Shadow Scheme

Skilled industrial engineers in the United Kingdom have a social status that requires them to go in by the "Tradesmen's Entrance." They are accustomed to be guided and overruled by English gentlemen and by civil servants. Last week, however, the "Ford of Britain." philanthropic Lord Nuffield, whose little Morris cars are omnipresent doodlebugs of the British road, marched out of the Air Ministry and stirred up the most public sort of scandal by announcing that the engineering plans of its gentlemen happen to be all wrong. Lord Nuffield made no secret of the fact that he had just given Lord Swinton, His Majesty's Secretary of State for Air, a pungent piece of his engineering mind: "I said to him, 'Well, God help you in case of war!' "

This state of affairs was exactly what able British airmen had expected would come about when the gentlemen of the Air Ministry recently maneuvered Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin into dismissing the only one of its civil servants with a practical grasp of Britain's colossal problems in air rearmament, Sir Christopher Bullock, Permanent Undersecretary of the Air Ministry (TIME, Aug. 17). Now that skilled and outspoken Sir Christopher is out of the way, silky Air Ministry civil servants have been going ahead on a secret program which they call "shadow aircraft engine industry." There is nothing of an engineering nature about this genteel idea, and last week Lord Nuffield blew the lid off. He declared that under "shadow aircraft engine industry" one factory is to make the crankshafts of British airplane engines, another is to make the cylinders, a third the ignition systems and so on. Vehemently Lord Nuffield pointed out to Lord Swinton that under any such scheme an enemy bomb which destroyed, for example, the crankshaft factory, could break the chain of British aircraft engine manufacture and bring it to a standstill. On the other hand, if complete engines were made by each of ten plants, the bombing of one would leave the other nine still turning out engines. "Your whole shadow scheme is completely unworkable!" Lord Nuffield told Lord Swinton.

In their anxiety last week, Lord Swinton and his Air Ministry subordinates decided that they could be on the safe side only by placing orders in the U. S. for the manufacture of at least 700 fighting planes. This decision came just after U. S. aircraft salesmen had left London, disgruntled by the cool assurances of civil servants that Britain was making and would make all fighting aircraft she needed. Under Congress' so-called Espionage Act of June 15, 1917 it may still be a crime punishable by 20 years' imprisonment to export equipment such as fighting planes if there is "reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation. ..." Amid uncertainty as to the application of this act the Vancouver branch of U. S. Boeing Airplane Co. was rumored likely to get United Kingdom orders which might be too "hot" to be executed in the U. S.

Meanwhile the "shadow aircraft industry" scheme of the Air Ministry was not scrapped. Behind it are the prestige and wisdom of Britons too powerful to be soon sidetracked. Last week six British automobile firms signed up to make whatever engine parts they are each told to make by the Air Ministry. Part of the shadow scheme calls for the building by these companies of a certain number of new factories which will not make anything at all until after Britain has gone to war. Until then the companies will keep machinery in such factories well-greased to prevent it from rusting. As there is already an acute shortage of skilled British labor to man existing factories, the idle shadow plants will hang around the neck of British aviation many interesting problems.

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