Jay Cooke Allen, Jr.

From: https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/22/archives/jay-a-lien-news-corresp...

Jay Allen, a foreign correspondent whose dispatches helped to confirm the German terror‐bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War, died Wednesday in Carmel, Calif., of the effects of a stroke. He had lived there since 1947 and was 72 years old.

As a correspondent for The New York Post and Esquire Features, Mr. Allen was in Bilbao, Spain, in May, 1937, when a German airman was shot down and captured by Basque militiamen. The town of Guernica, of no military importance, had been bombed April 26, with heavy civilian casualties.

The act had been attributed to German fliers sent to Spain by Hitler to aid Generalissimo Francisco Franco, then in rebellion against the Republican Government; but the German role in the bombing, which shocked the world at the time, had been officially denied.

Mr. Allen was able to question the German airman and then acquired his diary, which described how he had taken part in the bombing and ma chine‐gunning of Guernica. The unprovoked attack on the city later became the subject of a memorable painting by Pablo Picasso, which has been on exhibition for years at the Museum of Modern Art here.

Jay Cooke Allen Jr. was born in Seattle on July 7, 1900. After graduation from Pullman College in Washington and receiving a master's degree at Harvard, he worked briefly for The Portland Oregonian. In 1924, he went to France, where he was on the staff of the Paris edition of The Chicago Tribune. A year later he joined the paper's foreign service, and was a member of the legendary trench coated corps of correspondents that included Vincent Sheean, Edgar Ansel Mowrer and Le land Stowe.

Lived 2 Years in Spain

From 1925 to 1934, Mr. Allen covered events in France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Poland and the Balkans. He lived in Spain from 1934 to 1936, doing historical research, and was present when the Franco revolt broke out.

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In the civil war that ensued Mr. Allen filed dispatches, often under fire, for The Chicago Tribune, The London News‐Chronicle and The Post, among others. He was in Bilbao when it was bombed in 1937 by both German and Italian planes. In one dispatch he wrote:

"They are having a field day, these German and Italian planes. As sportive as porpoises in a squally sea, they leap and dive over the front, over the villages behind the lines, bombing, machine‐gunning, strafing down everything that moves. They have nothing to fear.”

He rejoined the foreign press corps at the outset of World War II in 1939, covering military and political events in North Africa and France. His exclusive interviews with Gen. Maxima Weygand and Marshal Henri‐Philippe Petain, done for the North American Newspaper Alliance, were widely printed.

Mr. Allen went back to North Africa in 1942, serving with American forces there for a year. After the war, he wrote for magazines and lectured extensively. He was also active in the Council on Foreign Relations.

A memorial service is to be held after Dean Allen returns from Hanoi, where he is on a Christmas mission taking gifts to American war prisoners.

See also: https://alba-valb.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Allen_Hostages_App...

' https://albavolunteer.org/2017/06/hostages-of-appeasement-jay-allen...