GREAT BRITAIN: Churchill Speaks Last

In Parliament last week, Winston Churchill finessed rather than faced the hottest critical barrage of his Prime Ministership. Called for an accounting on the subjects of the loss of Crete and weaknesses in Britain’s wartime economy, the foxy Prime Minister insisted that, since Parliament had forced the debate on him, he be allowed to speak last. His discombobolated, angry critics thereupon found themselves debating without any facts to debate about.

So little did they find to say that at one point there were only about 20 Members of Parliament listening. When it came the Prime Minister’s turn, the House was crowded and he easily prevailed—in public effect, if not in private reflection—by the strength of his oratory and sometimes by hiding behind the smokescreen of necessary military secrecy.

The chief critical voice, as in the debate after the loss of Greece and Libya, was that of onetime Secretary for War Leslie Hore-Belisha. But for the most part he had only such dubious suggestions to make as that 100 more fighting planes would have turned the tide in Greece, and only such vague conclusions to draw as: “It is evident that in strategy there has been on our side no adjustment to the tempo or to the resources of the enemy. . . . I deem it my duty to warn the country that it is only by handling our problems with greater vigor and imagination that we can obtain victory.”

Replying to criticisms that during six months the British neither mined nor fortified Crete’s airfields against German attack, Prime Minister Churchill said: “I could give answers to those questions, but I do not propose to discuss tactics here.” Tart and testy, he suggested that any critic whose mind was focused on the small island of Crete was being very small-minded indeed. Crete, he declared, was “only one part of an important and complicated campaign being fought in the Middle East. To select one particular sector of our widely extended front for Parliamentary debate is a partial, lopsided and misleading method of examining . . . the war.”

The Prime Minister admitted that Britain is still far behind the Nazis in materiel, especially anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns and tanks. Moreover, he pointed out that while the Nazi armament bases are only a few days from the Middle East, the British must send most of their weapons, including crated airplanes, around the Cape of Good Hope—thus keeping them “out of action for the best part of three months.” Apparently the British command had judged it unwise to spare for so long a time many of the weapons which might have fortified Crete. There was little to cheer about in this revelation.

Although the Prime Minister said that airplanes had been and were being rushed to the Middle East as fast as possible, he also said that “a very great number of guns which might have usefully been employed in Crete” were being used on merchant ships in the Battle of the Atlantic. In other words, the British fought at Crete with the weapons they felt they could spare—and were overwhelmed.

Said Prime Minister Churchill: “We provided in Crete a deterrent to enemy attack sufficient to require a major effort on his part, but to attempt to be safe everywhere is to make sure of being strong nowhere. . . . Suppose we had never gone to Greece. And suppose we had never defended Crete. Where would the Germans be now? Suppose we had simply resigned territory and strategic points to them without a fight, might they not . . . already be masters of Syria and Iraq and preparing themselves for an advance into Persia?”

In general, Winston Churchill drew a picture of Britain fighting what the New York Herald Tribune last week called a “guerrilla war of evasion, attrition, maneuver and retreat”—until such time as Britain’s armament catches up with the Nazi striking power. He said:

“There is no truth to the statement that productivity in our factories is falling off at an alarming rate. It may not be going as fast as we should like, but if anyone can do anything to make it go faster he will be rendering a great service. In guns and heavy tanks the monthly average for the first quarter of 1941 was 50% greater than in the first quarter of 1940. The output for the month of May . . . was the highest yet reached and more than double the monthly rate for the last quarter in 1940.”

Although he spoke with characteristic flourish, the Prime Minister failed to quell a widespread uneasiness. He had not accounted for the fact that Britain’s naval losses at Crete were greater than the Italian losses at Matapan (see p. 32). He had not satisfied many of his listeners that the British High Command was up-to-date as to military brains. And many hearers had found the Prime Minister’s thrusts at his critics bitter beyond all reason.

Strongest Churchill bile flowed when a question had been raised by Liberal-National M.P. Captain Edgar Louis Granville, who recently suggested that Empire War Ministers be allowed to address Parliament when in England. The Prime Minister turned aside Captain Granville’s question with the suggestion that he “return to the lucubrations in constitutional experiment to which he has devoted his time recently.”