Wairarapa Times-Age TUESDAY, JUNE 8, 1943. BOMBING AND CIVILISATION.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 June 1943, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age TUESDAY, JUNE 8, 1943. BOMBING AND CIVILISATION.

THROUGHOUT the war, our own nation and others fightin* by its side have abstained consistently from retaliating in kind upon the inhuman and atrocious barbarities of which the Axis Powers have repeatedly been guilty. That being so, there is something extremely gratuitous and untimely in the recent declaration of the Bishop of Lichfield (Dr E. S. Woods) that: “The bombing of Rome would be a crime against civilisation and a betrayal of the very things for which we are fighting.”

The bishop in the first place might have been expected to find a reason for holding his peace on this subject m the fact that the Allies, though it is within their power to bomb Rome, have refrained from doing so. The immunity thus extended to the city presumably would be ended only by some new development of foul tactics on the part of the enemy, but it is decidedly too much to claim that the bombing of Rome in any circumstances would be a crime against civilisation and a. betrayal of the cause of the free nations.

In 1941, Britain threatened to bomb Rome if the Axis Powers bombed Athens and it would be going to an indefensible extreme to say that the threat thus made was not fully justified. Neither would it be in conformity with justice and reason to suggest that Rome should continue to enjoy its present immunity if the enemy sought to use it as a safe and sheltered centre of war organisation, or in some other circumstances that may be imagined.

As the war is now developing, with a rapid and powerful extension of Allied offensive action in immediate prospect, the criminal gangsters against whom the free nations arc fighting and whom they are pledged to extirpate are throwing more and more energy into an outcry against the alleged barbarity and inhumanity of Allied methods. It should hardly need to be suggested that there should be no seconding of these endeavours by responsible and representative men in Allied countries.

It is more than enough that the present clamour about the crime of Allied bombing comes from men who not only attempted to do all that they now' falsely accuse the Allies of doing, but are branded with the guilt of crimes which put them definitely outside the pale of humanity. The outcry of the Nazis and their Italian jackals is made ridiculous by the recorded wrecking by bombs of three million homes in Britain. Its cynical effrontery becomes still more apparent when thought is given to the murderous bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade and other defenceless or virtually defenceless towns and cities in Europe, and to the deliberate selection as targets of British cities like Canterbury and Bath, which had no military importance and were remarkable only for their religious and historical associations.

There are even blacker counts, however, in the indictment of the Axis gangsters. They bear the infamy, for example of a wholesale massacre of Jews in Poland and in other European areas —their victims being numbered in millions —and of other deeds of cold-blooded murder of which the Lidice horror is an outstanding example.

The entirely false and hypocritical outcry of these vile criminals against the alleged inhumanity of Allied bombing is of course easily understood and accounted for. It is inspired solely by the fear of just retribution. The weapon of force by which the gangsters hoped to enslave and degrade humanity has been and is being turned against them with ever more deadly effect. It would be a crime against civilisation and against common sense if their hideously bogus outcry had any other effect on the United Nations than to stiffen a grim determination to proceed inexorably with the job of making an end of the foulness of international gangsterdom.