Right Bower

A Conservative Member of Parliament last week let fly at Prime Minister Winston Churchill with an eloquence that suggested the Prime Minister's own speeches. Said he:

"The men of the war-making organization who have botched and bungled almost every campaign so far ended, losing half the Empire in a few weeks, are still functioning unchanged. . . .

"On the credit side must be put at once . . . [Churchill's] fruitless efforts during the five [prewar] years, his Cassandra-cum-Jeremiah period. Secondly, was his 'into battle' period, when his superb rhetoric and unflinching courage focused like a burning glass the latent will to win of heroic, freedom-loving men the world over, when all seemed lost. . . .

"On the opposite page, alas, we see a dreary, lamentable series of failures, nearly all avoidable and almost entirely due to bad strategy and haphazard planning at the top. Churchill, the brilliant rhetorician, Churchill, the astute politician, is akin in spirit to the fabled comedian who eats his heart out longing to star in tragic roles. He has always fancied himself in a martial capacity, for which his particular brilliant attainments are unsuited.

"Where the successful strategist should be cold and calculating, he is fiery and emotional; his great sense of history leads him to confuse precedents and principles, and his dramatic mind builds star-pointing Alhambras of illusion totally devoid of a foundation of fact.

"He makes the mistakes of age--the inability to learn lessons, unwillingness to discard elderly inefficients, and, above all, dislike of contact with younger men whose minds are still elastic and in their prime. We are told . . . [Churchill] is indispensable; I deny that. We are told he is a great international figure and therefore must not be criticized, far less removed; I am unable to agree. International figures are made, not born. If you will make me Minister of Information with no more than the present powers over the press and radio, I will guarantee to make a sack of potatoes into an international figure inside of a fortnight.

"We are a democracy. True democracies should be suspicious of so-called great men. The Fuehrer principle is not for us. We want no Fuehrers here. ..."

Whatever the intrinsic merits of this speech, its effect in Britain will be heavily influenced by the reputation of the speaker. He was huge, hulking Commander Robert Tatton Bower, 48, onetime British Navy boxing champion and World War I submarine officer, whose opinions are more questionable than his fluency. In 1938, when Polish-descended, English-born Emanuel Shinwell, Laborite M.P., was attacking the Government's policy on the Spanish War, Commander Bower suddenly rose and yelled: "Go back to Poland!" Small, sinewy Emanuel Shinwell walked across the House of Commons and smacked Commander Bower so hard on the ear that his eardrum burst. The Commander took to his bed and issued bulletins on the state of his health; later he felt it necessary to say: "This is an example of what may happen if the Socialists get in."

In 1940 Commander Bower criticized Chief of Naval Staff Sir Dudley Pound for the conduct of the Narvik evacuation. Not content with sticking to military matters, such as the liaison, or lack of it, between the Navy and the R.A.F., the Commander talked about the Admiralty's "Gestapo methods" and said: "We are not fighting against Hitler in order to set up the First Lord of the Admiralty (A. V. Alexander) as a little pinchbeck Hitler with a tin-pot staff."

Millions of Britons last week might have been inclined to feel that there was some pith in Commander Bower's remarks on Winston Churchill's war effort. But, considering his past references to Emanuel Shinwell's Polish ancestry, his bracketing of the First Lord, however fantastically, with Britain's worst enemy. Commander Bower seemed loose-tongued and his motives dubious. His speech only pointed up the fact that, although much of the criticism of Winston Churchill has come from the extreme left, he has been catching it just as hard from the far right.

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