RED CROSS VIOLATED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 February 1944, Page 4

RED CROSS VIOLATED

EVIDENCE OF DELIBERATE GERMAN ACTION CORRESPONDENT GIVES FACTS. NURSES KILLED BY BOMBS. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 10.50 a.m.) RUGBY, February 9. ‘•There can have been no possibility of the German pilots mistaking the concentration of tents at the hospital, as all the air reconnaissance photographs of the enemy must have shown clearly that it was at least a mile from the nearest military objective,” writes a correspondent of the bombing of the field hospital in the Anzio beach-head. The hospital, he continues, was in the centre of an open field. He saw fighter-bombers dive and bomb from a low height. There were no barrage balloons in the area to call for caution in pulling out of their swoops, and there were no anti-aircraft guns near to reply to them. The correspondent said he heard a plane diving, but as it was at a hospital he took no notice. He counted eight bombs and went outside after the explosions. He found a nurse, to whom he had just handed some letters, dead in the receiving tent, with another nurse killed near- her. Three others were badly injured. He went through all the tents and found that all had been struck by splinters. The German pilots could not claim to have made a mistake, as the tent roofs were marked with the Red Cross and large Red Cross flags were pinned to the ground between the lines of tents. He measured one of these flags, which was at least 50 feet square, with a red band six feet wide crossing the sheet to its edges. .