South Yorkshire Times – Saturday 01 May 1943

Frightfulness

Primitive morality has long been a special attribute of the Axis powers, war reeks with examples of dastardliness which have already justified a thousandfold the previous denunciement of the late Prime Minister when he said, “It is the evil things we are fighting.” Mr. Chamberlain’s dictum is likely to be further reinforced. As conquering powers the Axis, particularly the German and Japanese members, showed themselves vile and pitiless enough. The Luftwaffe revelled in the unholy massacre of the French roads in the spring of 1940, when masses of harmless civilians were mowed down by machine-gun bullets or blasted to death by bombs. That was warfare true to the Hunnish ideal; the unsparing and unselective exploitation of military superiority. With mediaeval depravity, the Japanese gave us their own interpretation of this savage and cynical spirit by bundling together prisoners during the fighting in the East and cold-bloodedly murdering them with the bayonet point. The same outlook has been manifest by both powers in the cynical regimes which they have imposed on the countries overrun by their soldiery. It is the negation of civilised behaviour and a sure warning to all who ever toyed with the thought of coming to terms with nations capable of such monstrous conduct.

Now, with the enemy on the defensive, we have the latest example of totalitarian frightfulness, the execution of American airmen who took part in the raid on Tokio. And as if this were not sufficiently revolting, the enemy in Berlin veiled threats conveyed with typical indirectness that the same treatment may be meted out to our airmen who are giving the Reich such a gruelling. Thus it becomes patent to the blindest that there is no depth of infamy to which the Nazis and their filthy satellites will not sink. These murders (no other word fittingly describes them) so callously perpetrated by the Japanese, with complete indifference to any legal as well as any moral code, must be listed right at the top of the crimes demanding prompt and relentless expiation the day of victory. Retaliation on Japanese airmen in the hands of the United Nations would be as base as it would be ineffective. The Allies must nourish a long memory instead.

A dreadful example must be made of the criminals responsible for this action, and if the Germans so much as threaten overtly to match this Japanese abomination, they should be told categorically that nothing will save a single individual associated with such deeds from the utmost vengeance of those now probing and cataloguing every fresh act of wickedness committed in the name of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Shameless and blatantly imbued with a sense of their own moral and physical infallibility as we know the Nazis to be, it is nevertheless sickening to listen to their whining under the whip lash of the R.A.F. attacks. And coming almost to the day on the sixth anniversary of the destruction of Guernica, their recent attitude is nothing less than nauseating. The Luftwaffe’s record has been questionable enough in this war, but the obliteration of this small Spanish town, virtually undefended, revealed the German knights of the air at the peak of their bestiality. With no risk to themselves these gallant pilots bombed and machine-gunned old men, women and children of this Republican town in an orgy of sadistic slaughter. The wheel has come full circle. The Guernica raiders had no presentiment of a night in April, 1943, when bombs rained down on a German city at the rate of thirty tons a minute. Now it is their turn to squeal.

South Yorkshire Times, Saturday, 1 May 1943.

Notes

This is a strongly worded wartime editorial reflecting British opinion during the Second World War. The immediate trigger was the Japanese execution of American airmen captured after the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo (April 1942), news of which became public in 1943. The article also links Japanese actions with German atrocities, references the destruction of Guernica in 1937, and argues for post-war punishment of those responsible rather than retaliatory executions. It is a good example of local newspaper wartime propaganda and public sentiment in Britain during 1943.

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