PURCHASES IN U.S.A.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 July 1941, Page 6

PURCHASES IN U.S.A.

Dealing with the work of the Purchasing Commission in the United States, Mr Churchill said it had reached a very high level, and though a year or six months ago there had been a lot of trouble and discordance, his information was That they had largely died away. The 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 to the War Cabinet.” He dismissed the suggestion of the appointment of a Minister of Production and stated that such an office would be Unnecessary and unworkable. - Dealing with a specific allegation that aircraft orders to the United States had not been accompanied by maintenance and ancillary equipment ordered at the same time, so that aircraft were to be seen idle for want of spares, Mr Churchill said: “As far as British aircraft are concerned, this is 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 are' practically all now in use.” NEW AIRCRAFT Dealing with new aircraft, Mr Churchill said: “I am glad to tell the House that spring and summer fashions in aircraft this year are further ahead of contemporary German production than they were last. year. The enemy borrowed many ideas from our tighter planes and we borrowed some from him, but in the upshot we confronted him in 1941 with fighter aircraft which in performance, speed, ceiling and above all armament, left our pilots with the old and even with an added sense of technical superiority.” Technical superiority in aircraft. he added, sometimes meant the adoption of new ideas even at the expense of numbers of output. “The struggle for air mastery,” he continued, “requires vast numbers, but those vast numbers would not have succeeded alone unless forward and leading types had constantly achieved the highest level of enterprise and perfection.” A WORD TO CRITICS Mr Churchill deprecated the use by newspapers of such phrases as “the general feeling of the House was one of grave uneasiness,” when no vote had been taken. Parliament, he said, should be the arena in which grievances and complaints became vocal and the Press should be prompt and vigilant with the alarm bell, but ideas should not bo spread abroad as to the feeling of the House when its opm-. ion 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 had been taken from its context and conveyed a wrong impression of the speech, but it had been circulated over the world. DUNKIRK AND AFTER Testing the truth of the allegation, Mr Churchill said he had tried to find a datum line to find out what the 75 per cent represented. He had taken the three months after Dunkirk, which would be admitted as a time when the British people worked to the limit of their powers. “Working men and women,” he said, “did not take their clothes off for a week at a time and their output was the utmost limit of their strength. This produced an abnormal inflation of production. Now it is true that wo are only working 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 dimunition 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 and output may be retarded.” he said, “but we can no longer be destroyed.”