THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST KITCHENER

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXIX, Issue LXIX, 1 July 1915, Page 5

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST KITCHENER

. t • i.ONDO&-May. 21. London telegrams in the American papers give the following: ' Two men specially selected for attack by the press are Kitchener and Churchill. Kitchener is blamed from all sides, the Government supporters regarding him as the main cause of their downfall. Journals of the most opoo'site schools join in criticism. The Times says: "Kitchener's orders for shells were given too late, complaints and warnings disregarded, and the nation lulled into an utterly false security by misleading official reports. The consequence is that hundreds and thousands of British lives have been sacrificed in an unequal contest. The whole trouble arose because Kitchener assumed an impossible burden." The Manchester Guardian says it is nothing less than a scandal that we should still be sacrificing thousands of precious lives and holding back the march of our armies because the supply of ammunition is short. "It is impossible that Lord Kitchener should escape the responsibility, and the chief responsibility for this failure." It says: "It is an open secret that, quite early in the war, pressure was put upon him to adopt some of the means for increasing our supplies, which have, quite recently, been adopted. He resisted them." The Guardian urges that Kitchener be transferred to some other field, not less honorable, and leave his present post for a man possessing special grfts which the entirely new and unexampled situation demands.

The Daily Mail to-day prints a long and bitter editorial attack based on a declaration that Lord Kitchener has starved the army m France through the shortage of high explosives and ■shells. ■;■■ ■■• ■■ :■. •■ V ■■-.• :". ;- ; ■ '■ ...■■-..■ The Chronicle declares that Kitchener's .neglect to inform the Cabinet concerning the deficiency of high explosives, and his. omission to communicate to it Sir John French's appeals, has led to disastrous political and other consequences. It began the Cabinet crisis, and the ultimate results of the concatenation of grave events was the rather inglorious extinction of ».great and able Liberal Government. It declares that there ds an absolute necessity for some division of labor in the War Office. The Daily News, while attacking Lord Northcliffe for criticising Kitchener, declares that there is a feeling on both sides that Kitchener's great services would be best utilised not in civil administration, but in more piirely military duties. "Lord Northcliffe," the News says, "is to-day the greatest peril which threatens the Empire. It was he v/ho made Lord Kitchener Minister of. War 'by his clamoring at the beginning <\i the war. Kitchener at the War Office is Northcliffe's nominee, and if Kitchener at the War Office is, as Northcliffe now insists, the architect of the nation's misfortunes in war, then , the man* who should be hanged is the man who forced him on the country—Lord Northcliffe." The News gives prominence to the Liberal hostility developed against Winston Churchill in the new Mirrstry. "It js felt by the greater number of Liberals," it'says, "that Churchill has been oneiactor'in leooardisinig the Liberal Government's fortunes."

LONDON, May 21. The Daily Mail and other newspapers under the same ownership have been most violent in their attacks on Lord Kitchener. The Daily Mail says: "It never has been pretended that Kitchener is a soldier in the sense that Field-Marshal Sir John French is a soldier. Kitchener is a gatherer of men, and a very fine gatherer, too, but his record in the South African war, as a, fighting general apart from his excellent organising work as chief of staff, was not brilliant. Nothing in Kitchener's experience suggests that he has the qualifications required for conducting a European campaign in the field, and we can only hope that no such misfortune will "befall this nation as that he should be permitted to interfere with the actual strategy of this gigantic war." Proceeding to'accuse Lord Kitchener of having "ordered the wrong kind of shells," the Daily Mail asserts that "despite repeated warnings that a high explosive shell was required. Lord Kitchener persisted in sending shrapnel, such as He used against the Boers, thus causing the deaths of thousands of British soldiers, and incidentally bringing about a Cabinet crisis."