MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1941. "IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE" KEEPING A STILL TONGUE

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 260, 3 November 1941, Page 6

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1941. "IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE" KEEPING A STILL TONGUE

DOR over two years Germany's undersea pirates have lurked in the waters along the great sea lanes and their surface raiders have made intermittent hit and run attacks upon the ships which supply our needs from overseas and carry our produce home. Enough of these ships have been lost to grimly remind us of the dangers besetting those who have their business on the great waters, arid it would seem unnecessary to-day to ask for a veil of complete silence concerning the coming and going of the merchant fleet. But unfortunately the necessity exists, perhaps because many of those to whom such information must be imparted have lost their sense of responsibility in the long months of the war and no longer appreciate the fact that they may thoughtlessly pass on the very information which Germany is seeking. They may fail, too, to realise that it is possible for enemy agents to operate in this country, and to transmit to Germany the very facts that they have idly disclosed, a transmission which may cost the lives of a whole crew. There is a very general tendency to prove one's own superior knowledge by quite needlessly passing on information concerning the arrival or departure of this or that vessel, or by broadcasting what material or human cargoes are carried. The Gestapo has its agents everywhere, it is idle to assume that there are none in New Zealand, and any one of them, by listening carefully and asking apparently innocent questions, may obtain information which would send more of our already depleted merchant fleet to the bottom. Passengers arriving here or leaving the country are apt to say too much concerning their comings and goings, failing to realise that loose talk of this kind, carefully correlated, would eventually give to an enemy agent so complete a picture of the movements of our shipping that he would know -when and where to advise his piratical employers to strike. Universal silence will confine the Nazi agent's knowledge to his own personal observations, and thus prevent him accumulating sufficient data to be of any real use. The danger seems remote when one talks of the arrival or departure of a steamer, but it is very near to those aboard that vessel, and it is the duty of every one of us to minimise it by completely responding to the War Cabinet's appeal for silence.