Prime Minister Canute

To stop the flooding tide of public, parliamentary and press criticism of the efficiency of the Government's production machinery. Winston Churchill last week cast himself in the role of Canute. In less than an hour and a half he raced through an 80-page speech want the Government to appoint a supreme Minister of Production, Churchill put two questions: Who would be big enough to take the job? What could such a minister do that was not already being done by Supply Minister Lord Beaverbrook, Aircraft Production Minister Lieut. Colonel J. C. T. Moore-Brabazon, the supply departments of the Admiralty and the War Office? In the open House, Churchill could hardly give production figures to the last zero and decimal, but the high spots he hit sounded impressive. Admitting some faults and errors of judgment, he said that: 1) a third more people are working at war industries than a year ago; 2) almost all munitions factories are now operating under direct Government control; 3) British production alone has in the last year doubled Britain's power to bomb Germany, with U.S. production will double it again within the next three months, redouble it in six months more.

Production centers are also less vulnerable than they were. Aircraft and other factories have been "diluted," spread out over as many as 45 sub-centers for a single plant. "We may suffer [from bombing]," said Churchill, "we may be retarded, but we can no longer be destroyed."

The Prime Minister also claimed that the labor situation, target of much criticism, is encouraging. In 23 months of World War II Britain has lost only 2,000,000 man-days through labor disputes, against 12,000,000 lost in the last two years of World War I.

But it was on a warning note that the Prime Minister closed. "It would be madness for us to suppose that Russia or the United States are going to win this war for us. The invasion season is at hand. All the armed forces have been warned to be at concert pitch by Sept. 1 and to maintain the utmost vigilance meanwhile.

"We have to reckon with a gambler's desperation. . . ."

Had Churchill's eloquence stopped the waxing tide of production criticism? After the speech, Sir John Waidlaw-Milne, Chairman of the House Committee on National Expenditure, insisted as he had before that Britain was working at only 75% efficiency. The press was largely skeptical. At week's end it seemed that, like Canute before him, Winston Churchill could not command the tide, that, unlike Canute, he hoped he could.

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