Tommy's Friend Out

In a whirlwind of activity since he became Secretary of State for War three years ago cherub-faced and cheerfully ambitious Leslie Hore-Belisha has given the British Army a rousing New Deal. He raised Tommy Atkins' pay, smartened his uniform, gave him free haircuts, better food. More important, Mr. Hore-Belisha braced up the common soldier's morale by shattering a tradition of centuries that British officers were not promoted from the ranks but trained in expensive academies whose cost barred them to the poor. Promotion is now from the ranks; the mistress of a Tommy on active service today receives from the State the same allowance as though she were his wife; Tommy when home on leave can, for the first time, dine in the same restaurants as Army officers; and when Private Atkins goes back to his regiment he finds solicitous "personnel officers"--created by Hore-Belisha--who have no other duty than to watch over his personal welfare. In short the Army has been "vigorously democratized," and there was no question last week of canceling out these reforms when Neville Chamberlain quietly obtained the resignation of his War Secretary. At No. 10 Downing Street the Prime Minister told Mr. Hore-Belisha, "You will live in history." Gradual democratization not only of the Army but of all Britain has in fact been Tory policy for years, under Stanley Baldwin as well as Neville Chamberlain, but the War Secretary was told there was prejudice against him and that he must go.

A soldier with a flaming torch escorted Mr. Hore-Belisha home through the London blackout. "I may be back!" he told a War Office messenger, and to reporters who rushed to his small suburban estate at Wimbledon Common he mysteriously confided, "This is very big, much bigger than you imagine--it had to come." Over the weekend Bachelor Hore-Belisha refused to answer his ceaselessly jangling phone, slit open with satisfaction scores of telegrams and cables of sympathy and indignation, many from U. S. citizens. Good or bad, the reasons for the dramatic ouster of War Secretary Hore-Belisha, which caught the British public wholly unprepared and raised a world furor, were easily grasped by military men and politicians.

"Insufferable!" Within the Cabinet there has been constant friction between Mr. Hore-Belisha and other ministers, who have found his cocksureness offensive, his aggressiveness "pushy." Air Secretary Sir Kingsley Wood has been especially vexed at War Secretary Hore-Belisha's bland assumption that R. A. F. units in France ought to be subordinated to the Army as soon as possible. In fact, what Leslie Hore-Belisha has been after is the creation of a Defense Ministry--with the Army, Navy and Air Force all subordinate to one able go-getter. This might be a good idea. But coming from Hore-Belisha, who so obviously thought himself the man for the job, it struck the British Cabinet as insufferably bumptious.

There were hints this week that their choice for the job was Winston Churchill.

Although himself a super-go-getter, War Secretary Hore-Belisha, deeply influenced and frequently visited by Britain's distinguished military journalist and theorist Captain Basil Henry Liddell Hart (TIME, Oct. 9), opposed from the start of World War II any go-getting offensive by the Allies. Blockade Germany and wait for her to starve--with the Royal Navy doing most of the blockading--such is the policy which has seemed sound to Go-getter Hore-Belisha and of course to the whole Cabinet, since this has been the essence of British war policy.

"Young Blood!" In Great Britain the widespread popularity of "Hore-Belisha, the Tommy's Friend," made his exit a terrific press splash. Rhetorical questions still survive in British journalism and the public was excitedly asked if the Jew had been sacked because he was a Jew?* If the self-made Go-getter had been shrugged aside by the entrenched Gentlemen of England? Soon, however, London editors settled down to featuring an oversimplified story in which Go-getter Hore-Belisha was found to have been in bad odor not so much with the Cabinet as with those very generals whom he sensationally promoted 15 months ago in his great Army shake-up and infusion of "young blood" (TIME, Oct. 24, 1938). He certainly has been a sore trial to the generals, especially to General Sir Edmund Ironside, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, whose authority, undercut by Hore-Belisha, will now be much enhanced. Even Viscount Gort, the British Commander in Chief in France, whom the Secretary of State for War three years ago promoted over the heads of 50 older generals, has not been able recently to stomach what many a peppery British colonel calls, "That bounder Belisha!"

By no means an up-from-the-gutter Go-getter, Leslie Hore-Belisha was born of prosperous parents, educated in Paris, Heidelberg and Oxford. Sheer brilliance made him president of the Oxford Union, famed springboard to Parliament, and in 1922, after a short journalistic career, he sprang successfully, captured as a Liberal a supposedly safe Tory seat. When Neville Chamberlain, the Birmingham businessman, settled down as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he made Hore-Belisha one of his "bright young men" as Financial Secretary to the Treasury and for the past eight years he has made headlines in an assortment of sub-Cabinet and Cabinet posts. "Get the public talking about the problem!" this Go-getter always orders and your typical British statesman or soldier promptly concludes that Hore-Belisha has made everyone talk too much.

Father-to-Son. Thus the Cabinet and the generals were well pleased when Neville Chamberlain picked as his new War Secretary last week a man of character and a great gentleman, Mr. Oliver Stanley, son of the Earl of Derby, who was Secretary of State for War in 1916-18 and again in 1922-24. If the time is coming to send Tommy Atkins to glory, death and victory, quiet Mr. Stanley, who won the Croix de Guerre in hot fighting on the Western Front, will not hold the Army back. Neither will he go-get. That is practically guaranteed by Mr. Stanley's record right up to last week as a routine President of the Board of Trade and before that as an uneventful President of the Board of Education, Minister of Labor and Minister of Transport. Incidentally, in 1934 it was Hore-Belisha who took over the Ministry of Transport from Stanley and in a few weeks was making world headlines by dotting London streets with brilliant orange "Belisha Beacon" traffic globes set atop zebra-striped poles.

The Army objects profoundly to the zebra touch and War Secretary Oliver Stanley will certainly remember that in World War I the leading roles were legitimately played by Foch, Ludendorff, Hindenburg, Haig, Pershing--whereas today no Allied general has had a chance. Socially the new War Secretary is somewhat overshadowed by his clever and beauteous wife. Lady Maureen Stanley, daughter of the Marquess of Londonderry who used to be perhaps the chief British exponent of appeasing Germany but swung violently around after the rape of Bohemia last spring.

In Canada this week the appointment of Mr. Stanley was viewed askance, for Canadian troops have been writing home rhapsodies about the fine treatment they have been given by "The Tommy's Friend." In London the Daily Express of self-made Canadian-born Baron Beaverbrook gloomed: "Mr. Oliver Stanley is a most unsatisfactory appointment. . . . He belongs to the Tory hierarchy. . . . Belisha does not belong to that class."

Macmillan, Reith & Duncan. Observers have expected for some weeks that Neville Chamberlain would gradually make a series of Cabinet changes and last week he followed up his unpopular ousting of Go-getter Hore-Belisha by a popular ousting of Lord Macmillan from the post of Minister of Information of which he has made such a mess (TIME, Sept. 18). To take over the Ministry of Information the Prime Minister appointed Sir John Reith, "The Man Who Made The British Broad casting Corp." and whose deep voice the world heard introducing the abdication broadcast of Edward VIII. A strict moralist, nonsmoker, teetotaler and a man famed for his dislike of newspapers and publicity of all sorts, Sir John will now have supreme charge of censoring the British press and of getting publicity for the British cause.

As a final uninspiring but safe appointment, the Board of Trade (department of commerce) was handed on from Oliver Stanley last week to Sir Andrew Rae Duncan, chairman of the British Iron and Steel Federation, onetime chairman of the Central Electricity Board and never before prominent in politics. Seats will have to be found for him and for Sir John Reith in the House of Commons and by-elections in safe Conservative constituencies will soon be held for this purpose. This week, as Britain awaited further Cabinet changes, people were saying: "The generals intend to run the war."

*Hore-Belisha has been the No. 1 British Jew as Secretary of State for War, and Disraeli was the only Empire Prime Minister of his race.

But present-generation Britain has known a Jewish Viceroy of India, Lord Reading; a Jewish Master of the Rolls, Sir George Jessel; a Jewish Home Secretary, Lord Samuel; and a Jewish Governor General of Australia, Sir Isaac Isaacs. Jewish peers who swore allegiance to George VI at his Coronation were Lords Rothschild, Bearsted, Mancroft, Hirst, Swaythling, Reading and Duveen.

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