"Ominous"

After Coventry they smote Birmingham, Southampton and Plymouth. After these, Liverpool and Bristol--west-coast ports through which the supplies that insular Britain needs from the U. S. and elsewhere must pass. After these, last week, night-flying Germans again dropped crushing loads of explosive on Birmingham and on Bristol, on Plymouth, and on Manchester, the cotton and textile centre even greater in wealth and prestige than any other British city except London, having a ship canal of its own to bring in imports, a surrounding web of heavy industry, and important rail connections. Next followed two smashing new assaults on Southampton, leveling the big port's business section and hundreds of residences, setting oil stores afire. An Air Ministry communique admitted 370 persons had been killed and injured.

The R. A. F. was also dishing it out to the Germans at night, smashing full reserves (to hamstring the Luftwafle's training program), rail centres like Cologne, submarine-building and repair plants. But the harried British grew restive. U. S. correspondents grew cantankerous. It was absurd, they said, for the British censorship to try to hide the names of cities newly blasted by the Luftwafle, leaving citizens dependent upon German communiques to confirm what their own eyes or common gossip knew quite well. Contributing to a concerted outburst of U. S. sarcasm, the Chicago Daily News correspondent, Robert J. Casey, wrote:

"An undetermined number of bombers came over an unidentified portion of an unmentioned European country, on an unstated day ('recently' is the official word for it). There was no weather. Had there been, it would have been considered a military secret. The alert sounded at no particular hour because the enemy--one hesitates to label them with a proper name--are not supposed to know the right time.

"The bombs fell on a golf course, killing 75 unnamed rabbits. There were 25 persons in an Anderson shelter only a few feet from the golf course and the rabbits, and they weren't even scratched. A parrot, blasted from his cage, was seen walking down the street muttering to himself, quietly, of course, so as not to give any information to anybody."

So the names of stricken towns became permissible reportage, and in & out of the new Parliament a sharp debate crackled on Britain's state of being at this sharp turn in World War II.

Shinwell on Flag Days. The House of Commons' inveterate gadfly, Laborite Emanuel Shinwell, brought into open debate what was in many British minds. In a powerful, reasoned and disturbing speech he shocked the House by declaring: "Unless we can with speed and with the utmost efficiency reorganize our resources . . . victory may be beyond our grasp." Laborite Shinwell went on to denounce the Government's propagandist optimism ("The people of this country have no desire to be fobbed off with an exaggerated optimism which has no foundation in fact'') and the Government's inconsistent announcements on industrial production ("The Government should perform like a symphony orchestra and not like a jazz band").

Gadfly Shinwell then gave some pertinent figures to back up his claim that shipping losses were "ominous": in 14 war months Britain has lost 2,500,000 tons of shipping, plus more than half a million tons of Belgian and Dutch shipping, bringing the total beyond 3,000,000 tons. Since the beginning of July, shipping losses have been at the rate of 4,000,000 tons a year. Against this the Admiralty's shipbuilding program aimed at only 1,250,000 tons in the first war year, and even this figure was not reached. Lord Beaverbrook had upped aircraft production at shipbuilding's expense, said Shinwell; the Government had not used its emergency powers to transfer labor to the most useful work; emergencies were being met by appeals, not compulsion; "we can't run the war by a succession of Flag Days."

April 1917. Labor's Arthur Greenwood did the Government no good in a lame reply that was more a confession than a defense. "It is folly to deny that damage has been done to production," said he, "but I say unhesitatingly that it hasn't eaten to any extent into our productive capacity. It has embarrassed us and will continue to embarrass us." As to shipping losses: "It is true that this is a position much like that of April 1917." April 1917 was the month the U. S. entered World War I and saved Britain from going down.

Due to tonnage losses the British must "say a temporary good-by to apples, grapes, apricots and bananas," said Food Minister Lord Woolton. Imported meats would soon be rationed further. Milk, eggs, pork were running short for lack of imported feeds. Surveying Britain's future food situation, some observers predicted that home-grown turnips might become as strategic as homemade guns.

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