INTERVIEW BLUNDER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 April 1940, Page 6

INTERVIEW BLUNDER

APOLOGY FROM BRITISH WAR MINISTER SIR E. IRONSIDE’S CHALLENGE TO GERMANY. PREFERENCE TO ONE PAPER NOT INTENDED. The Secretary for War, Mr Oliver Stanley, received representatives of the Home and Empire Press and apologised for the action of the Ministry of Information in inadvertently allowing one English newspaper, the “Daily Express." io publish exclusively an interview with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Edmund Ironside, states the London correspondent of the ' Sydney Morning Herald." In the interview. Sir Edmund Ironside said: "We would welcome a German attack on the Western Front. We are now fully ready lor it." Mr Stanley said that the Ministry of Information had recommended that Mr Frazier Hunt, the special representative of the International News Service (a subsidiary of the Hearst group of newspapers in the United States), should be given facilities to write a series of articles. The Hearst newspapers were notorious for their utterances against the Allies in the war of 1914-18. but the chain of papers is no longer personally con- i trolled by Mr W. R. Hearst. Agreeing to this suggestion as probably good propaganda. Mr Stanley asked Sir Edmund Ironside to grant the interview for publication in America. Mr Stanley expected the matter to be made available to ail English. Empire, and world newspapers later. He did not contemplate that the interview

’ would reach only one newspaper on ' this side of the Atlantic. Coming at a moment when there are . persistent calls for a demonstration of Allied initiative, and the always imminent possibility that some military action may convert the stalemate into [ “real war." the English newspapers felt | that they had been unjustifiably scooped by the Government’s granting of exceptional privileges to an individual newspaperman. Their representatives voiced a strong protest. Likewise. Dominion representatives pointed out the unfairness—especially to Australia, where two newspapers receive the Hearst news I service. Mr Stanley was so impressed that he promptly called in Sir Edmund ironside to the crowded War Office confer- | once room and asked him to repeat lhe 1 interview for immediate world release. I thus enabling all the Australian newspapers to publish simultaneously what had been supplied to the favoured i

newspapers. Si)' Edmund Ironside even repealed the exact phrases, while newspapermen busily made notes in shorthand and then rushed to telephones. Hitherto since the outbreak of war there lias been a rigid practice io ban the mention of any high officers by name, even when they have addressed newspapermen at the War Office, the Admiralty, or the Air Ministry, as Mr Hore-Bel'isha. Mr Winston Churchill, and Mr Stanley himself have repeatedly done. Mr Stanley, indicating a sincere desire to mend the damage done, said: “You gentlemen have been writing the same sort of stull' for many weeks as Sir Edmund Ironside said when giving the interview, but I appreciate the value of having a name attached. 3'hercfore. I am asking Sir Edmund Ironside to repeat the statement, and i also you may say that I agree with Sir Edmund Ironside’s views. Von may i publish that. 1 wish to repair the damage done, and to assure you that the j incident won't happen again.” ;