PLANES TO BERLIN

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28872, 17 April 1959, Page 9

PLANES TO BERLIN

Provocation Alleged

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 10 p.m.) LONDON, April 16. Under a front-page banner headline “Generals Defy Ike Again,” a report in the “Daily Mirror” today claimed that American generals in Washington were defying President Eisenhower.

“Yesterday, against his explicit orders, they sent another transport plane to West Berlin above the customary height of 10,000 feet,” the newspaper’s foreign editor, Michael King, wrote. “The British Government, I understand, is shocked by this action, which comes less than a month before the East-West Foreign Ministers’ pre-summit talks open in Geneva. “The Foreign Office gave no indication last night of what action the Government might take after the latest example of meddling by American generals,” he added.

x The “Daily Mirror,” in a leading article, urged the British Prime Minister, Mr Macmillan, to tell President Eisenhower to stop “this military madness.”

“The meddling American generals have done it again,” the article said. "For the third time they yesterday sent a highaltitude plane to the crisis city of Berlin—once again risking a clash with Russia.”

“Nothing Threatening” In Washington, the State Department said there was nothing threatening in the flights of United States transport planes in the Berlin air corridors. The department spokesman, Mr Lincoln White, made this statement when asked about the report that a third United States plane had flown to West Berlin at an altitude higher than 10,000 feet.

Mr White reiterated the American contention that its planes in the corridors would fly at whatever altitude was found to be necessary.

“The purpose of these planes is to provision Allied troops, not only United States troops, in Berlin,” he said. “There is nothing threatening in any way, shape or form in these flights and I trust and expect that the Soviet Union will fully realise this.” American Embassy officials in Bonn said that it was not yet clear whether Russian MIG jet fighters had used “dangerous flight tactics” on the C-130 turboprop freighter which made its high altitude flight to West Berlin yesterday.