"Dear German Reader"

"A striking feature of the last year or so has been the rapidly increased circulation of broadsheets and newsletters, privately owned, which purport to give their subscribers a mixture of 'inside information' and well-informed comment.

"The demand for them clearly suggests that the public are not satisfied with the news service of the regular press.

"They feel uneasily that newspapers are not telling them the whole truth about current events, and especially about foreign affairs."

Thus the Yorkshire Post recently summed up one of the most curious phenomena of modern British journalism. A revival of the classic art of pamphleteering, London's newsletters are mimeographed or cheaply printed, distributed by mail to subscribers at home and abroad. Beginning about six years ago, newsletters have grown in circulation and influence until as of last week they were reaching hundreds of thousands of selected readers and had created an international incident.

Of the dozen or so newsletters being circulated from London these are the most important:

The Week, edited by a tall, personable Oxonian, Claude Cockburn (pronounced koburn), who quit as U. S. correspondent for the London Times because he could not stomach its extreme Rightist policy. Editor Cockburn holds down a regular job with the Daily Worker (under the name of Frank Pitcairn), grinds out all the final copy for The Week in one all-night session, fortified by draughts of red wine. He has 40 regular correspondents, makes frequent , trips to European storm centres, has printed some accurate inside stories of the doings of the Cliveden Set. Many times sued for libel, Editor Cockburn has yet to be brought to court.

Arrow, published by an anonymous group of journalists of whom the leader is grey-haired, pink-faced Fred Voigt, one of the ablest newspapermen in England and a close friend of Sir Robert Vansittart, famed Foreign Office careerist. Printed on a hand press in an Old Gloucester Street basement, Arrow comes out on Friday, helps to fill the weekend gap in British news. Its policy: ''England must be strong."

The Whitehall Letter concentrates on interpreting foreign news, has good sources of information, is pretty accurate. Published anonymously, the snooty Whitehall Letter insists that its subscribers be properly introduced. The Far East Survey is published fortnightly by a onetime editor of Kobe's Japan Chronicle, A. Morgan Young, purports to give Britishers the inside dope on what goes on in China and Japan.

K.H. Most successful of all newsletters is grizzled, pipe-smoking Commander Stephen King-Hall's K.H. News-Letter. A smooth speaker on the "Children's Hour" of British Broadcasting Corp. (he told the boys & girls about Mrs. Simpson), Commander King-Hall started his news-letter to save himself the cost of answering his fan letters individually. Circulation of K.H. News-Letter has grown to 54,000 in three years, continues to grow at the rate of 500 a week. Commander King-Hall's chief source of information is the Foreign Office, where he goes three times a week.

Convinced that "there is a yawning gulf between what we believe to be true and what the average German believes to be true," Stephen King-Hall last fortnight sent copies of a news-letter written in German, to people inside Germany. Excerpts:

"Dear German reader: I am writing you because I want peace. . . . Can you defeat us in a war? It would have to be a short war, a lightning war, as even your experts admit. It is said that you will bomb London from the air. All right, so what? . . . I admit that you could kill about 300,000 civilians. Certainly, if you think that over, you will realize that that will make you lose the war. Germany's name will stink to high heaven from north pole to south pole and it would draw the Americans into the war within a week. . . . It is true that you have the Italians as allies. We had them last time and we know all about them. . . . It is your Fuehrer, and not my old Prime Minister, who will give the signal to attack. . . . Perhaps you will recognize in time the abyss toward which you are being led. . . . Until next week, with best regards. . . ."

As soon as copies of this letter reached Germany, Dr. Goebbels and his press blew up. German papers reprinted parts of the letter (leaving out most of the above quotations) and Dr. Goebbels devoted 3,800 words to a scorching front-page reply. Gist of it was that Commander King-Hall was working for Britain's newly founded propaganda ministry and that Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax had helped him to compose the letter. In Rome, Fascism's mouthpiece, Virginio Gayda, dutifully echoed this view, took huffy exception to the Commander's reflections on the fighting qualities of the Italians, accused King-Hall of compromising the Anglo-Italian pact of 1938. But Editor Gayda could produce nothing to equal the sourball indignation of Goebbels, who sneered:

"The German people can no longer be befuddled by such little tricks as your correspondence, you honest British tar."

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