New Commander

Britain last week decided to try a new commander in its three-year-old fight to stamp out the Mau Mau in Kenya. General Sir George Erskine, 55, the big, cherry-cheeked commander in chief in Kenya since 1953, will be recalled to Britain; his successor will be a 48-year-old paratrooper: 6-ft. 4-in. Major General Gerald W. Lathbury, World War II leader of the British paratroopers at Arnhem.

Erskine's recall was the result of mounting dissatisfaction, in Kenya and in Britain, over the conduct of the Mau Mau war. Despite periodic announcements that the guerrillas were on the run, 7,000 Mau Mau, armed with homemade guns and spears, are pinning down a division of British regulars and 28,000 Kikuyu Home Guardsmen, Masai spearmen and Samburu trackers. Erskine, to his credit, succeeded in penning the Mau Mau into a mountain redoubt: the tangled Aberdare highlands. But his bluntly stated conviction that bullets alone would never wean the mass of the Kikuyu tribe away from their Mau Mau sympathies antagonized many of the crustier of Kenya's 40,000 white settlers. The settlers complained to Whitehall that the military were not being ruthless enough. Soldiers in turn blamed settlers for mistreating the loyal Africans, thereby providing the Mau Mau with a supply of recruits.

A fresh initiative was needed, and last week Whitehall decided that Lathbury was the man to supply it. His instructions were simple: go to Kenya and "finish the job."

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