When Britain's top army commander visited British front-line troops in Helmand province in Afghanistan on Wednesday, his means of transport -- a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter -- made almost as much news back home as the fact that he was in Afghanistan at all. The commander, Gen. Richard Dannatt, chief of the general staff, acknowledged -- perhaps more candidly than he would have if he were not retiring imminently -- that he had been forced to fly in an American helicopter because British forces, with only 30 helicopters for their 9,100 troops, could not spare one. Instead he relied on American forces, which have deployed hundreds of helicopters in the war zone. 'Self-evidently, if I move in an American helicopter, it's because I don't have a British helicopter,' the general said in a brusque BBC radio interview. As he warmed to his theme of the equipment shortages facing British troops, he came close to joining a recent groundswell of criticism in which Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government has been accused of trying to conduct the war in Afghanistan without adequate financing. The debate has been keenly followed in Washington and is politically perilous for Brown, who faces an uphill struggle if his Labor Party is to make a fight of a general election less than a year away. By the measure of its troop numbers, and its role in Helmand, the most violent theater of the war, Britain is the United States' most important ally among the 40 or more countries that contribute forces to the coalition military effort in Afghanistan. If Britain quit the war, as it has in Iraq, President Barack Obama's commitment to prevailing in Afghanistan would suffer a major blow. On Wednesday, the political battle moved to the House of Commons, where Brown and David Cameron, the Conservative leader, had an ill-tempered confrontation over the scarcity of helicopters. The issue has been highlighted as the conflict's touchstone issue by many of Britain's mass-circulation newspapers and by the families of dead soldiers. At the weekly prime minister's questions, Cameron accused Brown of responsibility for a $2.3 billion cut in helicopter procurement five years ago, when Brown was chancellor of the Exchequer. That decision, Cameron suggested, was directly linked to situations in which British troops had to close on the enemy in armored vehicles and on foot, rather than aboard helicopters that would reduce their exposure to the most deadly form of Taliban attack, roadside bombs. Few accusations could be more potentially damaging to Brown, in the context of events in Afghanistan in recent days, including Dannatt's trip, and the way it highlighted the helicopter shortage. In his trip on the Black Hawk, the general visited a forward operating base at the embattled town of Sangin, where five British soldiers from a single company were killed Friday in a double bombing by the Taliban. The five were among eight British soldiers killed in a 24-hour period, the worst rush of casualties suffered by British troops in nearly 30 years. The five were victims of roadside bombs on an earthen pathway as they advanced on Taliban fighters. Three of the dead were 18-year-old riflemen who rushed to the aid of soldiers hit by the first bomb, then were caught by the second. The bomb attack has entered British folklore as the country has confronted, to a degree unmatched since its deployment to Afghanistan in 2001, the realities facing its troops. The casualties so far this month -- 15 in 10 days up to last Friday -- have brought the number of British dead in the conflict to 184. That is five more than the number of deaths in Britain's deployment in Iraq, which will end when the last main-force troops withdraw in the next two weeks. The deaths' emotional impact was driven home on Tuesday when the eight soldiers who were killed at the end of last week were flown home. Britain's television channels provided live coverage as hearses bearing the coffins passed through towns, villages and expressway underpasses that were packed with mourners throwing flowers onto the passing cortege. Nothing like it has been seen in Britain since the body of Diana, Princess of Wales, was carried to her family's countryside estate after her funeral in 1997. It was an outpouring that underscored the volatility of public support for the war. While opinion polls show a narrow majority in favor of having British troops remain in Afghanistan, many commentators here believe that the support could evaporate if casualties remain high and there is no sign that the tide is turning against the Taliban. In the Commons, Brown said that the number of British helicopters deployed in Afghanistan had increased by 60 percent in the past two years, and that the government had budgeted nearly $10 billion to acquire more helicopters over the next 10 years. In any case, he said, the Sangin casualties, and many others in Afghanistan, were a result of ground combat that was necessary in the fight with the Taliban, regardless of the number of helicopters. 'It is not the absence of helicopters that is causing deaths,' he said. But Cameron said Britain's inability to field more than 30 helicopters -- compared with the 100 helicopters he said were deployed by the U.S. Marine Corps in Afghanistan, with a number of troops similar to Britain's -- could be traced back to Brown's budget cutback in 2004. 'We have to be frank about the dangers and difficulties in Afghanistan, and one of the difficulties is the shortage of helicopters,' he said. 