NO RETALIATION

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21215, 11 September 1940, Page 7

NO RETALIATION

FLIERS’ DETERMINATION ONLY MILITARY OBJECTIVES NO ATTACKS ON CIVILIANS (Official Wireless) (Received Sept. 11, 11 a.m.) RUGBY, Sept. 10 The air attack on London is presented by German wireless broadcasts as a great, exhilarating event, and the terrorist quality of the raids is, by implication, constantly emphasised. There has been no disposition in London to minimise the serious nature of the civilian casualties caused, but the Royal Air Force will not be deflected at this from its declared purpose of confining its attacks on Germany and German-occu-pied territory to military objectives. The Reich’s propaganda office today attempted in its wireless broadcasts to demonstrate how ineffective are the British air attacks by the publication of the casualty figures. It declared that between May 10 and August 31 the total casualties inflicted during the British air raids on German territory was 78 persons killed, 29 gravely injured, and 22 slightly wounded. These figures, if any confidence could be placed in Nazi statistics, would be received here with nothing but satisfaction, since it is no part of the British strategy to kill and maim civilians or destroy their homes, and would at the same time manifestly serve to underline the accuracy of the aim of the Royal Air Force pilots, since the scale and intensity of the attacks on military objectives in Germany during' the past months is widely known. Hundreds of Raids Apart altogether from attacks on military objectives in German-occu-pied territory and the bombing of troop concentrations, naval and military formations and dumps in Germany itself, the Air Force has during the period mentioned in the German wireless carried out 139 raids on aerodromes, 54 on aircraft works, 57 on munition works and chemical or supply depots, 139 on oil plants or depots, 13 on blast furnaces, 18 on power stations, and 25 on miscellaneous targets. Comment is further made in London that casualties so slight as these given by the German wireless seem hardly to warrant the many angry fulminations about the British bombing of civilian objective, nor indeed the present loudly-prSclaimed reprisal policy.