Capa marshaled his ten pieces of luggage and clucked around them like a mother hen. He saw them into a locked room. He warned the airport officials again and again that they must mount guard over them. And he was never satisfied for a moment while he was away from them. Normally lighthearted and gay, Capa becomes a tyrant and a worrier where his cameras are concerned.

Helsinki seemed a sad, pleasureless city to us, not badly bombed, but considerably shot up. Its hotels mournful, its restaurants rather silent, and in its square a band playing not merry music. In the streets soldiers seemed like little boys, so young, and pale, and countrified. Our impression was of a bloodless place, and a place of little joy. It seemed as though, after two wars and six years of fighting and struggle, Helsinki just couldn’t get started again. Whether all of this is true economically we do not know, but that is the impression it gives.

Up in the town we found Atwood and Hill, the Herald Tribune team which was making a social and economic study of the countries behind the so-called iron curtain. They lived together in a hotel room surrounded by reports and pamphlets and surveys and photographs, and they had one lone bottle of Scotch whisky which they had been saving for some unimaginable celebration. It turned out we were it, and the whisky didn’t last very long. Capa played a little sad and unprofitable gin rummy, and we went to bed.

In the morning, at ten, we were at the airport again. The tail-wheel of the Russian plane had been changed, but some work was still being done on the number two engine.

During the next two months we flew a great deal in Russian transport planes, and there are points of likeness in all of them, so that this plane may as well be described as representative of all of them. All were C-47’s, with brown war paint, remains of lend-lease stock. There are newer transport planes on the fields, a kind of Russian C-47 with a tricycle landing gear, but these we did not fly in. The C-47’s are a little run down insofar as upholstery and carpeting go, but their engines are kept up and their pilots seem to be very fine. They carry a larger crew than our planes do, but since we did not get up into the control room we don’t know what they do. When the door opened, there seemed to be six or seven people in there all the time, among them a stewardess. We don’t know what the stewardess does either. She seems to have no relation to the passengers. No food is carried by the plane for the passengers, but the passengers make up for this by carrying great quantities of food for themselves.

The air vents in the planes we traveled in were invariably out of order, so that no fresh breeze came in. And if the odor of food and occasional nausea filled the plane, there was nothing to do about it. We were told that these old American planes will be used until they can be replaced by the newer Russian planes.