Britain Assumes Full Responsibility for Planes Shot Down over Israel

Britain today assumed full responsibility for the reconnaissance mission during which five British planes were shot down over Israeli territory last week, a carefully-worded Foreign Office statement said today. A spokesman for the Foreign Office added qualifying considerations, however, which were taken here to mean that the British are shifting considerable blame on the United States.

Toward the end of 1948, the State Department in conversations with British officials complained that information about “Israeli aggression” was not obtainable through United Nations sources, the spokesman said. He added that the State Department “badly wanted to know what was happening” and, since the British had recourse to the only means of obtaining this information, the reconnaissance flight was ordered. The spokesman declined to reply to a question as to whether the State Department had been told that the reconnaissance flight would be undertaken.

The London Daily Telegraph, in a story headlined “Washington Request Led to R.A.F. Action,” reported today that “what has not been stated is that the British Government decided to entrust to the R.A.F. the difficult task of gaining irrefutable information about Israeli military movements over the Palestine-Egyptian border on the suggestion of the U.S. State Department that such Information ought to be obtained.”