Salt Lake Tribune | 1919-03-23 | Page 3 | Tannery Tells of Operation of War Telegraphs

TANNERY TELLS OF OPERATION OF WAR TELEGRAPHS PARIS, March 22. How the telegraph service of France was operated during the ' war has just been revealed by an official Investigation made by a committee commit-tee of the chamber of deputies which was appointed to inquire into war contracts. The report says the telegraphic control section, of which M. Tannery was the head and Captains Georges La Doux and Pierre Lenner the active members, was responsible for scandalous abuses. M. Tannery, the report of the commission commis-sion declares, admitted that an average of 40,000 dispatches daily were held up in the Paris office, and tho majority of them were never delivered. The rest of the dispatches were delivered only after, great delay. The dispatches held up were thrown in a waste basket and destroyed when the accumulation became too great, the officers never informing the senders or the addressees of what happened hap-pened to the messages. The section, it was testified, made no discrimination between messages sent by and to kings, princes and diplomats, treating them as they did the messages of ordinary individuals. The French foreign office, the report says, experienced great difficulty in preventing pre-venting the systematic holding up of state dispatches. The control section, it was testified, without informing the department, stopped all dlspatcheB from Spain, as well as those from M. Bapst, the minister at Copenhagen. The stock exchange orders were suppressed, including orders concerning con-cerning the war loans for national defense. de-fense. Orders sent by the great French munitions firm of Creusote also were stopped. When this condition of affairs was described de-scribed the French foreign ministry made a report, in which it said that "the telegraphic tele-graphic control section Is an organization of confusion and disorder, which engenders en-genders extraordinary abuse and risk, compromising the government seriously." M. Tannery was dismissed from his post, but obtained another under the ministry of finance In Alsace. He was removed from that post recently. Captains Cap-tains La Doux and Lenner are facing prosecution sin connection with the purchase pur-chase of the Journal by Senator Charles Humbert.