Defiance, Deference, Defense

In the early hours of the crucial Battle of Jutland in 1916 German salvos sent one British ship after another plunging to the bottom. Admiral Sir David Beatty, striding the bridge of the battle cruiser Lion, turned on a young flag officer, Alfred Ernie Montacute Chatfield, and remarked: "Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today."

Last week, nearly 23 years after Jutland, there was little wrong with Britain's bloody ships because Lord Chatfield as First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff had the job of bringing them to scratch. But there was plenty wrong with the rest of her three-year rearmament efforts. Four months have passed since the Czecho-Slovak war scare but few measures apparent to the public have been taken to improve Britain's shockingly weak defenses.

Production of antiaircraft guns and first-line fighting planes still lags below Britain's output in 1918. There has been no rush to fill the ranks of Britain's little army. Civilians who were scared stiff in September by the threat of Adolf Hitler's bombers were recently informed that there was neither time nor money to build deep, underground bomb shelters, that steel shanties to ward off splinters would have to suffice. Even the long trenches gouged in London parks and golf courses for air-raid "protection" have been allowed to crumble and flood.

Changes. Growing British resentment against this muddling contains enough dynamite to blow up the Chamberlain Cabinet and last week the Prime Minister took the long-expected steps to snuff the fuses. He moved his friend, slow-moving Sir Thomas Inskip, from the post of Minister for the Coordination of Defense, where everyone agreed he had been a first-class failure. Chosen to succeed him was Lord Chatfield, recently retired from active service. It was perhaps the most popular Cabinet move Mr. Chamberlain has ever made.

Only mildly sensational were other Cabinet changes: Sir Thomas Inskip took over the relatively unimportant post of Dominions Secretary, which had been filled by Malcolm MacDonald along with his Colonial Secretaryship; unpopular William Shepherd Morrison, a misfit as Minister of Agriculture, was transferred to the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. A gentleman farmer, Major Sir Reginald Hugh Dorman-Smith was given his job.

More "Oi!" The Cabinet shakeup, indicating that at least Mr. Chamberlain intends to energize the rearmament drive, is expected to rally public support for the Government's vast Voluntary National Service registration scheme, inaugurated last week by the Prime Minister with a radio chat from his high armchair at No. 10 Downing Street.

At the outbreak of the World War, Britain found that thousands of her skilled workers had flocked to the army, leaving raw youngsters to work the vital industries at home. Before the next war, Britain is determined to separate the cannon fodder from the needed workers. Out of a working population of 15,000,000 some 7,000,000 were listed by the Government as employed in "essential" jobs, exempt from voluntary defense duties, and, by implication, from draft. These included some whose possible wartime duties puzzled many Britons: floorwalkers, bulb growers, bookstall attendants, piano polishers, paper hangers, trade-union officials, executives of British Broadcasting Corp. (but not announcers or entertainers).

Workers in nonessential jobs are expected to join the army in wartime or, with members of their families, enroll for civilian defense work--in "decontamination squads," as refugee workers, midwives, etc.--glowingly described to them in booklets mailed last week.

The campaign to enroll volunteers got off with a typically British start, a mass meeting in London's Albert Hall, where 10,000 were addressed by Air Raid Precautions Chief Sir John Anderson. Sir Walford Davies, Master of the King's Musick, led a singsong, urged the audience to sing loud because the rally was being broadcast "and probably Hitler will pick it up." When it came to singing the Lambeth Walk, he insisted on more umph on the "Oi!"

"Our Motto: Defense." Clearly Mr. Chamberlain had swapped the unpopular nag of appeasement for the glossy war-horse of rearmament, a wise move in view of the fact that 1939 is almost certainly a General Election year.

Within two days, four Cabinet ministers went into the countryside to remind Britons, and, by implication, the dictator nations, that the British Empire was still tough. "The British Empire is so strong that it could not be defeated. Let those ponder who say we have grown weary with age and feeble in power. So they thought in 1914. They had a rude awakening," thundered Sir Samuel Hoare, Home Secretary, at Swansea. At Durham, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon reminded that the Empire's financial strength is "an important weapon of defense" and at Leeds, Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald keynoted that Britain's "will to victory . . . cannot be equaled." Air Secretary Sir Kingsley Wood opened a new aircraft works at Reading and announced that Britain's aircraft production had doubled during 1938, would probably treble this year. In an article, Earl Stanhope, First Lord of the Admiralty, estimated that Britain will launch a warship a week during 1939.

All these pronouncements were carefully timed and coordinated as an official buildup for the Prime Minister's own week-end speech before the Birmingham Jewelers' and Silversmiths' Association, a trade guild before which his halfbrother, Sir Austen Chamberlain, and his father, old Joseph Chamberlain, got off some of their most important political utterances. Neville Chamberlain's speech, in turn, was a carefully timed prelude to Chancellor Hitler's speech before the Reichstag this week. The Prime Minister lauded Premier Mussolini's "peace" efforts at Munich and repeated his assertion that the policy of "appeasement" would be pushed as soon as he received a "sign" from uncooperative Adolf Hitler. But the best-received part of his speech was devoted to a rosy picture of Britain's rearmament. Wildly applauded was the deferential Prime Minister when he thumped: "Our motto is not defiance and--mark my words--it is not deference either. It is defense!"

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