MURDER ON SEAS

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 February 1940, Page 8

MURDER ON SEAS

PLANES BOMB TINY BOAT • MORE FRIGHTFULNESS [BRITISH OFFICIAL WIRELESS.] ■ ~ / - J ; , RUGBY, February 12. In a recent speech, the Prime Minister declared, that the 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, 'to-day, 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 dowm and tried both 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 these can have no object by sheer frightfulness. Nazi airmen must get the same sadistic pleasure from preying upoh helpless fishermen as their Gestapo colleagues get in torturing Poles, Czechs and Jews. Such a story as this, 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 the "Nazi raiders, and. that the attacks on them are,' therefore, honourable and legitimate. What arms had these two men and a schoolboy? A boat-hook?”

GERMAN PRESS EXCUSE. RUGBY, February 12. Indications are growing that the need is increasingly felt iri Germany to justify to the German peopje the indiscriminate sinking of neutral shipping, of which 342,357 tons have now fallen victim to enemy action. While Dr. Goebbels’ organisation claims that Germany is master of the whole of the North Sea and South Atlantic, the “Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung” seeks to justify the Nazi methods of warfare against neutral ships by the frank confession that it is Britain’s control of the seas that justifies defiance of all accepted tenets of international law. The newspaper says: “As the means of modern war enable a State to be master of her territorial waters in nearly the same sense as she can be master of her land territories, it is impossible for Germany to accomplish the blockade and anti-trade war near to the English coast in accordance with 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.

DUTCH INDIGNATION (Recd. February 13, 1 p.m.) AMSTERDAM, February 12. Holland is seething as the' result of the torpedoing of the Burgerdijk. The owners have asked the Government to protest to Germany. The Burgerdijk was laden with Canadian wheat and flour for Holland from New York. Ninety per cent, of the cargo was destined for the Government for which reason the torpedoing is regarded as a more flagrant breach of international law than the two Holland had previously suffered. SHIPS COLLIDE LONDON, February 12. The Belgian steamer Flanders was beached on the south-east coast, after a collision with an unknown vessel. GERMAN FREIGHTER RECIFE (Brazil), February 11. The German freighter Uruguay (5846 tons) sailed with a cargo of foodstuffs.