THE AIR ARM

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 10, 13 January 1933, Page 6

THE AIR ARM

SPIRITED DEFENCE

SHORTENER OF CONFLICT

(From "the Post's" Representative.) ; . . LONDON, 18th December. Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, the present commander-in-ehi^f of Britain's air defence, who has been selected ,to succeed his brother John next year as Chief of the Air Staff, brought a note of reality into the disarmament controversy in.,a recent speech. His defence of the air arm, which is threatened with drastic "cuts," and even abolition,' took tho form of a reasoned argument that air forces are the greatest deterrent against war that could possibly be invented. He suggested that the proposal to abolish air forces originated in a fundamental misconception, that war, which ia only a process of organised killing, can be made humane. He ;held that statesmen and others who contemplate a war nowadays or in the future know well that by aggression they lay open their countries to terrible attacks from the enemy who will take no notice of the old frontiers but will- transfer the attack Immediately to tho home front. "With" this possibility," he said, "are they so likely to take upon themselves the responsibility of creating a war?" Much of the appalling mischief wrought by the last great war followed as-a direct consequence on its long duration. Millions of men were thrown into an almost static conflict, -millions of them were killed or wounded, while at home privation and hardship led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives as well as causing injury to the physique of the people of the defeated nations which will endure to the third and fourth generation. With this ,in mind Sir Geoffrey went on to point out that the chief danger to civilisation was the prolongation of war. "Anything that can shorten a war— and the air forces of. the world are the most powerful arm to do such a thing should not be abolished, but should be retained," he said. It was largely due to the presence of the B.A.F. in the outposts of the Empire that peace had Teigned: there since the war—a concluding statement which the Air Marshal could have backed up with incontrovertible facts. . • %