WAR OF THE FUTURE

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21464, 4 May 1935, Page 17

WAR OF THE FUTURE

ALL HOPE ABANDONED

War From the Air. Past, Present, . Future. By Air Commodore L. E. O. Charltdn. T. Nelson and Sons. 183 pp. (6/- net.)

[Roviowcd s>? R. K. PALMER.]

Germany has an air fleet hundreds strong; Britain will not accept less than parity in the air with any power within striking range; America builds aerial stepping st nes to the Orient; Japan plans an air line to Singapore; a stratosphere flight has been partially successful; pretty songs the cables sing, these days. And Air Commodore Charlton declares tha' the cpauletted greybeards who plan the destruction of nations have not yet, begun to realise wnat a weapon Wilbur and Orville Wright put in their hands. With evidence that cannot be denied, he shows how lamentably the directors of the last war let opportunity after opportunity to win slip by. Germany held a trump in gas, and showed it to her opponent before she played it. Britain did the same with tanks. Both sides misused aeroplanes, Britain more than Germany, in Air Commodore Charlton's view. Every time someone had a bright idea to win the war it was stifled by the military leaders because of either ultra-conssrvatism or the sort of stupid sportsmanship that led Sir William Napier to condemn the use of the Minie rifle, nearly a century ago, on the ground that it would turn infantrymen into long-ran#e murderers. Now, the general staffs are playing with aviation. «

An air force, intelligently used — and what charming irony there i is in that use of intelligence—can make armies and navies play as minor, if as useful, a part in war to-day as labour corps were given in the last. The heart of an enemy is the obvious target for a blow; why, because that heart has in the past been shielded, should modern fighters neglect a weapon that enables them to reach it, and make war, conventionally but ineffectively, by clarh'ng sword again.'t gua'd? Tht, briefly is what Air Commodore Charlton asks, and there is, of course no answer. Both sides have the same supremely effective weapon, the only form of attack for which there is no reasonably adequate defence; that side will win which first uses it.

Air Commodore Charlton does not rely on unbacked assertions to prove his case. If you like chapter and verse he has them for you; and if, after reading his book, you will think that aeroplanes are only appendages to armies and navies, you are to be congratulated on the immovability of your convictions. He does not go as far as the Italian General Douhet, whose view that the job of armies and navies is to reach stalemate and stay there while th? bombers win the war he fully expounds, but he sympathises with him strongly. General Douhet would not have a fighter or a reconnaissance machine in his air force, regarding them only as means by which the striking force is deprived of men and material. The Englishman, one feels, would allow his cities the doubtful defence of interceptors, and the artillery a few spotting machines. But he is as insistent as General Douhet that the air force, because it can strike as nothing else can, or lias ever in the history of warfare been able to do, must be used to strike. There is no need to go into the possibilities of air raids on industrial or commercial centres; no need to consider the effects that the German air raids had on the morale of those directly affected by them in London in the last war, or to compare the slow, comparatively defenceless and rather comic bomber of 1918 with the speedy flying fortress (apologies to the "Daily Mail") of to-day. Striking at the heart will win a war, and one side or the other is going to realise that first. Air Commodore Charlton suggests that if Britain is going to prepare to fight, she should prepare to fight efficiently; that the playing fields of Eton stuff should be discarded — after all, gas warfare dealt it a fairly solid blow, and bombing the Rhine towns did not strengthen it—and that Britain should prepare to win as well as to fight. He realises the implications of his views as well as anyone else—hearts' b'ood g: s'ling frrm both combatants for a brief minute, and then two deaths. He does not mention the mutilated kindergarten children, but he knows about them. He realises the limitless stupidity of man who, by the strivings of centuries, has built himself a moderately comfortable house and now prepares to die painfully in its ruins. And he does not laugh till he goes mad. He wonders whether perhaps other civilisations, ones that have already disappeared, reached the final stage of the conquest of the air. "Flying is evil through and through," he writes. "The reason is not far to seek. It directly subserves the ends of war." And, "the actual duty of combatants will be mainly the mechanical employment of using enemy cities as bomb dumps." Good, cheerful stuff. Listen to the cheering of the colonels! Air Commodore Charlton himself is not one of those cheering colonels. He sees the unrecognised, almost unwitting propaganda for war. "The birth of a royal princess is greeted with a salvo of artillery. A peace-loving old queen is carried to her last resting-place on a guncarriage. ... A prince performs a peace mission on a battleship .... School-boys are put into ill-fitting khaki, loaded with rifles and accoutrements, and set against each other in mimic fight," he says, and asks, "How can people emancipate themselves from the war habit when it is inculcated in these subtle ways? The peace instinct is a plant of slow growth."

Air Commodore Charlton has Ms remedy—disarmament and an international air police force, with the internationalization of commercial flying. But that is rational, sane, and only the ordinary citizens of the world, the people who pay the bills and will fill the coffins want to be rational; the statesmen prefer parity to sanity, security to sense.