NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 21, 26 January 1943, Page 4

NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

PACIFIC STRATEGY

AIR POWER THE KEY

General MacArtbur's tribute to air power "with its swift, massive strokes" as the key to victory in the Pacific is important news and confirms what was said in this column yesterday on the.vital fac- ( tor of air superiority in the Allied • victories in Russia and North Africa. Without this virtual mas- ! tery of the ah* neither the Eed Army nor the Eighth Array could have achieved what it did. No single arm—land, sea, or air-r-can do the whole job alone, but com- '■ bined they put viotory definitely on the map. General Mac Arthur has stated clearly his view of the role of air power in the singular operations in the Pacific archipelagos—singular because, there is hardly any parallel to them in military history- Without the mani--1 fold applications of air power described by General Mac Arthur the jungle fighting in Papua and the Solomons would degenerate into the lowest form of .warfare, a wretched business of attrition with all the horrors of war without quarter, death in the tree tops, and the miseries of malaria and other plagues of the Tropics. This would apply not only to the tropical islands, but to tropical mainlands also, as in the jungles of Western Burma where the same deadly kind of struggle is now going on. Weight of air power turns the balance, as in Guadalcanal, creates a virtual blockade of the inferior in the air and gives the superior a chance of breaking out into the open. Out of the peculiar conditions and problems of the war in the Western Pacific is developing a new air technique, on which Hanson Baldwin in the "New York Times" has some very interesting comment. j New Tactics and Technique. | On his reutrn from a Pacific lour at the end of October Mr. Baldwin wrote a series of articles on the situation as he found it, and in the sixth of these he discusses tactics in the air. Major changes, he begins, in the tactics and technique of the employment of air power are occurring in the Pacific as the result of our combat experience of the first ten months of war. He continues: The navy, long limited to the use of flying-boats, Seaplanes, or wheeled planes that fly from carrier decks, is now starting to employ long-range, four-engined land bombers like the army's B-24 and B-17. And the army, which in peacetime believed that high-altitude horizontal bombing was the best method of attack against ships, has revised its concepts and is studying the technique of "skip-bombing,"' first introduced by the Germans in their bombing attacks upon British ships at Crete. The carrier plane has borne the brunt of the fighting in the Pacific war; dive-bombers, torpedo planes, and fighters, based on carriers or on land fields, have done the major amount of the damage to enemy ships, and were instrumental in paving the way for our first offensive step in the Solomons and in helping us to maintain until the present our foothold there. If our carriers had not done a splendid Job at Midway, that .island would be flying the Japanese flag today, for the Japanese invasion fleet was turned back primarily by the efforts of the squadrons from our carriers, not by land-based, high-level bombers. Dive-bombers and torpedo planes, m that order, were and are the greatest menace to a ship, and the percentage of hits obtained by them has been far, far higher than the percentage obtained by high-level horizontal bombing. Nevertheless, it is foolish to say—as a naval officer implied in a recent intervew i—that carriers and carrier-based j planes alone are adequate to solve the problems of the Pacific. The entire problem of establishing sea and air supremacy obviously becomes simpler if our carriers can have the support of long-range, land-based bombers. That is why we attacked m the southern Solomons—because it was possible to obtain this support from nearby bases and from New Guinea and Australia. Precision Bombing-. The Army's peace-time technique of precision bombing of ships.from 17,001 to 20,000 feet or higher has not yielded —for several reasons—results commensurable with the effort expended or the weight of bombs dropped. In the first place, a ship captain, watching a plane make its run knows when tha' plane reaches the bomb-release point and, either by instrument or by eye, can determine the exact moment when the bombs are dropped. The ship can then be manoeuvred to avoid the bombs, and because the time of flight from 20,000 feet is appreciable, an experienced skipper can usually handle his ship so that she escapes damage. If pattern bombing of an area—with the ship as its centre—is tried by a formation of planes, the mathematical chances of obtaining a hit are increased/ But in practice, when eleven to fourteen B-17 bombers are about the maximum number ever assembled m the Pacific for any single attack upon ships at sea, it has been found that so many bombers are required to lay down a really effective concentration against even a single ship (and many times more against a large formation), high-level horizontal bombing is unproductive and, in a military sense, inefficient. It might not be if the old well-trained Army crews of peacetime, highly skilled.in precision bombing were available; but with relatively green lads manning our Fortresses and Consolidated Liberators, we had to cast about for new methods. On the authority, then, of Colonel L. G. Saunders, who commands the Fiyin«* Fortresses in the Solomons from New Hebrides bases, high-altitude horizontal bombing "is not effective against manoeuvrable targets." Furthermore, the flying-boat, the Consolidated Catalina and even the new Martin patrol planes, are, says Mr. Baldwin, shining targets for Zeros, and their job of longrange scouting and patrolling can be done more efficiently, the navy has decided, by long-range, four-engmed land bombers of the B-17 and B-24 types. The first of the navy-manned B-24s are now in service in the Pacific, and because they are. much faster^ far better armed, have a larger bomb capacity, and have a range approx* mately equal to the flying-boats the B-24's probably will gradually replace the flying-boats. The Greatest Change. But the greatest change has come in the substitution of low-level horizontal bombing for high-altitude horizontal bombing. "Skip-bombing, 1, or bombing virtually at masthead height, was used by the Germans at Crete. It has two advantages: first, it is almost impossible to miss if the pilot presses the attack home; second, the bomb may strike the side, or near the underwater portion, of the ship and do even more damage than if it struck the deck. The bomb is dropped from so low an altitude that it never straightens out and falls vertically, but strikes the target or the water near the target" more or less as a projectile fired from a gun would strike it. The bomb has a delayed-action fuse, so that the plane will not be "hoist by. ? its own petard," The .disadvantage of the torpedo plane*' is that it is extremely vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire. The losses on both sides in the naval battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, and the Solomons have been intolerably heavy, Mr. Baldwin comes to the conclusion that what with enemy fighters and the concentrated barrage of "AA" fire from guns of all calibres, the odds against the torpedo plane are too great. This leaves the dive-bomber the most effective weapon against the surface' ship, and even the dive-bomber suffers at times "murderous losses." Operational losses in the Pacific have also been heavy with improvised airfields. Role of Big Bombers. Since October, with the growth of ground facilities the long-ranged landbased bomber has come more into its own as the news of far flights to distant enemy bases indicates. Today it is of tremendous utility in scouting and reconnaissance, and particularly when it is used against bases or a large number of ships in harbour it can lay down an effective pattern of bombs from high altitude with small