"After Christ Crucified"

Sentimental Stanley Baldwin, Lord President of the Council, last week gave the House of Commons Britain's revised air program, two months after Adolf Hitler had told Sir John Simon that Germany's new air fleet will match France's 1,700 planes. Slow in coming, the British reply was impressive. Last week, while Baldwin explained the bellicose program in principle to the Commons, Air Minister Lord Londonderry gave the House of Lords the details:

"By March 1937, the strength of the Royal Air Force based at home, irrespective of the fleet air arm, will be about 1,500 first-line machines. This compares with the actual figure of first-line machines of 580 today and with a total of 840 which we should have reached by March 1937, under the expansion program announced last July. In short, we are nearly trebling the present strength of the Royal Air Force for the defense of the British Isles."

Since reserve planes are usually in a 3-to-1 ratio to first-line planes, this meant a 1937 fleet of about 4,500. Cost: -L-30,000,000 ($147,300,000). To man the planes the R. A. F. needs 2,500 more pilots, as well as 20,000 more mechanics, riggers, wireless operators, etc.

Noting that British airplane stocks are already soaring, Stanley Baldwin last week added: "I hope there will be no profiteering in a time we might call an emergency. ... I have been made almost physically sick to think that I and other statesmen of Europe should, 2,000 years after Christ was crucified, be spending our time thinking how we can take the mangled bodies of children to hospitals and how we can keep poison gas from going down the throats of people."

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