EUROPE: Thoughts & Actions

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On the sixth anniversary of the liberation of Paris last week, the air over the French capital was filled with the whoosh of jet fighters. At an airfield, loudspeakers barked out flight orders in a mixture of English and French: "Castor Bleu, scramble . . . Cobra Jaune, en readiness dans quatre minutes" For three days, 450 planes of the Dutch, Belgian, British and French air forces, supplemented by U.S. B-29s, carried out Western Union's first air maneuvers. Exulted a French colonel: "Today there is actually a European air force . . . Maybe we're just a little ahead of the politicians." .

But there was still no joint European air force—only occasional joint maneuvers. Western Europe's military men could not get any farther than Western Europe's politicians were willing to go. Last week, Winston Churchill reminded his colleagues that they had not gone very far.

Responsible & Wrong. In the tones of a tired Cassandra, Churchill said: "The supreme peril is in Europe. We must try to close the hideous gap on the European front."

Churchill recalled that one of his earlier suggestions for strengthening the defenses of Western Europe had been dismissed as "irresponsible" by Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Said Churchill sardonically, "Perhaps it is better to-be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong." Under Attlee's Labor government, charged Churchill, Britain's defense policy had been characterized mainly by "disconnection of thought and action."

Churchill's salvo at Britain's Socialists would find other targets. While the Tory leader spoke, the North Atlantic Treaty's Council of Deputies was meeting in London's Lancaster House to see how the individual defense programs of North Atlantic pact nations jibed with the overall requirements of Western European defense. The deputies realized that, even on paper, the funds, industrial production and manpower which the North Atlantic powers were prepared to contribute did not add up to the minimum requirements for Western defenses (TIME, Aug. 14).

The British declared firmly that even their present inadequate proposals could be carried out only with more U.S. dollar contributions. The French delegation complained that France had not yet received a full measure of MAP aid promised her by the U.S., and that she was not sufficiently equipped to justify further expansion of her armed forces. Said one French expert: "It's not logical to expect us to make a bigger plan when we haven't yet got the material we need for our present one . . ." The French also wanted the U.S. and Britain to send more troops to the Continent; that demand was echoed by the Germans (see below).

Regrettable & Inevitable. All these arguments sounded eminently reasonable. They were, however, basically wrong—or at least unrealistic. The chairman of the Council of Deputies, the U.S.'s affable

Charles M. Spofford, a former New York lawyer, listened to all arguments and said little. But the U.S. position was pretty well known by last week. It runs something like this: