Questions to the U.S.

From the day Britain went to war, U.S. citizens and their press have freely criticized the British, their Government and their war effort. The British have seldom talked back. But last week, with U.S. foreign policy beginning to loom large in the politics of war and peace, Britons of all political complexions showed a growing concern with the meaning and direction of U.S. policies.

The shrillest voice raised was that of Jennie Lee, onetime M.P. and wife of Labor M.P. Aneurin Bevan. Wrote Leftist Lee to the New Republic: "We over here are wondering what in God's name American diplomacy is driving at. We don't like Darlan. We don't like Franco. We don't like the idea of asking decent men to die if it is only in order to make a new Europe congenial to such as those. Justly or un justly, the American State Department is being given the credit for having brought to our side those latest allies. What does it all mean? Where are we heading?"

In two long editorials the Manchester Guardian spoke for the broad bloc of liberal-minded Britons: "The United States is carrying on the war with determination, but it has not yet concluded the debate on the objectives of the war which Pearl Harbor interrupted. . . . Much of the discussion has been far below the lofty vein of Vice President Wallace. . . . Isolationism . . . has again reared its head; there is real fear that the country will tread the same path as in 1919."

The London Times spoke for progressive Conservatives. "Those Americans whose utterances . . . are most frequently quoted abroad . . . are all men deeply convinced of the necessity of maintaining close collaboration after the war. But because they are prominent it does not follow that they are, or will remain, representative of American opinion. The men who killed the Versailles Treaty in Washington were not for the most part well-known outside their own country. . . . The prospects of continued American collaboration after the war are bound up with the readiness of the rest of the world, and of Great Britain in particular, to formulate and pursue policies which the American people recognize as identical or consistent with their own."

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