Blockade Relaxed When Enemy Not Assisted

Northern Advocate, 19 November 1941, Page 5

Blockade Relaxed When Enemy Not Assisted

[British Official Wireless] (Roc. 1 p.mj RUGBY. Nov. 13. The return to Istanbul is expected today of the Turkish ship Kurtulush from its second voyage to Athens with food and clothes provided by Turkey, America and Britain for starving Greeks and British prisoners of war. This is a sample, says “The Times," of the British Government's “earnest desire to allow the properly controlled distribution of food to the hungry wherever it can be made without affording advance or advantage to the enemy.” Another example is the passage through the blockade of the American medicants and milk for children in unoccupied France. Within the blockade area, “The Times” recalls, food in smaller quantities has similarly passed from Sweden to Norway, from Portugal to Belgium, and Switzerland to several occupied countries. Until Grip is Broken “The British Government cannot but welcome these transactions on the understanding that they do not entitle the country making the gift to demand passage through the blockade of additional food for itself," “The Times” continues, stating that it deeply regrets that “other countries suffering just as severely as Greece can have no hope of any large-scale relief as long as they remain in the grasp of their cruel, rapacious and wholly untrustworthy conqueror. “It is a rule of war recognised by all civilised countries that the-con-queror makes himself responsible for feeding the inhabitants in the territories he has occupied. Germany’s Responsibility “That obligation was restated by the Americn Secretary for State (Mr. Cordell Hull) recently when he said that the United States Government was deeply sympathetic with the needs of many parts of the world, but that it was the manifest duty of the occupying authorities to supply relief.

“It is notorious that the Germans have removed large quantities of food from every country they have entered and have diverted food inside those countries from women and children to factory hands, who are forced into the production of armaments. “German spokesmen, moreover, have repeatedly declared that the British blockade is ineffective, and one paper was arguing not long ago that the Nazi system of self-sufficiency had made the whole of Europe ‘invulnerable’ to the blockade.

“Out of their own mouths it is proclaimed that organised robbery and pillage are the cause of the present terrible destitution in occupied countries. There was no starvation in any one of them before the German armies marched in.”