Work or Fight?

"We cannot afford the luxury of a quarrel while fighting with Hitler," said blond, blue-eyed Sir Walter Citrine, secretary of Britain's powerful Trades Union Congress (5,000,000 members). Yet last week found Cabinet, Press and Labor wrangling over Britain's toughest labor problem since the war's outbreak: Shall the Government continue to conscript skilled war-industry workers for the armed forces? Sir Walter Citrine said no.

Pot-paunched Labor Minister Ernest Bevin, backed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and a special committee that studied the question, shucked his recently acquired Carlton Grill manners to argue a blistering affirmative: more & more expert workers must be withdrawn from industry if the high operating efficiency of British aircraft and mechanized vehicles is to be maintained. Bawled Bevin: "Am I entitled to send a man up in a bomber without providing a journeyman to test the bomber and see that it is safe? No! It shall not be on my conscience that I risked a single airman's life."

The London Daily Herald, whose largest stockholder (49%) is TUC, made an investigation of its own, pooh-poohed the Bevin theory, warned that continued "drain of skilled men into the forces" is leaving gaping holes in war industry that cannot be plugged. Bawled Bevin, an old TU Congressman himself: "A paper that I helped to build--a working-class paper --is carrying on a nagging, quisling policy. ... I am disqusted with the business since I left it."

Snapped Sir Walter Citrine: "We are all suffering from some degree of war strain and we must allow for Ministers becoming hypersensitive of criticism in such circumstances. The Government is fortunate in having the undivided support of the Trade Union movement in its war policy, but that does not mean we have surrendered our independence of judgment or our right to criticize, and we have not the slightest intention of doing so."

As the House of Commons prepared to debate the question in secret, most of British Labor supported Sir Walter's flat-footed stand. Behind him also were three Cabinet Ministers (Supply's Beaverbrook, Agriculture's Hudson, Mines' Grenfell).

There was a growing rumor that Bawler Bevin's Cabinet days were numbered, that Sir Walter Citrine would succeed him. The luxury of the quarrel between them seemed to many to have been justified as issue-clearing. Spreading rapidly throughout Britain was the conviction that, to keep Russia in the war, Britain must go all-out with the finest equipment to Russia, even at the expense of whittling down her home defense and pinching the army with which she hopes some day to invade the continent.

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