VALETS OF WAR.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 304, 26 December 1939, Page 6

VALETS OF WAR.

R.A.F. ORGANISATION.

REMARKABLE EFFICIENCY.

WHY ATTACKS ARE DELAYED.

(By WALTER DURAXTY.)

With the R.A.F. in France,

With the British R.A.F. in France.

One of the things I have learned from this war —although lam willing'to bet that Pan-American Airways knew it long ago—is that the aeroplane is not only the fastest but also the slowest means of locomotion invented by man. I mean the 'planes that fly the Atlantic in one day; but ask the Pan-American directors how many months and years they needed to prepare this simple service. And it is a question whether the huge multi-engined, 'planes, with their tons of loads of passengers or bombs, are less helpless or need more- nursing than a modern fighter which can do 400 miles an hour. "Five hours from New York to San Francisco," one says coolly. ''Isn't that wonderful?" But do you realise t'nat few of these modern fighters carry two hours' fuel ? To make a long non-stop flight requires ar infinity of preparation and special fuel containers and a hundred other details of training and adjustment. Once all this is done and the service is fully established, the whole process works like a clock — speaking generally—although clocks have been known to stop. And one must not forget the airfields al! along the route and the vast effort of labour, money and time their establishment involves.

So the 'Planes May Fly. If that is hll true in peace-time in one s own country, what do you suppose it is like for the British Air Force in Northern France, where almost everything from living quarters to aerodromes must be more or improvised, where everything, including the language, is unfamiliar, and. where, last but not least, the whole country is in darkness for 12 hours out of 24. That is the job these folks are really doing—to enable the 'planes to fly. As a guesswork estimate, I would say it took a thousand hours of a man s work to keep a 'plane in the air for an hour. Although, of couise, once the man s work has been accomplished, then it follows that hundreds of planes can fly for hundreds of hours. Jne British Air Force has done in this respect in the past two months little that is spectacular and we reporters here, and doubtless the public at home, are grumbling that nothing happens and even practice flights are interrupted by bad weather. "Don't aeroplanes fly in any weather or mightv near it?" you ask plaintively. Yes, bui I venture to reply without unduly complimenting the British Air Force,' which says it hates compliments and is even restive in talking about itself and disapproves of interviews—that few such jobs of organisation, supply and preparation have ever been carried out so S ,"I *y. and '-'fluently in face of such difficulties. It is- hard to detect the change from day to day, but in little more than the three weeks I have been here the cumulative effect is most impressive. Modern Rapidity of Tire. Squadron after squadron arrives and apparently goes to ground as if the earth had swallowed it. All you notice i» a group i:i dark blue uniforms in the streets of some village that was almost empty, or hear one flyer say to another in the town restaurant, "Hello, when did your lot get here?" There is another point—ammunition—some of these new multi-machined 'planes can lire all the ammunition they can carry in the time vou can ho-id voui breath or little more. Well may Mr. Winston Churchill write in a recent article, "The difficulty is no longer the rapidity of lire, but the supply 0 f an.munition to the actual point of

If that is the case with the land foices, how much truer when fighting in an aeroplane—the man-made swallow, the man-made tortoise. In armies in fortress possums that have been pre pared for years. Hke the Maginot and v i gfned Lmes, it is naturally a differ--1« th V' 1 the P° int is th «t thev thU :, lon ?, I' repai 'ed on the one hand and on the other that they are in defenr"f t rn t,on «- * U PP°* C Germany wishes ,I rn n ' C ! T eke thc Maginot n, H , V, I 'V" 0t that ex P lain the delay the lull Cilice Poland's defeat? Because the attacker far more than the defender must prepare and improvise a d be ready to feed his marching men and guns and tanks and 'planes as thev „o forward. It is a less pleasant explanation than to think that the "we'-" will be postponed until Easter. But is it more wrong on that account?—