Lethargy Damned

If the British had any feeling of complacency last week it was not because of Frank Owen, a tall, rangy, bushy-haired newspaperman, who was born on the border of Wales 35 years ago and calls himself Sudeten Welsh. Nine years ago, after building himself into a Laborite problem child in the House of Commons, he lost his seat in a Tory landslide, took a crack at foreign corresponding, wound up on the London Evening Standard of Lord Beaverbrook, whom he looks on as "a promising lad from the Dominions." This month the passion for work which keeps Editor Owen at his desk some 19 hours a day exploded in a series of blistering editorials, blasting the lethargy of Britain's war effort. Excerpts:

>"When did the Nazis perfect this remarkable striking force which gave them the victory in June? In the five months before January 30 'when Germany slept.' In the four months before May when Hitler 'was missing the bus.' As for Britain we had 900,000 unemployed and at Christmas some of the aircraft works shut for the week. Sundays and half Saturdays were sacrosanct. Last winter it was Britain who slept. Therefore we ask soberly now what is this year's winterset? . . . The Boche are working late this winter. In the shrouded factories in far Bohemia, the new centre of German arms production, there are being forged weapons of another spring's Blitzkrieg .... The entire economic effort of at least 120,000,000 in the heart of Europe is directed into the channels of the Nazi war industry. German loot has been on a gigantic scale. . . . The Nazis are exerting 30% more energy than Britain on their war output. ... In the war's second winter we still have three-quarters of a million workers we cannot find use for. . . . Let every man in Britain ask himself whenever he feels like taking life easy, 'What have I done this winter day to win the war this spring?' "

>"I calculate that Hitler has 30.000 aircraft of all types and a probable bomber strength of 7,000. ... He has never yet directed against us anything like his total hitting power. ... He had to train new personnel in long-distance night-bombing tactics. He is doing it. ... The Nazis have 16,000 instructors now working on six-week courses in factories. We have got a couple of thousand. They have 200 training centres. We've got 40. ... They have really mobilized the whole area they control. Conscription is the honest word for mobilization and let's stop being mealymouthed. . . . We must have guns, machine guns, airplanes, ships, or else we shall have neither food nor clothing. . . . If the whole nation must go on soldiers' wages as well as soldiers' rations, let's do it now. We have been told that this is a people's war, a total war. Make it so."

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