Tough War for the General

When General Andrew G. L. McNaughton became Canada's Minister of National Defense last November, he stepped into the battle of politics, in which the tactics were strange and the weapons stranger to him.

At the very start he invited attack, for he had entered the Cabinet to make the Government's policy of no-overseas-conscription work, and almost at once had adopted a policy of conscription. Then, during the heated Grey North by-election campaign (TIME, Feb. 12), in which he was seeking a seat in Parliament, Minister McNaughton stumbled over his own security regulations. He said publicly that U-boats were torpedoing Allied ships in the Atlantic "day by day." Eyebrows were lifted. They were lifted higher when, after his Grey North defeat, McNaughton seemed to be a poor loser. Said he: "We are . . . congratulating no one."

Last week John Bracken, national leader of the Tory Party which had walloped McNaughton at Grey North, raked the General from a new angle. He said that he had expected Defense Minister McNaughton to resign right after Grey North voted. In a 550-word statement, John Bracken said, in sum, that Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King should "replace the Defense Minister immediately."

Along with this frontal attack came a potshot from within McNaughton's own Liberal Party, and the Cabinet itself. In Ottawa's Press Gallery, Navy Minister Angus L. Macdonald plunked himself down behind the green-topped poker table, answered a question thrown out by Ken Cragg of the Tory-minded Toronto Globe & Mail: "What about this business of ships being sunk 'day by day?' "

Macdonald: There have been some sinkings, but losses in '44 were less than in '43 and '42, and less in December and January than in early '44.

Cragg: Then you don't agree [with McNaughton]?

Macdonald: Certainly not!

When McNaughton said he would answer later, Macdonald cracked back: "I am not retreating an inch!"

On top of all this was the undeniable fact that General McNaughton was run down and tired. The people wondered when & how all the hubbub and hostility would end. Not many really thought the bruised and battered Defense Minister would ask the Prime Minister to relieve him of his job. But that possibility could not be ruled out. Said the Ottawa Journal: "Many experts [believe] that McNaughton won't answer the bell [for the next round], that Mackenzie King . . . will advise him to throw in the towel."

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