Mountain of Anger

The dread term Munich men returned to British tongues again. Many critics attributed the Government's failure to open a second front to high officialdom. The critics suspected anxiety to restore the old order and a fear of Russian victory.

The critics wondered, for example, about Arch-Tory War Secretary Captain H. D. R. Margesson, who had once been Neville Chamberlain's Jim Farley. They wondered about Arch-Tory Ambassador to the U.S. Lord Halifax, who had publicly declared that the time was not ripe for Britain to invade Europe. They wondered about Arch-Tory Aircraft Production Minister Lieut. Colonel J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon, who had been accused of expressing the wish that the Germans and Russians would exterminate each other.

Critics of Munich men did not worry about dynamic Supply Minister Lord Beaverbrook, whose verbal leaps into bed with Russia have been spectacular, who has reportedly urged a British Expeditionary Force in the Ukraine or the Donets Basin. But the testy, growling Beaver himself was stirring up a Cabinet crisis that might bring about a drastic reorganization. Last week he was wheezing with his periodic asthma. His sickness may have been partly political, for he threatened to resign. Behind his threat was seen a warning that he would like the non existent post of Minister of Production, a powerful combination of the Supply & Labor portfolios, which millions of Britons think the Beaver could carry to perfection.

Only other candidate often mentioned is plump Labor Minister Ernest Bevin, who has got himself in Dutch with Labor by supporting the Army and Navy policy of taking skilled industrial workers for military service. Last week the Beaver, who wants more & more skilled women for a huge production program in the Midlands, approached open battle with Minister Bevin on the question of woman-power.

Prime Minister Churchill had nothing to say about a Minister of Production, about Munich, or about anything else. But the plainest words spoken to Winston Churchill last week came from one of his and one of Lord Beaverbrook's good friends. Said the scholarly London Economist, partly owned by the Prime Minister's friend Brendan Bracken and the Beaver's first lieutenant Sir Walter Layton:

"If Mr. Churchill were to ask either Parliament or the people whether they wished him to continue as their leader, the answer would be overwhelmingly favorable. . . . Yet the people are not very happy about the leadership they are getting. . . .

"There is a reappearance of the feeling, unknown since Mr. Chamberlain's day, that the policies of the Government are something less than a full expression of the determination and capacities of the people. . . .

"This struggle in which we are engaged is not merely a military conquest. . . .

What is disturbing more and more citizens of this democracy is the suspicion that in the Government's mind our way of life is purely on the defensive. If so, then the prospect of victory is a relapse into the blindness, the cowardice and the stupidity that brought us to our present pass. Then, indeed, Britain is an elderly and declining nation, making one last brave spasm of resistance before it yields to those who are younger and stronger. . . .

"The British people reject this notion with a firmness second only to their rejection of the idea of a truce with Hitler.

They are not on the defensive; they are determined to reconstruct. There is a mountain of anger throughout the country against the ideas and the men who brought the country to September 1939. . . .

"There is a chance now to return to the native tradition of practical realism, to that mixture of tradition and progress which the Prime Minister gave as his political philosophy eighteen months ago. There was a hope at that time that the injection of Mr. Churchill's robust practical sense would turn the Conservative Party away from the Brummagem neo-feudalism of its recent years to the Disraelian tradition of constructive popular and progressive realism, and make it a worthy member of a national partnership. But it is not Mr. Churchill that has captured the Conservative machine; it would appear to be the Conservative machine that has captured Mr. Churchill."

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