ABYSSINIA DOOMED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 234, 3 October 1935, Page 17

ABYSSINIA DOOMED.

A GRIM PREDICTION. ITALY'S MODERN WEAPONS. FAMOUS SCIENTIST'S OPINION (B1 PROFESSOR A. M. LOW.) Abyssinia is doomed. It is inevitable. Victory for the Italians is as certain as was victory for William the Conqueror when he and his troops invaded primitive England 900 years ago. Tho reason Is as simple as it is obvious. Abyssinia has been blind. She has been deaf. During the greatest age of scientific expansion in world history she has kept her eyes and ears closed to the significant gestures, tho insistent warning words of modernity. She has ignored science. And her end is at hand. The enemy now battering at her gates is a Power fired by a tremendous ambition, prepared to (sacrifice tho flower of its young manhood to gain the prize of a colonial outlet of great potential wealth for the generations to come—a Power equipped with every resource of modern warfare, and, I have no doubt, some entirely new surprise-packets in scientific weaponry up its blaek-shirted sleeve. What of the weapons which Italy will bring into play? It is certain that those in uso during the Great War will play a largo part. The monster guns will hurl their screaming canisters of death across tho hilltops. Exploding shrapnel will play havoc amongst the boulders behind which tho Abyssinians will crouch to snipe. On days when tho wind is in the right direction clouds of gas will blow down upon men who have never seen a gas mask.

But tlio greatest factor will bo the bombing raids by fleets of air-machines travelling at colossal speed. Nothing is moro demoralising to a soldiery bound by its own gravity to the land. As the campaign continues, new and secret armaments may be tried out. New Trench Machines. In the battlefields of France and Flanders the digging of trenches and tunnels was of vast importance, but no serious attempt was made to introduce tunnelling machines of high power. I shall expect rapid-boring machines to be employed if, as is quite likely, a certain amount of trench warfare develops. Abyssiniat, one liopc of even minor success at the outset of a campaign is for her soldiers to work guerrilla fashion, in small bands, sniping from the rocks and lull vantage points and making lightning liand-to hand raids. But from recent reports of the training methods adopted by the new captains of Ethiopian infantry, massed-forma-tion actions are seriously contemplated. This would imply trench fighting, and rapid-boring parties of the enemy could speedily lay mines under and behind the Abyssinian lines.

Radio control is a new and deadly weapon I should expect to see in use; armoured cars, tanks, aeroplanes and aerial torpedoes can now be controlled by radio with great success; such land and air weapons, directed against an enemy who has no facilities for jamming the radio control-beams, would work with devastating effect.

I shall expcct to see new kinds of flame-throwing guns, on more modern and deadlier lines than those used in the Great War, with a far greater range of throw. To augment such methods of dealing death at close quarters it is possible that striking new devices may appear with electricity as the basis.

Electric water-guns may make their bow as weaponry. These would be nothing less than monster hose-pipes, probably with the nozzles mounted on some form of mobile carriage, and about the size of field guns, discharging upon the enemy high-pressure jets of elcc-trically-ehargcd water.

I have myself experimented with such a device and found it highly successful as a paralysing agent. Water is an efficient conductor of electrical energy, and as to the effect upon .the human body when struck by electrified water— well, ask any member of your fire brigade who has ever had to deal with a fire disaster where electric tables have fallen upon his soaked equipment. Gone for ever are the days of the old "0.P." tower, where two men crouched, peering through field glasses and muttered into a hand-cranked telephone set that went wrong every five minutes. The new micro-detectors will be able to record with accuracy the advances and retreats of _li"idden assailants.

Senator Marconi is alleged to have admitted that he has invented a wireless short ray with the power to put aeroplane engines out of commission, livery War Ollicc in the world pricked up its ears immediately. Definitely, I do not expect to bt'o such a ray appear as a war-weapon, either this year or next. Intensive tests have been made and are being made with apparatus which the inventors claim will do just this thing, but to my own knowledge not one of these rays has yet proved practicable.

There is no need for public alarm over this talk of "whole fleets of aeroplanes being put out of action at a single stroke" or the equally futile theory that "the advance of mechanised military units can thus effectively be checked." It may be noted that Senator Marconi was very guarded in his replies to the .bombardment of queries directed at him after the report of the interview appeared. Death Ray Not Yet. Which brings me to all this talk at "death rays." Let me explode a myth which has been • kept alive only by sensation-mongers. There is no suca thing as an effective "death ray." For years and at great cost inventors have been trying to produce a form of ray apparatus for dealing destruction from a distance. But the death ray offers, at the moment, an almost insuperable problem because in its electrical sense it implies that terrific energy can be conveyed through the ether without the use of wires.

It is not possible to take enough energy by means of radio waves to any appreciable distance with the efficiency required to move a small feather.

Noticeably to affect a man by the accumulated energy, of the largest power station in the world at a distance of a nundred yards is a problem at the moment almost beyond our ken.

1 do not expect to see "death rays" emerge within the next few months, as -onie people seem to believe. Science may some day produce a power-trans-mitting ray, but that day is very far distant.

Gas Has Limitations. Gas, the most recent of all modern war weapons, may not prove so deadly in the case of the Italo-Abys« lian conflict, owing to the obvious difficulties of projecting the gas clouds. Most poison gases are heavy and require the wind to be "just right" to render their use effective. It is certain that Italy has gas-throwing equipment ready for opportunities that may arise; it is equally certain that, given the right conditions for such an attack, an enemy utterly without protective equipment would suffer heavily. But the vagaries of tlie wind must always be taken into account by those who plan a gas attack. Tlie dropping of glass carboys of gas from aeroplanes would not prove effective; the glass containers, of necessity, would be small, and the gas cloud released on impact with the ground would scarcely accomplish anything. Any cxwavtime aviator can tell you that an explosive bomb would do far more damage.

Abyssinia's plight is tragic. But the fact remains. She has ignored science. And in these days it is "be modern— or go under." —(Copyright.)