Churchill and Bevin under Fire

So long as his nation wins battles, a nation's wartime leader can usually face down any sort of home opposition. It is different when battles are regularly lost. Last week it was fast becoming different for Winston Churchill.

Largely by means of sheer eloquence, Churchill had been able to keep most Britons' devotion in the face of Narvik, Dunkirk, the Luftwaffe, Libya, Greece--and to quell general fears that Britain's wartime productivity was far short of what it should and might be. But last week, with Crete added to the somber list of defeats, a tide of opinion arose in Britain to the effect that one more major defeat--such as the loss of the Suez Canal--would call for a radical change, if not the exit of the Churchill Government. Few doubted that Prime Minister Churchill, due to face Parliament this week with regard to Crete, would encounter the first heavy criticism of his Prime Ministry.

Britons wanted to know why, with seven months in which to do it, the Cretan airdromes had not been either fortified or dynamited against Nazi landings. They wanted to know why Nazi planes had been able to soar against Crete in hordes from Greek airdromes which British officials had called practically useless.

Widely circulated in London was the account of an Australian officer in Crete, suggesting that the British Command had merely expected a "leisurely sea invasion." Said he: "We were having a nice sunbathing holiday till the Germans came. . . . A truck driver was telling my Colonel that he had seen men coming down by parachute 16 miles up the road. I did not believe it."

Parliamentary circles were angrily agog with suspicion that the obsolete and stubborn 1914 military mentality was still in charge at G.H.Q. and that it had been getting a romantic gilding from the eloquence of Winston Churchill. Military Historian Liddell Hart, whose theories of defensive warfare were blasted by Adolf Hitler's Blitzkrieg tactics, broke his recent silence long enough to remark that the British people's hearts of oak were being betrayed by their leaders' oaken heads.

The rising criticism was even harder on Winston Churchill for neglecting the war economy--munitions production, shipbuilding, agriculture--and the psychological lift that might be derived from a clear, impassioned statement of progressive peace aims.

Labor Minister Ernest Bevin admitted: "We are behind with our airdromes and some of our factories." Onetime War Secretary Leslie Hore-Belisha, who would undoubtedly like to be Prime Minister himself, declared: "Productivity in factories and docks is falling at an alarming rate. . . . The tempo of our effort cannot be considered adequate when five months have to elapse between the fire of London and the outlining of a scheme for the coordination of the fire brigades. . . ."

During Whitsuntide millions of Britons had gone off to the country on their annual long weekend, cramming the trains to get away from offices and factories.

Cried the London Sunday Express: "Do we even now understand that we are at death grips in a fight for our lives? We do not. . . . These crowds of people . . . were symptoms of a fatal frame of mind. Their peril and their fate were at the back of that mind. Custom and habit were at the front of it. . . . If the cause of the shut down is lack of raw materials, then a sad situation exists. If the cause is 'holiday is as usual,' then a scandalous situation exists."

Said the London Daily Mail: "When are we really going to get down to the job of winning the war? When are we going to run machines, factories and shipyards to full capacity? When are we going to see an end of masterly retreats? . . . Something is wrong. Britain needs new ideas. She certainly needs a radical shake-up on the home front."

Distrust of Winston Churchill's leader ship was best summed up by the University of London's brilliant, leftish politico-economist, Harold J. Laski, who wrote:

"The Labor Ministers have been utterly unable to make Churchill grasp, on the economic side, the revolutionary character of the changes produced by the war. . . . He has an emotional interest merely in its domestic impact. . . . The pathos of the bombed areas makes him demand instant action. But the inadequacies of the policies of his Government in education, for instance, or evacuation, do not arrest his interest, and nothing proportionate to their importance is attempted. . . . He does not even begin to understand the gravity of his colleagues' failure to grapple with the problems of production. . . . Mr. Churchill remains a very great war leader. It is not as yet clear that he is in any sense a great Prime Minister."

Especially distressing to many Britons was the seeming complaisance of the Labor Party leaders with the way Government was going. Their position became clearer last week, in shabby, tobacco-smoky Westminster Central Hall, where the British Labor Party held its 40th annual conference. At the end it seemed that the fears which seized many Laborites when the Churchill Coalition Government came into being last year had been fully realized --in the old British fashion the Conservatives had stifled the opposition of the Laborites by absorbing them; the Laborite leaders had become an echo rather than a goad to Winston Churchill.

At the conference there was scarcely more than a murmur against the Government's military or economic conduct. The tone of the Party leaders was set by the fervent rhetoric of Lord Privy Seal Clement Richard Attlee, which might well have come from a Conservative mouth: "All members of the Government are absolutely united. . . . There can be no parleying. There is no way out but the destruction of Hitlerism."

Minister of Labor Ernest Bevin, who at his advent last year was widely saluted as a squarejawed, horny-handed son of toil who would assure tough, down-to-earth Governmental selfcriticism, was silent except for a two-minute talk on unemployment insurance. The only lengthy criticism was directed at Britain's tight press and radio censorship (see p. 67).

A sharp attack by Mrs. Barbara Ayrton Gould on the Government's food policy, charging that it was devoted to traders' rather than consumers' interests and had led to scandalous maldistribution, failed to stir so much as a single response. Finally, by a heavy vote, the conference approved two vague, grandiose memorandums, one denouncing any idea of a negotiated peace, the other demanding the end of economic inequity after the war.

Last week some Britons found a wry symbolism in the fact that Labor Minister Bevin had taken to lunching among the well-heeled Conservatives at the swank Carlton Grill. Said the acute New Statesman & Nation:

"Bevin, a man of great reputation and full of character, came fresh to a Cabinet office and to the House. In an office which more than any other except the Prime Minister's requires ruthless determination to achieve his ends, even at the cost of his own popularity, Bevin seems too concerned with his own popularity and not clear enough in the lead he should give to labor. He has given vent to occasional outbursts against employers on the floor of the House, but he is very cautious about giving them orders, even on vital matters affecting production."

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