HOW RESPONSIBLE ?
Sia,—May I express my- deep appreciation of the trenchant and timely letter from Mr. J. Spedan Lewis. His main point—that we must shoulder the chief responsibility for the events of the past eight years—is one which we should all do well to ponder. As a typical member of that uneducated electorate enfranchised by the folly and (should I say?) cowardice of a Tory Government, I was an active supporter of the League of Nations Union during the inter-war years. I took part in the infamous Peace Ballot, and the vote which I cast expressed the same misguided views as those of the great majority of my fellow misguided cretins. I must, therefore, accept my share of responsibility for our ill- preparedness for the war of 1939-1945. I was responsible for the fact that in 1940 we had no armoured fighting vehicles capable of meeting the German panzers in equal combat, and I recognise that this deficiency in our equipment, which dogged us throughout the war (Cf. Mr. R. R. Stokes and others), was one of the main causes of the disasters which overtook us in May, 1940. During the war, like everyone. else, I did what I could to atone for my earlier errors and follies, and I am grateful to find that Mr. Spedan Lewis is gracious enough to lift some small part of the burden of guilt from my aching back by implying that if I had been better educated I might not have been so fatuously short-sighted. Alas—I had had to rely solely upon the education which the State provided for me.
When I look back over the war years, however, and when I now read the official accounts of the battles and campaigns which were fought, I realise that, but for the development of radar and the eight-gun fighter plane, we must inevitably have been invaded and destroyed in 1940. If this had happened we should indeed have failed in the great trust to which Mr. Spedan Lewis refers. But I note with some perplexity that the vital decisions on the development of radar and the fighter plane were made in 1935 and 1936—just at the time when I and my fellow cretins were peace-balloting for all we were worth. No one asked me about these vital decisions, and if they had I should, no doubt, have dismissed both with an airy nonchalance as unnecessary and dangerous to the peace of the world. It is equally true, of course, that no one asked me about the development of adequate armoured fighting vehicles, the development of effective anti-tank weapons, the wisdom of carrying out small-scale military exercises (with due regard to the question of expenditure) on the lines urged by de Gaulle and others, for the purpose of gaining experience
in the art of mobile armoured warfare and the logistics involved in that art. So when I think it all over, I begin to wonder whether I (regarded as an individual and as a unit in the uneducated mass) am quite so responsible for the sorry mess as I—and Mr. Spedan Lewis—imagine. I also wonder, with some apprehension, what vital decisions are being or are not being -made in 1948 on the questions of (say) atomic bombs, supersonic rockets and the like. I can, I hope, now claim to be semi-educated, but I am still far short of the omniscence which would enable me to express a useful opinion on these subjects even if anyone asked me to do so—which they won't. I must, I suppose, trust to luck, as in the past, accepting the blame for the wrong decisions which my leaders make, and giving them all the credit for the occasional right decision.—Yours faithfully,
GRADUATE (EX-LIEUTENANT-COLONEL).
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