Surprise Attack in the Next War

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 255, 24 July 1937, Page 1 (Supplement)

Surprise Attack in the Next War

1 4 ESPITE reliance upon the ‘crushing surprise blow’ theory of H VI Yon Schlieffen and others, mechanisation and technical improve- || B ments are certainly as potent for defence ns—if not more than | .Jr —for attack,” says a writer in the “Economist.” “To give but one example, Belgium, France and Czechoslovakia all'conceive the possibility that Germany may one day attack them. In view of the rate and extent of German war preparations they could not do otherwise.

“Their measures have been, first, to put their German frontiers in a state of semi-permanent mobilisation, with self-sufficient garrisons in their Maginot lines, wartime munitions supplies, etc.; and, secondly, to organise their military commands in such a way that the minimum of marching, com munications by road and rail, etc., is necessitated, thus minimising the risk of dislocation by sudden aerial attack.

“For the rest, if an attack comes like a thief in the night, special plans of defensive campaigning are linked —as almost every kind of warfare is linked to-day—with the possibility of organised air-raids on the military and industrial centres of the enemy.

“This week, the Italian Under-Secretary for War has announced that Italy’s land frontiers are to be permanently manned; enough has been shown in Spain to prove that a better-equipped attacking force to-day needs the consilience of many other favourable factors before their lenders can count on anything like a surprise ‘walk-over.’ No European, no Western State —

however small—is likely ever to prove so easy to reduce as Ethiopia proved to Italy a year ago.

“In these circumstances, the very mechanisation and (if we can use the word in this context) over-capitalisation of land warfare is likely to remove decisions in such warfare from the purely military sphere to other spheres, if only the defence against sudden attack can hold. “We must not forget that a sudden attack on land will doubtless be accompanied—in order to be more crushing—by aerial and possibly naval action, on a great scale; and it may be that, against a small State in isolation, a Great Power could quickly prove victorious.

“Against such a possibility, however, other factors work: the solidarity of political and military interests between the various groups of European States (to say nothing of the League of Nations); the sudden imposition of the strain of war upon the aggressor’s national economy; the tendency of local wars to spread, if victory is not sudden and complete. “Over and above these factors, there is the inordinate material wastage of modern land warfare, however localised. The disciples of ’totalitarian war’ have at least this much on their side. As far as we can see to-day, a State which aims to achieve a political decision by means of war must reckon on much more than a war l>etween professional land armies.

“It will need to be a war of all the talents, all the resources, of the nation. Providence is tending to inarch away from the big battalions; and in such unfamiliar circumstances, the risks of miscalculation and the penalty of failure are to-day far greater than they have ever been before.”