FOUL TACTICS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 November 1939, Page 6

FOUL TACTICS

GERMAN MINE-LAYING IN NORTH SEA VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW. HEAVY LOSSES INFLICTED ON NEUTRALS. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 11.25 a.m.) RUGBY, November 19. The sinking of the Royal Dutch mail liner Simon Bolivar has evoked feelings of indignation and sympathy. The disaster adds many more lives and another fine ship to the long list of casualties inflicted upon neutrals by German ruthlessness and disregard for international law. Among the more recent of these have been the sinking of the Danish liner Canada by an unnotified German mine, and the torpedoing without warning or attempt to place the crew in safety- of the Norwegian tanker Arne Kjode. International Jaw demands that if a belligerent lays mines he must take every possible precaution to ensure the safety of commercial navigation and must, for this reason, declare a danger area and warn shipping to keep clear. The Allies have announced every danger area created by them. Germany has announced some danger areas, notably those designed to close the Baltic and force all neutral shipping passing in or out of that sea to use the Kiel Canal, thus submitting to German contraband control and bringing to Germany much-needed foreign currency by the payment of canal and harbour .dues. German U-boats are. however, making a practice of laying clumps of mines in channels used by merchant shipping on this side of the North Sea. The establishment of these danger areas is not announced. as their whole objective is to inflict losz ses before the mine fields are discov--1 ered and swept. In the case of the Danish ship Canada, Germany at once averred that the ship had struck a British mine. It is hardly common sense to imagine that a maritime nation should illegally lay mines in channels used extensively by its own shipping. . Moreover, all the evidence, and the statement of the master of the Canada, proved it to have been a German mine. If a British warship is damaged by one of these illegal minefields, Germany is only too pleased to claim it as a great success for German arms. Yet if a neutral ship is sunk in this way the German minefield is at once announced as British by the German Propaganda Ministry. Further proof of the illegal laying of mines by Germany in shipping routes on the west side of the North Sea has been secured by the fact that many German mines have been wash- 1 ed up on the British East Coast. The effect of this ruthless German warfare against neutral shipping is shown by the following quotation from a Norwegian newspaper, referring to the torpedoing without warning of the Norwegian tanker Arne Kjode: “It is proof of open warfare excluding the aggressor from the civilised community. Such matters can only be resolved when the nation which thus raises its hand against all finds that I every man’s hand is against her. One cannot exceed the bounds of humanity even in war.”