GREAT BRITAIN: Tempest

A hoarse, warning bellow tore through the fog of postwar shipping plans last week, set Britons tooting nervously. Back in Washington from a three-week visit to London, U.S. Maritime Commission's Rear Admiral Howard L. Vickery announced that he had told the British the U.S. "had become a maritime nation and intended to remain one; that we would do it by cooperation if they wanted to but, if they 'didn't want to, we were going to do it anyway. . . . But ... it is much better to do it in cooperation . . . than to start a wrangle."

Said Britain's General Council of Shipping, after the press had reacted sharply, suspiciously: "Shippers have sufficient faith in American realism to believe that it will be recognized that how ever important the possession of an adequate merchant marine may be to the U.S., to Britain it is a vital necessity."

Postwar air transport was also up for action and argument. Winston Churchill's new Lord Privy Seal, restless, tireless, Canadian-born Lord Beaverbrook, this week conducted an informal Empire Air Conference, to lay plans for later, more difficult talks with the U.S. and other rival nations.