BRITAIN JUSTIFIED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 February 1940, Page 5

BRITAIN JUSTIFIED

UNOFFICIAL VIEWS IN WASHINGTON NAZI OUTCRY RIDICULED. NORWAY UNDER PRESSURE. NEW YORK. February 19. While the State Department declines to comment on the Altmarck incident as American interests were not involved, all unofficial Washington opinion agrees that Britain has tenable grounds in international law' to support her action. Leading jurists declare that Norway was at fault in not determining the true status of the Altmarek and freeing the prisoners. They cited the Appam case in 1916, in which the United States was forced to free 429 British prisoners taken to Newport News aboard a liner captured by a German raider. Mr Gerard, the former Ambassador to Germany, said: “Just suppose the Altmarek put into New York harbour. Would we have stood for it?” The New York “Herald Tribune” says: “There is grim humour in Berlin’s wild cries of anger and pain and the outraged moral virtue of a nation whose governors have made brute force their deity and have had. relatively mildly, the tables turned Norway. of course, is protesting with one eye on Germany, but none outside Germany is really profoundly shocked and many Americans are not repressing sardonic smiles at the German outcries.” The "New York Times” says few incidents of the war surpassed the sheer dramatic interest of the Cossack's rescue. The Norwegians' failure to discover the prisoners was incredible, but it. is conceivable that the unhappy Norwegian Government was acting on German pressure. This is the only explanation, too, for Sweden's refusal to allow the passage of foreign troops to Finland. It was announced in a Daventry broadcast late last night that up till then no reply had been received from Norway to the British Note. In the absence of official comment, the newspapers are all following the lead of the President of the Norwegian Parliament, and complain bitterly against the British action, and express regret that the Western Powers should now have encroached on Norwegian territorial rights, but they make no attempt to reply to the British charges that Norway had failed to exercise true neutrality rights.