Arms & the Man

Winston Churchill wore an unusually subdued look as he stepped up to the despatch box in the House of Commons last week. As Minister of Defense, the old warrior, whose name and appearance Britons instinctively associate with bulldog-ging it through, faced a painfully ironic task. He announced that Britain's $13.1 billion rearmament program, which the Labor government inaugurated, will have to be cut back sharply. "There will be a lag," said Churchill glumly. "We shall not succeed in spending the -L-1,250 million [budgeted for] this year. Some of the program must necessarily roll forward into a future year."

Coming from the man whom Laborites dubbed a warmonger, such disappointing news was a far cry from the heroic scorn and we-can-do-it-better of Tory electioneering. Churchill made his speech in flat, conciliatory language, without any suggestion that the Socialists were to blame. Thus, what had been regarded as Labor's excuse for failure was now accepted as fact. Britain will be short of 1,500,000 tons of steel in 1952. Coal production will be about 5,000,000 tons short. There are at least 500,000 jobs waiting to be filled. Gloomy Treasury experts anticipate a 20% drop in arms production.

Honorable Mention. "Told you so," jeered the Bevanites. Churchill could not deny it. Taunted by Rebel Nye Bevan, who insisted on quoting his own 1950 warnings that rearmament would wreck Britain's economy, Churchill sarcastically admitted: "I am giving Mr. Bevan an honorable mention in despatches, for having, by accident, perhaps not from the best of motives, happened to be right."

Churchill seemed to be endorsing several other Bevanite ideas. For one thing, he now regards war as remoter than when he was lambasting Clement Attlee's defense plans: "I cannot feel that the danger of war is so great today as it was during the Berlin blockade of 1948." He also professed to be concerned, as Bevan is, by the "great and ever-growing U.S. atomic bomber base in East Anglia." U.S. airmen occupy 13 major airfields in Britain. Five of them, in East Anglia, are equipped to service strategic bombers. Churchill implied that by providing British bases for U.S. bombers, the Labor government had placed Britain in the forefront of any future war between East and West.

Bargaining Point. White with anger, Clement Attlee leaped to his feet in protest. "Be careful about this," he warned. "We agreed to the stationing of American bombers in this country . . . but never specifically as a base for using the atomic bomb against Russia." Churchill's retort: "That is the impression which, however mistakenly, they [the Americans] seem to have derived."

Actually, Churchill, who was understandably stung by the election-time warmonger cry, and possibly by the charge that he is too pro-American, did not say that the U.S. should clear out of East Anglia. He knows as well as any Englishman that, in case of war, Britain would be a major target for Russian attack--with or without U.S. bases. The best guess is that Prime Minister Churchill is using the East Anglia issue, as he is several others (e.g. his stout refusal to abandon plans for a .280-caliber rifle, when most of the allies prefer the U.S. .30-caliber), as bargaining points for his business visit to Washington next month.

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