44 Valuable Men

Not a single bomber delivered to Britain by air has been shot down by German action, even though the planes used to fly unarmed and unarmored. But last week a plane carrying eleven Atlantic Ferry Command pilots and eleven crewmen back to America for another batch of deliveries crashed, presumably of engine failure, on a lonely hillside in Britain. Four days later another crashed on the takeoff, and twelve more Ferry Command pilots and nine more crewmen were killed.

If Douglas Bader was valuable for his character, these men were valuable in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. It cost at least $100,000 apiece to train and maintain the 23 pilots who were killed in both crashes, up to the time when they began ferrying. The planes which crashed were presumably Consolidated B-24 Liberators, worth about $250,000 each. Total loss in the two crashes: at least $2,800,000.

Linchpin. There was one passenger aboard the second plane the loss of whose life was incalculable in these terms.

In terms of money, Arthur Blaikie Purvis was worth only one Canadian dollar a year. But since the third month of the war he had. as head of the British Purchasing Commission and British Supply Council, handled billions of U.S. dollars worth of orders.

Sharp-looking, energetic as a motor, he was the first British munitions buyer to reach the U.S. in 1914. became, at 34, president and managing director of Canadian Industries, Ltd. (explosives, fertilizers, paint, plastics, industrial chemicals --Canada's Du Pont). Now he had become, as Viscount Halifax said last week, ''the linchpin of the vast organization built up on this side to cooperate with the U.S. Administration in all vital matters of production and supply."

Sincerest American tribute was that of Cordell Hull. This homespun, intensely American American said of the late Arthur Purvis: "A true Englishman."

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