THE AIR FIGHTER.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIX, Issue 11, 12 January 1918, Page 10

THE AIR FIGHTER.

WILL HE DECIDE THE WAR 1 "RESERVOIRS OF ATHLETIC YOUTH." WORK FOR GENIUS. [(By H. G. WELLS, in the "Daily Mail.") All the prophets are bankrupt. Their time has run out. Even the prophetic almanacks say nothing this year about the date of the peace that must come ... At the word "peace" I seem to hear a distant cry of "Yah, Pacifist!" Nevertheless, it is a fact of experience that wars do end. Then the seasoned diplomatists meet in a friendly way above a weary world and give away the fruits of the struggle on behalf of such nations as have been too busy "getting on with the war" to tolerate any statement of the peace they are. seeking. Heaven forbid that I should enrage the leaders ot the "Daily Mail" by suggesting again that it is well we should know the peace we want in order to be sure that we get it. Another Treaty of Berlin or another Treaty of Vienna is, I understand now, much more to their minds. A truce, therefore, to that dispute. What 1 have to write about here is not peace at all, but a factor that may contribute very powerfully to end the war—in an Allied victory. It is a factor I have not seen nor heard discussed as decisive, and so probably it is one that may be new to a number of people. It is the factor of what one might call first-class airman power. EXCEPTIONAL YOUNG MEN. What I want to do here i 3 not to advance any opinion or Suggestion of my own, but merely to set out certain considerations which the reader may judge for himself. The first of these is this, that though anybody who can ride a motor-bicycle can probably learn to fly a fairly safe type of aeroplane by daylight in good weather, only a very exceptional sort of young man is any good as an air lighter. My whole argument rests upon that fact. 1 do not think anyone has yet attempted to estimate just what proportion of our male population is capable of good air fighting, but if vvc had it in figures it would probably come to a rather startlingly low total. The other day 1 had the pleasure of meeting one of our most brilliant airmen. He was a very ojuiet, fair young man, in the early twenties, a little apologetic in his manner, and it was only by the happy chances of the conversation that it came out that he had been in over 150 air fights, that he had certainly killed 40-odd German airmen in single combat, and that there iwere perhaps another dozen whom he had sent down to an uncertain but probably conclusive collision with the ground. "You can't be sure," he said. "You can't wait to 6ee. Perhaps there's another of their chaps at you." . . But it was suddenly borne in upon mc just low supremely important high personal quality is in air lighting. Yon Richthofen, the German champion, claimed to have killed GO Ally aviators. It will •be manifest, if you think over those two instances, that good air fighting' tmust be a very rare art. It will be equally manifest that it can be very little good to put up second-class men to fight against first-class men. It follows that to discover, train, and send tup men of real air genius is of quite primary-importance in this war in the air. There must be in every country a definite limit to the supply of such men. My aviator told mc some particulars of the air fighting that is going on today. A really first-class air fighter is capable of the most amazing tricks. Looping the loop is but the beginning of his collection of stunts and devices. He will spin over sideways; lie' will fly npside down; he will sideslip, drop, and dodge and double in a fashion that no one would have dared to dream of in 1914. He dances round and kills a common flyer like a cat killing a rabbit. , NOT BY THE 100,000. Now the point 1 want to make here is ti it the side that can go on producing this very rare product, the first-class airfighter, longest and most abundantly, is going to chase the other side out of the air, 1 am told on the best authority, and I firmly believe, that the side fthat can dominate the air can dominate the artillery "conflict and the whole ground battle. It follows that to beat the other side in producing air fighters is a certain way to win the war. So that if theje is any reason for supposing that we and our Allies can produce an overwhelming superiority in air fighters it is a sound reason for anticipating an Allied victory. And now how how many air fighters can the Germans put up if they strain their utmost, and how many can we and our Allies? We are dealing here with an elite. For my own part, I doubt if the Central Powers were to comb out ~every possible man for this service they could put up more than a very few thousands. I am inclined to think the figure would be rather hundreds than thousands. They must have wasted the best of their youth greatly. And I may •be blinded by patriotic prejudice, but I have a strong belief that Great Britain, North France, and North Italy can all of them produce a larger proportion of this ra-re sort of young man than Germany. Men are no good at this sort of work until they are over 19; few have an unbroken nerve after eight-and-twenty; how much of the fine flower of those precious years between 19 and 29 is now left alive in Central Europe? And in addition to our probably superior resources in Europe, we have all the continent of America, all our Empire, vast reservoirs of open-air athletic youth, to draw upon in this contest. Now, if this line of reasoning is sound there" ought already to be a perceptible average superiority in the Allies air fighters over the German air fighters. I have lost no opportunity of questioning our armies upon this point. They are naturally very chary of under-estimat-ing the enemy, but they do agree in telling mc that in the case of certain rather difficult turns and manoeuvres our fighting men can all do as a matter of course things which the German fighter regards as exceptional accomplishments. And it is clear evidence of an awareness on the part of the enemy command of this increasing air inferiority that their air fighters are kept as far as possible behind their own front. Tnere is no military advantage in doin" this; there is every disadvantage, except that it does seem to offer them some

hope of correcting a numerical and qualitative disadvantage. This points at least in the direction of any suggestion that the Germans are • already on the verge of a shortage of first-class airmen power. We have reckoned on all sorts of shortages as possible factors in the overthrow of German imperialism. Have we reckoned fully upon this possibility of a shortage of air fighters? Is it not possible to press the air war so hard, so as to concentrate on the air attack, as to bring the German air arm to the break- [ ing point? To run the Germans right out of air-fighters, "in fact? 'My o°vn belief is that if both sides were to do their utmost, we and our Allies could ultimately put up ten fighters to the German one, and each of ours a better man than he. In other words, I believe that for the reasons I have stated, given a concentration of effort on this particular business, the German can be driven clean out of the air.