SCIENCE AND WARFARE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 21, 25 January 1940, Page 12

SCIENCE AND WARFARE

CANADIAN LEADER

A BRILLIANT CAREER

(From "The Post's" Representative.)

VANCOUVER; January 3,

Appointed to command the Canadian Expeditionary Force before his fifty-; second .birthday, Major-General A. G. McNaughton is a distinguished engineer, as well as military strategist. In some . respects, ' his career resembles that of the late Sir John Monash, who commanded the Australian Imperial Force in the later stages of the Great War.

Born on the Prairie, McNaughton graduated as Master of Science at McQill University, and served on the McGill. faculty for two years before entering private practice. Had he not been appointed, in 1925, as president of the National Research Council, it is almost certain he would have become principal of his Alma Mater, an office which it has been found difficult to fill since the death of General Sir Arthur Currie, who commanded the Canadians in the Great War.

. He was one of the first Canadians to enter on a course at "McGill in 1909 designed to train officers for the British Army. He was such a brilliant student that the War Office -offered him a cavalry commission. He preferred, however, to remain with the Canadian Militia, and, at the outbreak of the war he organised an artillery' battery In his thirty-first year he commanded Canada's heavy artillery at the close of the war. He was wounded at* Soissons in 1918. At 42 he was appointed Chief of the General Staff.

In 1932, in co-operation with Colonel Steele, McNaughton devised a cathode ray direction-finder that was subsequently in general use in the Royal Air Force. He directed personally the organisation of a high-voltage labora-, tory, and the expansion of aeronautics research. He was a member of the. Imperial Economic Conference committee on transatlantic aviation in 1932, and was chairman of the inter-depart-mental committee that laid the groundwork for the establishment of the trans-Canada airway.

Ir •an address at , the Canadian Navional Exhibition in 1935, General McNaughton said: "The army of the future will be smaller, faster-moving, harder-hitting, and with a very long range of action. It will require the mobilisation of the whole _ industrial resources of the nation for its support. Aircraft has become of the .first importance, not only in an auxiliary role a« the eyes of a commander for reconnaissance, but also as a primary means of attack, both on the forces in the field and on the civil population, as well as in areas far distant from the scene of operations. And there is a school of thought abroad, which sees, in the consequent destruction of cities, and in »the slaying of women and children, a perfectly legitimate method of-attacking the will" to resist of an enemy people."