Manawatu Evening Standard. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1940. THE RULES OF WAR.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 239, 6 September 1940, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1940. THE RULES OF WAR.

Because the German Government liad given notice of its intention to wage unrestricted war on shipping, Berlin claims that its submarines cannot be expected to differentiate between vessels, even though some of them may be carrying children out of tile war zone to a safer haven until hostilities cease. That is its reply to the protest against the outrage perpetrated in the North Atlantic wh'en a vessel carrying British children overseas was torpedoed. Such a reply, of course, is what could only be expected from the barbarians who a year ago killed thousands of fleeing women and children in Poland; who earlier had assassinated hundreds of Czechs without trial because of their resistance to the Nazi code; whose war machines in their thrust through Belgium and Prance toward the Channel ports and Paris crushed under them thousands more men, women, and children refugees who impeded progress, and who in many cases had already been mown down by inhuman airmen who no doubt regarded this form of diversion something far beyond anything that the Nazi “kultur” had yet provided. There are countless other outrages against humane instincts and the rules of war that have piled up into an enormous score to be answered for, and they are having precisely the same effect as similar incidents in the war of 1914-18 in stiffening the resolve of the defenders of freedom rather than weakening it.

On the very day that a British air pilot was riddled with bullets from three Nazi fighters as he parachuted, a helpless target, from his disabled machine it was intimated that Britain had received notification, through Switzerland, of Germany’s intention to employ numerous ships with Bed Cross marking for rescuing airmen from the sea. very properly the British Government replied that it will accord hospital ships complying with the relevant provisions of the Bed Cross Convention all reasonable immunities conferred thereby, but cannot admit tlie right of a belligerent Government to employ hospital ships in a manner calculated to interfere with the conduct of naval and military operations. This last phase has always been recognised in the use of the Bed Cross. It has been conveniently forgotten by the enemy that they have, with the most ruthless methods that ever sullied the pages.of history, repeatedly killed and wounded Bed Cross workers and those under theiv care, sink-

ing hospital ships and destroying ambulances and Hospitals. Tlie very protection the Red Cross should afford has been misused by them for offensive purposes, as witness the recent case of Nazi planes bearing the international emblem being utilised for reconnaissance purposes off the British coast when none of their combatant airmen were near the scene. In the early months of the war it became a common topic to discuss the Allies’ war aims. With the intensification of the fight academic speculation on these has disappeared with the deeper realisation of the one great aim—the removal for ever of a barbaric code that respects no humane sign and which recognises no sanctuary either under the Geneva emblem or the Cross of Christianity.