Word: plewman
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Warwise Canadians, seeking the hard facts of death and disaster, knew one place to find them. In spite of censorship, in spite of anonymous telephone calls accusing him of treason, in the Toronto Star Go-year-old William Rothwell Plewman-platinum-haired and wearer of a tall Herbert Hoover collar-wrote his daily column, The War Reviewed, analyzing World War II as he once analyzed World...
...Plewman is Canada's only first-rate public military analyst. His integrity is a legend in Canada. Born in Bristol, England, son of a Methodist leatherworker, Plewman emigrated to the Dominion with his family when he was eight, in school and church set a long-standing record for juvenile deportment. Not long after he went to work as a reporter, he stood for vice president of the Toronto Press Club, put up posters reading: "Plewman for Vice." Up went placards by his rival: "What does Plew man know about vice?" He was defeated...
After office hours, during World War I, Plewman trained to become an officer, studied military tactics, earned a lieuten ant's certificate. He applied for overseas service, was never called. Plewman foresaw, before most military men, how World War I must end. On Jan. 2, 1918, he wrote: "Everything points to Germany and Austria-Hungary having tremendous and increasing difficulty in persuading their peoples to fight on. ... An enemy offensive on the Western Front this year would leave the enemy worse off than ever, and doomed to certain defeat." There was an offensive : it ended in defeat...
Though his British taste for understatement often hides the gravity of his views, Plewman thus far has not failed to emphasize Nazi strength, Allied weakness. When German columns broke the Allied line in Flanders last month, Plewman wrote with the sober detachment of a historian that there was nothing between Hitler's Army and the Channel to stop their advance...
Before the evacuation of Dunkirk was completed he predicted that the Germans would strike directly at France within five days. Before the Germans gained much ground on the Somme, Canadian headlines exulted over Allied planes bombing Berlin, and Allied guns blasting Nazi tanks, but Plewman wrote dispassionately: "Whether the Allied Air Forces can give enough help to enable the French Army to stand its ground during the rest of the week is un certain. . . . The French may have to evacuate the Peronne salient and fall back on positions probably well prepared along the Compiegne-Montdidier line...
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