BRITISH CONTROL OF ALL SEAS

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 120, 14 February 1940, Page 9

BRITISH CONTROL OF ALL SEAS

Confession In Germany NAZIS’ PIRATICAL WARFARE Contemptible Methods (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, February 12. Indications are growing that the need is being increasingly felt in Germany to justify to the German people the indiscriminate sinking of neutral shipping, of which 342,35.7 lons has now fallen victim to enemy action.

While Dr Goebbels's organization claims that Germany is master of the whole of the northern seas and the South Atlantic, the “Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung” seeks to justify the Nazi methods of warfare against neutral ships by a frank confession that it is Britain’s control of all seas that justifies the defiance of all accepted tenets of international law.

The newspaper says: “As the means of modern war enable a State to be master of Iter territorial waters in nearly the same sense as she can be master of iter land territories, it is impossible for Germany to accomplish a blockade or an anti-trade war near to the English coast in accordance with the prize laws.” Neutral shipping is compared by the newspaper to a bus running between the Maginot and Siegfried lines. Finding that this thought introduces quite a new conception of international law it pleads for the evolution of a new code to replace all existing international law and designed, it would appear, to give legal authority to ruthlessness. Cruel Air Attack. In a recent, speech tlie Prime Minister declared that lite practice of Nazi raids on British fishing vessels is not war but murder. The justice of this accusation, says the “Yorkshire Post,” is sharply revealed by the news today of contemptible attacks by German planes on a tiny fishing coble off the Yorkshire coast.

Two fishermen and a boy were out in this boat when two Nazi planes swooped down and tried botli to bomb and machine-gun them. All they could do was to crouch and make for the shore. Once their boat was blown clean out of the water by the explosion of a bomb. Attacks such as they can have no object but slicer frightfulness. Nazi airmen must get the same sadistic pleasure from preying upon helpless fishermen as their Gestapo colleagues in torturing Poles, Czechs, and Jews. Such a story as that brought home by our Yorkshire fishermen is a crushing reply to the excuses offered by German newspapers that British fishing boats are armed to fight Nazi raiders, and that attacks on them are, therefore, honourable and legitimate. AVliat arms had these two men and a schoolboy'? A boathook?