BRITISH AMUSEMENT

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 44, 20 August 1940, Page 6

BRITISH AMUSEMENT

NAZI "TOTAL BLOCKADE"

CHANGE IN NAME ONLY (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, August 18. What might be termed the "comic relief" to the fierce renewal of Germany's air attacks is the grandiloquent announcement of a total blockade of Britain. The savage attacks on neutral ships by the Germans since the beginning of the war when no warning had been given before the unprovoked torpedo or bomb was hurled at them-suggest that there will be no change of policy except that the German sea methods will now have the dignified official title of a total blockade of England.

Such practices have been known in the commercial world, when a firm which fails to sell shoddy goods tries to get rid of them to innocent people by changing the description—they are still the same goods.

Berlin itself states that the announcement of the blockade was made in "giant headlines" in Dr. Goebbels's Press, which "carried the full wording of the Government statement on its front page." Such a position for such an announcement in the Berlin Press is not regarded as surprising, even when the statement has to be printed that Britain's "criminal course of war-1 fare" has led the Reich Government to decide to "retaliate in kind and employ armed force with the same ruthlessness against the shipping round England."

The amusement here is completed by a German broadcast statement to America that Irish ships are likely to be permitted to "pass through certain lanes at certain times" if flying the Irish flag. An imaginary picture is conjured up of an Irish ship carrying a German permit, looking for a certain lane while the British Navy securely guards all the approaches to Britain and looks benevolently on.