REPORTING THE WAR

Southland Times, Issue 23946, 12 October 1939, Page 6

REPORTING THE WAR

“EYE-WITNESS” AGAIN IN EUROPE LINK BETWEEN TROOPS AND HOME The mention of an “Eye-witness” with the British forces in France shows that an important and somewhat mysterious figure linking the armed forces with the Homeland is again across the Channel. • . . The “Eye-witness” is the official reporter for the War Office, who is attached to headquarters and brings his trained mind and his analytical ability to bear on the problems of the war. He passes on his observations, which are studied at home and suggest lines of inquiry. The “Eye-witness” early in the last war was Colonel Sir Ernest Swinton, whose work on “The Defence of Duffer’s Drift,” published in 1904 had become an unofficial text-book of the British Army. ..... , . He’had worked-on the official history of the Russo-Japanese War and appreciated, almost alone in Europe, the change which the machine-gun had made in modern warfare. In France he saw confirmed what he had discovered in the Russo-Japanese campaign—that the stopping power of the machine-gun -was creating a state of paralysis of the offensive. He was the first to suggest an antidote for this disease, and his proposals made to Sir Maurice Hankey (now Lord Hankey), the Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, in October 1914, was the first step towards the creation of the machine-gun defying tank. The present “Eye-witness” is also certain to be some soldier of known scholarship, and one suggestion is that it is Major-General A. C. Temperley, who as Major Temperley, was a staff officer with the New Zealand Division, and who was British military representative at the League of Nations, leader of the British military delegation to the Disarmament Conference, and formerly Deputy-Director of Operations and Intelligence at the War Office. Lately he has been military correspondent of The Daily Telegraph and The Morning Post.

CYNICISM OF NAZI RULERS

UNHEROIC ABANDONMENT OF CLAIMS

LONDON, October 10.

Developments in North-East Europe, arising from the new relations established between the Nazi and Soviet systems and affecting Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and now Finland, are seen in London as affording renewed evidence of the complete cynicism of the present rulers of Germany and of their complete disregard of principle or even of their own past professions. By their efforts to secure from Russia a favourable, or at least indifferent, attitude in the war with the Western Powers to which their policy of military adventure has led them, the Nazi chiefs have involved themselves in a most unheroic abandonment of their past claims to exercise control in the Baltic and to be the protector of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from Bolshevism. To these States, which in the past the Nazis have claimed to lie within the German sphere of cultural influence, the Berlin Government’s attitude to the advance of Soviet influence must appear as an act of treachery, but the outside world will be struck chiefly by its significance as a demonstration of Germany’s Weakness.

It is indeed a matter for surprised comment among observers here that the Nazi Government has been ready so soon to accept an adjustment of the g andiose assumptions upon which Herr Hitler must have started his war of aggression and to face the necessity of jettisoning much which they must have once believed to be secure to seek to avert disaster.

GERMAN TROOPS REACH NEW SOVIET FRONTIER

LONDON, October 10.

The Rotterdam correspondent of The Times says it is officially announced that German troops have reached the Russian-German demarcation line at every point. The announcement is made in this form apparently to conceal the fact that the Germans, instead of advancing, have mostly retired from the positions previously reached.