GREAT BRITAIN: Civilians in Battle

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As thundering German bombers methodically attacked British civilians for the fourth successive week of heavy air raids, the people of London began to see themselves as a sort of army of non-fighters who must take their punishment and hold —with self-help and Government help. Among the other millions of London housewives who no longer bother with hats or have lost them amid the debris of smashed homes, Mrs. Winston Churchill tied a spotted scarf over her head and went about the streets with the Prime Minister. "Now, there's a lydy for you!" chirped an appreciative cockney.

The King's personal physician Lord Horder (chairman of the Committee of Inquiry into Shelters) summed up last week some of the basic problems with which the King's Ministers were grappling. "The crux of the problem is overcrowding," said Lord Horder. "The Government has the choice between dispersal and the provision of more shelters. But these two courses are not alternatives: both should be taken."

Government Help. Both were being taken. Some 3,000 mothers and children daily were moved out of London, dispersed in the safer countryside. Health Minister Malcolm MacDonald, son of the late Ramsay, called on 14 of the less heavily bombed boroughs of London last week to give shelter to 20,000 homeless from boroughs which have suffered more. In the swank West End many vacant homes and apartments were turned over to the poorest evacuees from grimy Limehouse and other East End slums. The once pro-Nazi Lord Redesdale, whose daughter the Hon. Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford came home from Naziland with a bullet mysteriously embedded in her throat, offered his big London house to 90 homeless people (TIME, Sept. 30) but received a rebuff. The first family to arrive from East End slums were Jewish. On being told they might have what had been the bedroom of Hitler-admiring Miss Freeman-Mitford they left in a huff. But by last week Hon. Unity's bed was slept in by Jews.

The Government appointed the distinguished barrister and World War I veteran Henry Urmston Willink as Coordinating Commissioner for Rehousing to handle problems of getting bedding, furniture, etc., for the homeless. Sir Warren Fisher, who has served since 1919 as head of the entire British Civil Service, was appointed Coordinating Commissioner of Repairs to bomb-damaged water, gas, electricity, telephone and sewer services, as well as roads. Winston Churchill gave both his new Coordinating Commissioners dictatorial power over all local political authorities, public-utility companies and even over Government departments.

This was practical wartime socialism with a vengeance. The Prime Minister grew testy when the Communist Party persisted last week in dropping leaflets among persons in shelters inciting them to occupy London subway stations which the Government was trying to keep clear so as not to choke the city's communications. Up to last week a British desire not to ruffle Joseph Stalin has left the Communists free to propagandize as they please, but Winston Churchill had squads of Scotland Yarders raid Communist Party headquarters, confiscate Red handbills.