothing. Give them a decent standard of living again so they can afford to be busy with international problems. One night I met a group of underground men which included Sigurd Evansmo, sole survivor of a band of 18 Norwegians who were caught off the west coast of Germany trying to escape to England. An informer, one of their party, had turned them into the Gestapo for 700 crowns, an average of about $10 per head. All but Evansmo were executed. He escaped by a lucky accident. I asked him why the Nazis so deeply hated the intellectuals. I suppose they hated the intellectuals because they knew that they could expect the hardest resistance from them as good perpetrators and also because the Nazis had what they call it the knoves of the men's greatest. They crushed all rights of men. That was a fellow Norwegian who supplied the missing phrase. I talked with other Norwegians, with Gunnar Janssen, the sculptor who said, I believe the artist belongs just as much as the scientist in the forefront of international thinking. I talked with Dr. Otto Moore, rector of the University of Oslo, who said, I think we have to teach people to be able to agree without being disagreeable. And who told me later, we've got to be optimistic, or it will not be worthwhile living. I talked with a housewife, Mrs. Haugen, who told me, I haven't seen an egg in years. Every now and then I hear them spoken of, but I never hear of them being eaten. I listened with fascination to the stories of Karl Lieker, the handsome prematurely gray-haired director of the Norwegian state radio, who told me that before he was sent to a concentration camp for services to the underground, he was kept at his radio post by the Germans. One day, when quisling was scheduled to broadcast, Lieker refused to cooperate. The Nazis didn't do much about it because, said Lieker, they despised quisling themselves. Lieker's 17-year-old boy had run away from home to join the Norwegian forces, and when he was asked later whether he'd had pangs on first raising a rifle to shoot a human being, he replied, certainly not, I was shooting a German fascist. Perhaps the most significant interview I had in Norway was with a young foreign minister, Halvard Lange. Like so many outstanding Norwegians, he had been imprisoned in a concentration camp. His offense was illegal communication. Mr. Lange said to me, Norway fought not only for freedom and democracy at home, but for cooperation abroad with other peoples, and the conclusions we have drawn from these years of struggle I shall state briefly. He then proceeded, Certainly, the old principle of neutrality will offer no guarantee in future. This world revives is one world, and Norway, like all other countries, will be unable to isolate service. Secondly, peace can only be achieved through an organized international instrument strong enough to enforce peace. And we consider the United Nations to be such an instrument, and Norway will carry on her foreign policy within the framework of that organization. And we are not prepared to join any combination which may be regarded as a potential threat by any other nation. This last statement, even in its phraseology, was remarkably close to that made by the foreign minister in Denmark. Together with what was to be told to me later by the Swedish Foreign Office, it dovetailed into a three-ply policy of absolute power-block neutrality for all Scandinavia. We went to the Oslo air-drome and took the plane for Stockholm. It was an old yonkers, relatively slow. I had time looking out over the beautiful woods and lakes which lie between these two capitals to sum up my impressions of the three countries I had visited in the past fortnight. Each was exhausted by its struggle. Each was, to a large extent, in-drawn to its own problems. Each was improving day by day. What seemed to me most encouraging of all was that little of the bitterness and hostility toward some nations, which I heard from some quarters before I left New York, had been expressed to me on any side in France, Denmark and Norway, or in England before then, for that matter. In the occupied countries, among the men who had had the closest experience with war, the resistance men, there was never talk of a new war. Nobody was interested in lining up any block of powers. The only combination they seemed eager to join up with was One World. We got off the plane at the Broma Airport in Stockholm and were met by a group including Dr. James Robbins of the American Legation. He handed me a letter which he had been holding for me. It was from President Truman concerning the One World flight. The concluding sentence was this. Anything which can promote better relations in a world too long divided by suspicion and ill-will is of value to our time. I looked around me. There were many planes on the ground, each of them on a peaceful errand. They were bearing the emblems of a dozen united nations. We have been listening to Norman Corwin, CBS playwright producer and first winner of the One World Award in the third of a series of broadcasts based on his recent 37,000 mile global flight. All voices heard on this program were recorded in France, Denmark and Norway. The musical score was composed and conducted by Alexander Sammler, Guy Dela Chaffa was associate director. Next week at this same time, Mr. Corwin will present sounds and voices recorded on his visits to Sweden and Poland.