ARMS FOR EMPIRE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 26, 30 July 1941, Page 7

ARMS FOR EMPIRE

Britain Answers Gall

CHURCHILL GIVES FACTS

(Eec. 1 p.m.)

KUGBY, July 29.

"A picture so luridly drawn of a chaotic and convulsive struggle of three supply departments, without guidance or design, is one which, no doubt, will be pleasing to our enemies, but happily has no relation to facts." (

These words occurred early in Mr. Winston Churchill's speech on the third day of the production debate in the House of Commons.

Mr. Churchill had recalled the speech he had made on January 22, in which he gave in detail the form of supply organisation which he proposed to adopt, and to which he proposed to. adhere.

He stated that, as Minister of Defence, he had prepared for the War Cabinet a general scheme, based on forward programmes of the fighting Services, which had brought together the whole of the home munitions production and the imports programme, and prescribing the largest reasonable target at which to aim. - -

Pointing out that each fighting department in the main had its own chain of factories, Mr. Churchill said that except on the fringe of these powerful organisations there was almost no friction or overlapping between one department and another. He briefly reviewed departmental organisation, and said: "We are not a totalitarian State, but we are steadily and, I believe, as fast as possible, working ourselves into a total war organisation." AMERICAN PURCHASING. Dealing with the work of the British Purchasing Commission in the United States, Mr. Churchill said that it had reached a very high level, and though a year or six months ago there was a lot of trouble, his information was that this had largely died away. Th,e | United States naturally asked- for the fullest and clearest information about the goods they were supplying, and whether there was waste or misdirection. Their criticism was searching and well informed, and it was the Government's duty to reply to their questions. Turning to home production, Mr. Churchill dealt with the allegation of departmental disputes and said: "All I can say is that, for the last four months, no question of departmental rivalry or dispute has been brought to me or the War Cabinet." He dismissed the suggestion of the appointment of a Minister of Production and stated that this was unnecessary and unworkable. Dealing with the specific allegation that aircraft orders from the United States had not been accompanied by maintenance and ancillary equipment ordered-at the same1 time, so that the aircraft were to be seen idle for want of spare parts, Mr. Churchill said that as far as British aircraft were concerned this was quite untrue. But after the collapse of France, aircraft built for French requirements had to be altered before the R.A.F. was able to use them and new spares had to be ordered. They were practically all now in use. " " '■ >\ AIRCRAFT SUPERIORITY. Dealing with new aircraft, Mr. Churchill said: "I am'glad to tell the House that the spring and summer fashions in aircraft this year are further ahead of contemporary German production than they were last year. "The enemy has borrowed many ideas from our fighter planes, and we have borrowed some from him, but in the upshot we have confronted him in 1941 with fighter aircraft which, in performance, sp%ed, ceiling, and, above all, in armament, have left our pilots with their old, and even with an added, sense of technical superiority." , Technical superiority in aircraft sometimes meant, the adoption of new ideas, even at the expense of numbers of output. • "The struggle for air mastery requires vast numbers, but those vast numbers have not succeeded alone unless the leading types constantly achieved the highest level of enterprise and perfection." Mr. Churchill deprecated the use by the newspapers of such phrases as "the general feeling in the House was of grave uneasiness," when no vote had been taken. , WORKERS AND OUTPUT. . Parliament, he said,' should be an arena in which grievances and complaints became vocal, and the Press should be a prompt and vigilant alarm bell, but ideas should not be spread abroad as to the feeling of the House when its opinion had not been tested by a division. Mr. Churchill devoted particular attention to the examination, of a statement made by Sir J. Wardlaw Milne that "Our people are only working to 75 per cent, of total efficiency." This statement was taken from its context and conveyed a wrong impression of the speech, but had been circulated all over the world. Testing the truth of the allegation, Mr. Churchill said, he tried to find a datum line, to find out what "75 per cent." represented. He had taken the three months after Dunkirk, which would be admitted as the time when the British people worked to the limit of their' powers. AN IMPOSSIBLE LEVEL. "Working men and women did not take their clothes off for a week at a time, and their output was the utmost limit of their strength," he said. "This produced an abnormal inflation of production. Now, it is true, we are only working to 75 per cent, of that." Mr. Churchill explained that if such conditions had continued there would have been a crash costing far more in production than the minimum periods of leisure now adopted. He also explained the temporary retarding effect of labour dilution and the permanent diminution, because of the dispersal of vulnerable plant to different centres. The latter he illustrated by a Bristol aircraft firm, which had been dispersed over nearly 45 sub-centres. "We may suffer," he said, "and output may be retarded, but we can no longer be destroyed." SUCCESS THROUGH ORGANISATION. Mr. Churchill gave "facts and figures to show how we succeeded, by improved organisation and by smoother running of our expanding machinery, in overcoming difficulties." In spite of the troubles and difficulties confronting the Ministry of Supply, output in the last three months had been onethird greater than in the three months of the Dunkirk period. He continued: "Though our Navy, Army, and Air Force are larger, the Ministry of Sup-

ply has one-third more people working in its factories.

"Each man is turning out, each day, as much as in that time of almost superhuman effort. This despite dilution of labour, dispersion, air raids, black-outs, and all the troubles I have described. "Let me present the balance-sheet — one-third more workers, and one-third more output is quits, but all the adverse factors I have described have, somehow, been cancelled out by superior development and organisation. We made, in the last three months, more than twice as many field guns as w& made in the Dunkirk three months. Of munitions we,are turning out half as much again, and the combined programme of merchant and naval shipping, now in hand, is greater than at any period during the last war." STRENGTH IN BOMBERS. "Since the present Government took over, the progress and expansion have been enormous and continuous. In fighter aircraft we are at least as much ahead of the Nazis as a year ago, and there has been no sacrifice of quality to quantity. As for bombers, in British production alone the bomb discharge on Germany has been doubled, and in the next three months we shall double it again. ' ' / "The output of warlike stores in: this seventh quarter of this war was nearly double the production in the seventh quarter. of the last war, and equal to that attained in the fourteenth quarter. The time lost through labour disputes ; has been much less. \ "Twelve million working days were lost in the last war, but so far less than 2,000,000 have been in this. "I received, just before coming here today, information that at 11 o'clock this morning there was no stoppage of work of any kind arising _from any dispute in any part of Britain." After paying a tribute to the Minister of Labour and the great work he was accomplishing. Mr. Churchill gave what he decribed as "a very serious, warning." "There ar.e no doubt temptations to optimism," he said., "It is a fact that the mighty Russian State, so foully and treacherously assaulted, has struck back with magnificent strength and courage and inflicted prodigious and well-de-served slaughter,for the : first time upon the Nazi: armies. ■ , RELAXATION IMPOSSIBLE. "it is a fact that the United States, the greatest single Power in the world, is coming to our aid on a gigantic scale and is advancing, in rising wrath of conviction to the very verge of war. It is a fact that the German air superiority has been broken and the German air attacks on this country have for the time being ceased. "The Battle of the Atlantic, although far from.won, has, partly through American intervention, moved impressively in our favour. It is a fact that the Nile Valley is much safer than twelve or thirteen months ago. It is a fact that the enemy has lost all pretence of theme or doctrine, .and has sunk even deeper in moral and intellectual degradations-bankruptcy, and almost all his conquests have become burdens and sources of weakness. "But with all this, we must not be led for a moment to suppose that the worst is over. The formidable power of Nazi Germany, the vast mass of destructive munitions which "it has made, and the courage and skill of its striking forces and the ruthlessness of its centralised war direction, the prostrate condition of so many peoples under its yoke, and the resources of so many countries which have been tosome extent available to thenv all these restrain and forbid the slightest relaxation. INVASION SEASON HERE. It would be madness to suppose that Russia or the United States are going to win this war for us. The invasion season is at hand, and all the armed forces have been warned. * By September 1 we have to reckon with a gambler's desperation. "We stand here, still champion. If we fail, all fail. If we fall, all fall together. It will only be by a, superb, intense, and prolonged effort by the whble British Empire that the great combination of about three-quarters of the whole human race against Nazidom will come into, a vehement domination of life. • "For more than a year we have been all alone. All alone, we have had to guard the treasure of mankind. Although there have been profound and encouraging changes in the situation, our responsibilities remain undiminished, and we shall .only discharge them by continuing to pour out, in the common cause, the utmost endeavours of our strength and virtue, and if need be to proffer the last drop of our heart's blood."—B.O.W.