THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS SATURDAY, JULY 27, 1940 SINKING OF THE MEKNES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23719, 27 July 1940, Page 10

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS SATURDAY, JULY 27, 1940 SINKING OF THE MEKNES

In this war, as in that of 1914-18, deeds of callous atrocity, fully authenticated, have been committed by Germany. Their number, although in the aggregate making the tale of them more terrible, tends to reduce the horror aroused by each succeeding item in the discreditable list, for the human mind tires and becomes numbed under a repetition of such blows. In the Nazi programme of deliberate "frightfulness" this tendency has, no doubt, been borne in mind with reference to the reaction of those outside the circle of victims; just as certainly have the instigators hoped that the victims, suffering directly or indirectly, will be increasingly affected by fear as their personal experience of the savagery lengthens. From time to time, in the broadcast words of Hitler, ah adept torturer, a naive disclosure of his knowledge of these twin psychological facts has been made. Probably he prides himself on having reduced his "war of nerves" to a fine art. These comments on the German programme are prompted by the sinking of the Meknes, some details of which are published to-day. It is not a singular instance. The past eleven months have been marked, with evidently studied frequency, by outrages ranking with it in inhumanity. Yet it has features calling for special attention. While its calculated influence upon British and French was meant to be intensified by its being a recurrence of injury and upon onlooking peoples merely another happening of a kind to which they have become idly accustomed, it has a distinction of barbarity.

This ship, French and flying the French flag, was conveying to France nearly 1300 French naval officers and men, a company of those who had signified in England their wish to be out of the war and at home with their families. The British Government had promised to facilitate the granting of any such wish, and was honourably carrying out its promise. Unusual care had been taken to secure for these French officers and men a passage free from molestation. The French colours were painted on the vessel's sides and deck, and she was fully lighted for the night crossing; it is understood that beams of light illuminated the flown tricolour and the other signs of her French mission. Beforehand a precise notification of the occasion of her brief voyage had been sent to the German Government, which had thereupon guaranteed her a safe passage. In spite of all this, she was torpedoed and sunk by an enemy vessel, after ample investigation to make sure of her identity. The only attempt to establish a case for ignorance of this was a hampering of her efforts to signal her name —at each effort she was fired on—and this conduct makes the outrage additionally indefensible. To be noted also is the speed with which the evil intention was carried -out: her passengers and crew, the latter .presumably British, were given only five minutes to leave the ship. There was barely time to launch the boats ; several passengers were killed outright by the attack with gunfire and torpedoes; in a desperate effort to save their lives hundreds of men leaped overboard. Later news .may have a precision impossible in a first account, but the testimony of survivors leaves no room for doubt that a dastardly outrage was committed.

It has been made morally worse by a clumsy attempt in Berlin to juggle with the facts. Mr. Alexander, the First Lord of the Admiralty, who announced the sinking of the Meknes, added "I have just heard that the German High Command admits responsibility for the sinking, because a Berlin communique to-day states that a German speed-boat sank an 18,000-ton merchantman off Portland." From Berlin also, by radio, came a description of the sinking of a ship of the same tonnage off Portland, "a particularly fine success," but this ship, accoiding to the message, was not the Meknes. The haste to dissociate the news in the official communique from the sinking of the Meknes was significant. Her tonnage, by the way, is 6127, but accuracy has never been a proud virtue of Berlin tellers of 'tales, and to multiply an achievement, in any particular, by three, is really modest. When credible news comes of the enemy's sinking of an 18,000-ton ship, at the same time and in the same vicinity, it will be possible to believe that the Berlin news did not refer to the Meknes. Until then, Mr. Alexander stands acquitted, by the maker of the charge that he sank the Meknes in order to create anti-German propaganda, of all complicity in the characteristic Nazi crime.