Defenders On Spots

Viscount Swinton, His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Air, drew recently from Britain's leading aeronautic journal, The Aeroplane, this information:

"Probably Lord Swinton is the only person in British Aviation who does not know that he misses a great deal of knowledge by his lack of tact in dealing with people, from his own subordinates to the most important."

This came just before the Christmas Holiday, and last week The Aeroplane followed through with an attack which London correspondents slapped onto the cables as Britain's story of the week. From Viscount Swinton in particular to the British Cabinet in general, vigorous Editor Charles Grey of The Aeroplane passed as from a case of ministerial halitosis to a national scandal. "The 1936 was disappointing," wrote he, year "when you consider the millions in money that has been flung about by the British Air Ministry in obedience to scared politicians who ordered them to produce airplanes like rabbits out of a conjurer's hat regardless of whether these airplanes could be of the slightest use in a real war.

"The key to the whole political lunacy lies in a delightful expression used by a very junior officer of the air force when he said that if Britain wanted to go to war with Germany we should have to arrange with the German air force to allow us to use advanced landing grounds in Germany and supply us with 'leaded fuel when we got there.' "In other words, the great majority of the airplanes which we had in the Royal Air Force squadrons during the past year, ostensibly as bombers, could not carry themselves, let alone a load of bombs, 300 miles out and 300 miles home. If they flew 500 miles out they would have to tank up again to get back.

"We have a certain number of squadrons of what we call long-range bombers, but they are so slow that if they met a reasonable headwind in either direction they could not do a trip 500 miles out and 500 miles back, carrying a reasonable load of bombs."

Since The Aeroplane is the favorite paper of British Royal Air Force pilots, who swear by Editor Grey, his final punch at Viscount Swinton was considered as reflecting the Service's own views last week. Although the facts are known to every member of the Air Force, declared The Aeroplane, the British Cabinet has "gone on making obsolete airplanes just to be able to say in the Houses of Parliament that Britain is numerically strong or nearly as strong as other powers on the continent of Europe.''

With Parliament about to reconvene, a major national issue thus faced the Prime Minister and Sir Thomas Inskip. Deputy Chairman of the Committee for Coordination of Defense, a committee of which the Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin is chairman. Sir Thomas is an extremely churchy, well-meaning British statesman who has the misfortune to know almost nothing about modern mechanized warfare. He is an expert on the Prayer Book and successfully led a great House of Commons battle against bishops of the Church of England when they wished to "reform" it (TIME, Dec. 26. 1927). In 1936 the two most fateful acts of Mr. Baldwin, much influenced in both cases by churchy Mrs. Baldwin, were to obtain the abdication of Edward VIII and pick Sir Thomas Inskip to co-ordinate Imperial Defense. At the time of this surprise appointment (TIME. March 23) British wiseacres called it a "typical Baldwin bumble'' and predicted that the Prayer-Book Knight as an Imperial Defender would "outbumble Baldwin." Today Sir Thomas, like Lord Swinton, "misses a great deal of knowledge by his lack of tact," but Mrs. Baldwin is firmly convinced that he is as right as King Edward was wrong and that "character is more important than ability."

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