CHURCHILL TAKES COMMAND... Radio reports Wednesday night say that Britain’s long-expected cabinet shakeup has been announced, and it puts First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill in charge of the army, navy, and air force. One London paper says Churchill is now the nation’s “Super War Lord.” And there are seven other changes in the new cabinet. But the British papers say there might be less here than meets the eye. There are only two new faces in the government, only one minister has been dropped, and for the most part Chamberlain’s men are merely swapping jobs. Moreover, British commentators say that Churchill’s new powers are perilously ill-defined. Maybe the shakeup’s a good thing, but at the moment it looks like it might be just another Chamberlain half-measure.
...AND CHAMBERLAIN GAINS IN POPULARITY. So says the New York Times, which favors the Prime Minister with a largely complimentary portrait in Wednesday’s paper. The article, written from London by Anne O’Hare McCormick, describes Chamberlain in the best possible light on the occasion of his address to the House of Commons to announce beefed-up blockade measures --
“After seven months of war, puzzling and worrying to many Britishers, Mr. Chamberlain’s position actually is stronger than a year ago. His parliamentary leadership is unquestioned and his personal popularity greater than the popularity of his policies. The outstanding fact of today’s session was its demonstration of the extent to which this rather commonplace figure, so lacking in showmanship or emotional appeal, dominates wartime England. If the British majority followed Mr. Chamberlain from appeasement to war and swings with him from the first uncertain phase of the conflict into its second phase, it must be because his movements accurately reflect the pace of the average British mind. Certainly his tenaciousness, whether for peace or war, is typical....public opinion apparently still prefers Mr. Chamberlain to direct the risky experiments of war to any of his possible successors.”
BRITAIN INTENSIFIES THE BLOCKADE. Certainly Chamberlain’s message to Commons Tuesday was heartily welcomed by his friends and opponents alike. According to Edward Angly in the New York Herald Tribune, the Prime Minister announced that Britain would use both her sea power and her purchasing power to completely cut off Germany’s imports. And “he made it clear that the Allies were determined to let the chips on neutrals’ shoulders fall where they might,” Mr. Angly writes.
What the former means is that the British are using their power of the purse to snatch up minerals, fats, and oils offered for sale by Germany’s neighbors -- and potentially of great use to Nazi armies. The British have bought up large amounts of these resources from the Balkan states, Chamberlain says, along with Norway’s entire exportable catch of whale oil, also coveted by the Reich. The Herald Tribune story doesn’t really explain what it means about letting the chips fall on neutrals’ shoulders, though Chamberlain did warn that British Empire products will be denied to neutral countries unless they agree to limit trade with Hitler. New trade agreements with Norway, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Iceland address this requirement, he said.
He also explained that getting tougher with the blockade was the most humane way to fight -- “If we are to bring this war to a close with the least possible destruction and dislocation of our commerce and spiritual and material civilization, we must deprive Germany of materials most essential for the prosecution of her aggressive policy. The Allies are, therefore, determined to prosecute the economic war to the utmost of their power.”
SHINING MOMENTS IN FRENCH DEMOCRACY. The current issue of Time magazine has a fine wrap-up on the fall of Premier Daladier, and mentions one startling rumor, the mere existence of which conveys just how little faith the French have in their government’s basic competency. The passage in question -- “In any other country the fall of a Cabinet in war time is a major crisis. In France it is bad enough. But Frenchmen who in peacetime think no more of yanking a Premier than Americans think of yanking a pitcher out of the box, were not unduly upset -- even when a report got about that the Cabinet had fallen because one box of ballots had accidentally gone uncounted.”
Time doesn't say, but one assumes (or maybe just hopes) that there's no truth to this. The facts are bad enough. Apparently the French deputies forced Daladier from power without meaning to -- they just wanted to send him a message by abstaining on a crucial confidence vote. The punchline is that the whole upheaval began as an attempt to fire up the French war effort.
THE “WHITE WAR” MIGHT GO ON. A New York Times editorial sees in Chamberlain’s latest address the implication that the Allies aren’t about to go on the attack --
“Seven months after the start of the war, the Prime Minister reaffirms General Gamelin’s promise of last September that he would be ‘positively miserly’ with manpower. Unless Hitler begins the carnage, it will probably remain a ‘white war’ this Spring; and the Allies’ main effort in coming weeks will be to tighten their economic stranglehold on Germany....Perhaps it is fortunate for Europe that the war still takes this shape, and that the tragedy of ‘total war’ has not yet begun. But there is tragedy, too, in the possibility that the present methods of bloodless war may not be decisive.”
ROOSEVELT’S FOREIGN POLICY BUNGLES. Meanwhile, the New York Herald Tribune’s editors take a look at President Roosevelt’s record on foreign policy in the wake of the German “White Paper” fuss, and find that the administration hasn’t done much to help the Allies, the cause of peace, or itself --
“The trouble lies in [Roosevelt's] inability to follow a simple course consistently. This has been one of his greatest failures in domestic as in foreign affairs. Invariably he has chosen bad means to attain a good end. It seems impossible for him to avoid muddle and indirection. The fact that he failed in making plain to the Germans a year ago what they seem only now to have realized -- that American sympathies are strongly anti-Nazi -- is in no small measure because his well known sleight of hand left the Germans uncertain as to his true intentions. By the same token his record for broken promises raised doubt in the mind of the Allies as to the value of the protestations of friendship and proffered help transmitted through his ambassadors....Mr. Roosevelt, in lieu of candor, apparently encouraged one ambassador to urge upon the Allies a policy of conciliation and surrender while another urged a “strong policy.” As a result, the American concern was both understated and overstated. His own remarks were often cryptic, usually indirect, and better calculated to hide than to make plain his true meaning.”
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