The torpedoing and sinking of a British naval air station by a German submarine will rank as one of the outstanding feats of the present hostilities. No details are given regarding the attack beyond the fact that it was due to clever tactics adopted by the U-boat, but considerable ingenuity must have been exercised by the U-boat commander and the German propaganda service and it is to be hoped that the Admiralty, in investigating this amazing occurrence, will not overlook the possibility, of the submarine having come up the drainpipe to fulfill its mission. The facts are perfectly clear and do not reflect much credit on the authors of the story. According to long tradition, the British Navy gives its shore stations names of ships and H.M.S. Kestrel is a naval air station many.miles inland. A recent German broadcast claimed that H.M.S. Kestrel had been torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine, and, therefore, another naval casualty had been added to the list. How on earth a submarine could sink a naval station unless the frightful invention possessed by the Germans is a land-travelling submarine something like the machines used by the men from Mars in H. G. Wells' book will remain a mystery until the hostilities are concluded. It is comparable in assinity and unintelligibility to the report recently published by a Japanese newspaper which informed its readers, with rare disregard for facts and geography, that the German submarine Deutschland had sunk the American steamer City of Flint off Stonegate, the latter being the name of the ship whose crew was transferred to the Deutschland after being sunk.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.