WAR OFFICE SECRECY

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20526, 9 April 1941, Page 4

WAR OFFICE SECRECY

LORD MILNE AS CRITIC AFRICAN CAMPAIGN INFORMATION WANTED LONDON, March 20. A famous old “war lord” denouncing' War Office secrecy and "the curse of paper” was a piquant ex-, perience for British peers when Field-Marshal Lord Milne, commander at Salonika in the last war and Chief of the Imperial General Staff for seven years, initiated a debate in the House of Lords yesterday.

Lord Milne spoke after a summary of the African campaign had been given by the Joint Parliamentary Under- Secretary for War, BrigadierGeneral Lord Croft.

The peers cheered Lord Milne when he declared: "There is rising throughout the world, and especially in the British Umpire, a growing, strengthening, and laudable desire for information.

•'People of the Empire want to know something of the deeds of their husbands, sons, and daughters. Morale and patriotism do not require stimulus, but neither would be any the worse for a little nourishment.”

Lord Milne praised the press for its full accounts of events, and expressed the hope that the dispatches of General Viscount Oort, on the achievements of the British Expeditionary Force in France and at the evacuation from Dunkirk, which are to be published shortly, would not be expurgated, “because,” lie said, "it is right and just to the men who fought the battle of France that we should be told the whole truth.” Brains Behind the Moves

Varying the phrase "boys of the hack room” used by the Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook, to describe the scientists and technicians behind Britain’s air achievements, Lord Milne demanded the publication of the names of the people “who did the work behind” in Libya, where, he said, the strategy was so excellent and the tactics so sound and beautifully carried out. He praised the rapidity of movement of tile Libyan campaign, and asked who arranged the supplies for these great army movements.

"It would be an excellent thing for the country to know how that was done and to know the men responsible,” he asserted.

Lord Milne praised another kind of secrecy—namely, the officers’ and soldiers’ self-imposed discipline. "The ease with which information was secured in the last war was almost a crime,” he added, “especially in London’s frivolous nightspots.” Referring to army extravagance, Lord Milne used the phrase “the curse of paper” to describe “forms, reports, and returns, which are mounting in geometric progression much worse than in the last war. The disease is spreading to the Home Guard, whoso officers are snowed under with paper:”