Wearing his simple Trinity lighthouseman’s blue uniform, a cigar jutting from his face like a gun from a turret, Winston Churchill got home to a London that loved him and criticized him. At Paddington Station to greet him were fur-hatted Mrs. Churchill and a delighted section of the British public. Son Randolph Churchill, an Army press-relations officer back from Cairo, was also there. Winston Churchill’s face was rosy with the triumph of secrecy that his trip—in a big flying boat by way of Bermuda—had been. Part way he had steered the flying boat himself.
But the Prime Minister could not blink the fact that the public’s affection did not mean unqualified approval of the way he and his Cabinet were running the war effort.
He got back to a grind of press and individual criticism that was harder than ever before. It was no partisan criticism. From the staid London Times right through to the leftist weeklies, the British press had one thing to say to Winston Churchill: that Britain was not doing very well in the war world, and that many members of his Government did not seem to realize that the war world was a changing world.
Bungling. The critics took their angry text partly from Britain’s weakness in Malaya. Said the London Daily Mirror’s tart Columnist Cassandra: “The greatest corporation in the British Empire is swelling mightily. … Its name is the British Army. . . . The bungling and mismanagement are on a scale that … is obvious to all. . . .* At the top you have the military aristocracy of the Guards’ regiments with a mentality not very foreign to that of Potsdam. In the center you have a second-class snobocracy. And behind it all, the cloying inertia of the Civil Service bogged down by regulations. . . .”
To this, Editor John Gordon of the Sunday Express added: “The rich men again could not bear to see their property destroyed (in Malaya). They toasted the land instead of scorching it.”
Bottlenecks. The critics were equally hard on Britain’s production record. The solid London Times, not given to loose Government-heckling, stated flatly that Britain’s war production, far from being all-out, could be increased 40%.
Such opinions were necessarily rash, since the Government publishes no figures on guns, tanks, planes. But critics pointed out that Chairman Sir John Wardlaw-Milne of the Select Committee on National Expenditure had himself admitted that production was only 75% of what it should be, that Prime Minister Churchill and Labor Minister Ernest Bevin had themselves appealed for a 30-40% increase —implying that it was possible.
Money. Criticism of the Churchill Government has hitherto concentrated on the Old School obsolescence of many British leaders. But by last week critics were hammering not so much at mere fuddy-duddyism as at the desire of the British Big Money to see that its pre-war profits and privileges survive.
Said the Times: “Money is the root of many of the evils of production. . . .Resentment about low wages … is fanned by the belief that extra effort by the workers is helping to add to private profits as well as to the strength of our war machine. . . . Concern about the future is being given too prominent a place in the plans and activities of too many industrial concerns. . . . Even ministers shrink from upsetting normal trade practice. . . . Men of vision cannot fail to see that humanity is passing at this moment through the fire of social revolution as well as of universal war.”
Faux Pas. The critics, upset by defeats in the Orient, not only made charges of British bungling and greed, but also attacked the Government’s entire conception of the world crisis. Countless Britons had been shocked to hear Anthony Eden, on his return from Russia, declare: “The trouble with Hitler . . . was not that he was a Nazi at home; the trouble with him was that he would not stay at home.” To many this sounded as though their Foreign Secretary, and by inference others in the Government, had a curiously warped notion of Naziism.
Foreign Secretary Eden tried to wriggle out of his faux pas by saying that he fully realized that the “essence of the [Nazi] creed and the essence of German practice for the last 100 years is that they are aggressive animals.” Daily Mail Columnist Hannen Swaffer jumped on this with the question: “When did Eden find this out? On Tuesday when criticism appeared? On Wednesday when M.P.s of all parties began to murmur?”
Wide distrust of the Government’s intentions for the world of the future was voiced by Editor Stephen King-Hall of the National Newsletter: “Viewed against the vast historic setting of this struggle, it is only the purely military aspects of the battle which have been tentatively coordinated and analyzed in Washington and Moscow. The far more important part of the indivisible phrase ‘war peace aims’ is still etherealized in the Atlantic Charter. … As a program it was out of date before the ink was dry on the signatures.”
What the Prime Minister thought of all this, only he could say. But by week’s end Parliament circles felt sure that, even if he discounted many of the charges, he would have to accept a good number of them. It looked as if the Churchill Cabinet was due for an overhauling.
*Nor did British Navy bungling escape notice. It was revealed last week that the warship which took Winston Churchill to the U.S. was supposed to pick up a British destroyer escort near the Azores. The destroyers did not show up. Lest enemy agents inform Axis submarines of the warship’s presence near the islands, the ship proceeded unescorted.
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