If the British broadsheets stole a march on the tabloids on Wednesday as the country braced itself for the first war in Europe since 1945, by Thursday morning the Sun was leading the media pack when it came up with the typically jingoistic headline, "Clobba Slobba".
As with the conflict in the Falklands in the 1980s, the Sun has adopted the language of war with considerable ease. Its supportive language on Thursday referred to "our boys" and explanations of "how we blitzed the Serbs" running across a map detailing the firepower of Tomahawk cruise missiles as they made their way across the skies of Europe to "clobba Slobba". In an ominous warning to its readers, the Sun's military adviser, Maj Gen Ken Perkins, said that at worst the conflict could become another Vietnam. The photographs used to illustrate the copy tell a similar story. In yesterday's editions an RAF pilot was shown inspecting a 1,000-lb bomb tucked under the wing of a Harrier jet based in southern Italy and one of his colleagues had scribbled a message to the Serbs on the side of the bomb: "I hope you like it."
On another page, a photograph of President Slobodan Milosevic was shown alongside that of the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, and Hitler. President Milosevic was a bigger tyrant than Saddam, said the Sun and justified the war on Serbia by describing Mr Milosevic as "a beast" who got a sexual kick from power and killing.
The Sun's language of hatred is not matched by the broadsheet writers, who have stuck to detailed descriptions of NATO sorties over Serbia on their front pages. On the inside pages of the Guardian, the Independent and the London Times yesterday they described the disunity among MPs over Britain's participation in the NATO bombings as several Tories joined about a dozen dissident Labour MPs in describing the bombings as "ill-conceived". Many of the British correspondents thrown out of Serbia after the first wave of attacks have described their treatment by the Serbian authorities. The BBC's Southern Europe correspondent, Orla Guerin, writing in the Independent yesterday, described how armed police came knocking on the door of her hotel room in Pristina at 2 a.m. and told her she would have to leave the country along with colleagues from CNN and the Spanish media.