"Another Gallipoli"

Last week fell the 25th anniversary of that grim dawn when 80,000 Allied troops started swarming ashore at the Dardanelles to storm the Turkish positions in the hills of Gallipoli. Stupid staff work and indecision spoiled that venture and cost some 9,000 casualties, but the man mostly blamed was Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, then as now First Lord of the Admiralty. Turkish and Allied troops, now fraternizing in the Near East, observed the occasion last week by exchanging salutations, especially Major General Bernard Cyril Freyberg, chief of the Anzac Command,* and Marshal Fervi Cakmak, Chief of the Turkish General Staff.

But in London, this Gallipoli Day was another bad one for Winston Churchill and his war colleagues in the Chamberlain Government. For out of Scandinavia crackled a story which, on a smaller but similarly bloody scale, charged another blunder like that of the Gallipoli beachheads. It was a story written at white heat by white-haired War Correspondent Leland Stowe of the Chicago Daily News, after he visited the Northwestern Expeditionary Force near its beachhead at Namsos, Norway (see p. 22). Mr. Stowe wrote, in indignation, of two advance battalions of raw British troops, without artillery, antiaircraft, supporting planes or even white sheets to camouflage themselves, who were "dumped into Norway's deep snows and quagmires of April slush ... to fight crack German regulars--most of them veterans of the Polish invasion--and to face the most destructive of modern weapons. ... A major military blunder which was not committed by their immediate command, but in London."

Correspondent Stowe quoted officers & men of the decimated British advance party at Steinkjer as saying to him: "For God's sake, tell them we have got to have airplanes and anti-aircraft guns. . . . It's a bloody mess. They've let us down in London." He quoted a Norse captain as saying, after Norwegians covered the shattered Britons' retreat: "It looks as if the British were going to fight to the last Norwegian."

Stowe's story caused enough stir so that a British communique was issued calling it a "distortion of the facts." British newspapers (except the Times of London) carried extracts from it and demanded greater frankness from the High Command. Correspondent Stowe and his employers squeezed their "beat" for every drop of blood, even claimed that the Chamberlain Government might have fallen had the full Stowe text reached the British public.

Although no Cabinet crisis followed at once, the press, the public and the politicians began asking pointed questions. Deputy Labor Leader Arthur Greenwood (whose Party, having opposed conscription, was partly to blame for the troops' greenness) said in a speech over the weekend: "I believe that military and naval direction of the war in Norway is competent. What I do not understand or trust is the political direction."

As Parliament reconvened this week, Prime Minister Chamberlain summoned Member Greenwood and his chief, Clement Attlee, for a conference. Cloakrooms buzzed with talk that Labor would call off its truce with the Government with demands for a secret session of Parliament at which members could demand a full ex planation of the situation in Norway. Since the Chamberlain and Churchill fac tions of the Conservative Party had agreed on the necessity for rush (and risky) action, there seemed little chance of a split in the Party. Criticism might be allayed temporarily by making a goat of War Secretary Oliver Stanley.

Meantime, steps had been taken to fortify the British High Command. Understudies were appointed for the chiefs of the Naval, Imperial General and Air Staffs, to make it physically possible for these offices to function 24 hours a day.

The Appointees:

> As stand-in for General Sir Edmund Ironside--General Sir John Greer Dill, 58, a hard-riding but soft-spoken Irishman, commander of the B. E. F.'s First Corps, well acquainted from previous work at the War Office with Britain's industrial set-up for arming and equipping soldiers.

> As stand-in for Admiral Sir Dudley Pound--square-chinned Admiral Tom Spencer Vaughan Phillips, whose last command was the Home Fleet destroyers.

> As stand-in for Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall--Air Vice Marshal Richard Edmund Charles Peirse was promoted from Deputy Chief to Vice Chief of the Air Staff.

In addition Sir Wilfred Freeman was put in charge of the Air Ministry's production division, replacing Railroadman E. J. H. Lemon, and for his alter ego Sir Wilfrid was given Sir Charles W. Craven, who, until World War II recalled him to the Admiralty, had been managing director of the vast Vickers-Armstrong munitions works since 1931. These last two appointments were viewed as signs that new Air Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare means to force British aircraft production beyond the bottleneck stage where bustling, beaming Sir Kingsley Wood left it.

* In 1915, Anzac Freyberg, then a lieutenant commander, swam two miles to shore in the night to light a row of flares which made the Turks think the Allies had landed on a beach across the Dardanelles from their true objectives.

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