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Richard K. Law, M. P. for stanchly Conservative Hull and son of World War I's Conservative Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law, also opened fire on the Government, denouncing its "attitude to the problem . . . which must be changed before the country is in sight of victory."
Meeting privately in the House of Commons, 20 influential Parliamentarians, including ex-War Secretary Leslie Hore Belisha, former First Lord of the Admiralty L. S. Amery, ex-Minister of Information Lord Macmillan and Radical Publicist Vernon Bartlett, decided that the resignation of the Cabinet had now become an immediate issue.
In a move to thwart political scalp-hunters, oldster Sir John Simon tossed the entire Cabinet into a single cauldron of responsibility, maintaining in a united-we-stand-divided-we-fall speech that "if there is anybody disposed to fasten criticism upon this Minister or that ... he will be most woefully disappointed.'' Iron Veracities. Chief spokesman of the Chamberlain-can-stay group was veteran Publicist J. L. Garvin, who in the London Observer gave expression to the general demand that the Allied war machine be rapidly geared up to that of a powerful, superbly organized, determined enemy. "We must wake up to the iron veracities of this war," he wrote, "and then face them not merely without flinching but with redoubled energy of will and effort. . . . The British people have done everything that was asked of them. . . . Their Government, willingly supplied with immense means and powers, ought to have done far more.
"We require above all two things: first, the supreme effort for absolute air mastery; . . . second, a smaller War Cabinet composed of a few men . . . who will give their whole minds to the higher direction of the war. . . . Against a foe who holds the strategical initiative ... we have to get ready both for a wide extension of the struggle and for its intensified violence at home and abroad. Britain and France have to fight not only for their own liberties but for their lives. They have to wage that fight and win it during the next few months. It may well be, and it is very likely to be, the most desperate struggle that the world has seen. . . . The Nazis are full of vehement confidence. . . . They are flushed with unlimited dreams of destruction and triumph. They mean to make a giant bid for complete victory by next autumn. The Allies have to meet the full shock of this temper before they can begin to smash it. But they cannot smash it until they possess complete and overwhelming predominance of the flying arm. . . . The truth and force of that view ought to have been brought home to practical imagination long ago by the Polish Blitzkrieg. By the new lessons in Norway the case is proved up to the hilt. . . . The Allied cause demands nothing less than an air supremacy of two to one. . . .