FEELING IN BRITAIN

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 2, Issue 225, 14 October 1940, Page 7

FEELING IN BRITAIN

SACRED WORDS SAID OVER DEAD GERMANS TREATMENT OF PITILESS ENEMY Feeling is iising throughout Englnml against the sentimental treatment of captured. German airmen. Correspondence columns of the newspapers bitterly criticise cases of householders giving them cups of tea and cigarettes before handing them over to the authorities. The pitiless bombing of London lias prompted the Daily Herald to ask whether military funerals for German raiders are merely a matter of form or whether the chaplains mean it when they read the burial service. Conscripted Worship It describes military honours paid to a dead German airman shot down while bombing an undefended village in Kent. The coffin was draped with the Nazi flag and was carried by six British airmen. It bore a wreath from the focal R.A.F. and 200 R.A.F. men attended the service, for Avliich the prayers were read by an R.A.F. chaplain. The Daily Herald points out that it is difficult to believe that the chaplain could have been sincere when he read the sacred words over someone he knew had wilfully killed helpless civilians. "Certainly," says the paper, "a. large proportion of the troops attending such compulsory military services regaid them cynically. "Conscripted worship," it adds, "means nothing."