MAKING AIRMEN-GUNNERS.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIX, Issue 148, 22 June 1918, Page 13

MAKING AIRMEN-GUNNERS.

ARMAMENT IS AS IMPORTANT AS ENGINES

"Now you, sir, please come and tell the squad all you know a.out the care and cleaning of the Vickers gun," says the sergeant-instructor. An officer gets up from his seat -on the wooden form,-'stand, by the tripodmounted gun, and begins to talk. The sergeant is at his side in the capacity of prompter and critic. All around other sergeants and other-officers, cadets or non-commissioned officers are doing the same thing. Half-a-dor.en little lectures are going on in the hangar; half-a-dozen little squads are 'examining aerial gunnery." In one corner observers are firing off round after round of imaginary ammunition at model Hun flying machines, pausing to clear prepared stoppages or get their gun into action again. In mother corner cadets are stripping and is?embling guns; everywhere work is in .11 swing, and the talk is of tiring in he air or of bombs. Only a few months old, and by no neans completed yet, this school of irmament is already setting the stanlard of gunnery and bombing in the Royal Air Force, writes an aviation :orrespondent of an English paper. It is the official "university" of the Force in this respect, the gradtiating-place of all ivhose business it is to fight the Hun in the air or bomb him, and also of those chosen to instruct in these matters. - The instructors qualifying, both commissioned and non-commissioned, . are drawn from all sources and are mostly "crocks." There arc pilots and observers who have crashed, and who are no longer fit for flying; men'from the Navy, and men from the Army, secondlieutenants and majors, chief "petty officers and corporals. Chevrons abound..; medal ribbons are quite common; the red, white, and blue of the Mons Star is in most of the squadsAlready, with the administrative, officers who 'run the non-technical side of things, the strength of this new university of aerial gunnery amounts to many hundred, and soon it is expected to be three times as great. Gunnery and - bombing, are to be of supreme importance In the Royal Air Force. It is no good sending up bombs if the pilot and observer do not properly understand bombing. It is useless having guns if the men in the machine do not know how to use them or the men on'the ground do not know how to prepare them. The days when armament and the proper understanding of it in the air were of secondary importance are gone. Armament is now as important as engines. The system of teaching is splendidly thought out. Demonstration, explanation, imitation, interrogationthese are the never-varying principles of it. Every separate hit of mechanism, every movement, is so dealt .with that the whole working of gun or bomb is at last laid bare in such a way that anyone with the least mechanical bent must grasp its mysteries and become more or less expert. In a fortnight a person with but the vaguest ideas on machine-guns can discourse quite learnedly on the Lewis 01 the Vickers; in another fortnight he may know every kind of bomb.dropped from the air, and how. each one "works." In seven weeks he can qualify as a gunnery instructor or an armament officer. Even a year ago such speedy specialised training would have been considered impossible. And not only must all who have to do with armament in the R.A.F. pass their tests at this remarkable new university, but henceforth every gun to be used in the air must ''prove" itself here. AH day long the rattle of machine-gun fire goes on. On the ranges instructors are putting squad after squad through their tests; in the gun-testing section, accommodated in the grounds of what used to be a pretty private park, gun "candidates" for the Air Force are being tried out.

Altogether, about ' half -a - million I rounds are fired off every week in tests".*