WAR OF TO-MORROW

Evening Star, Issue 21621, 17 January 1934, Page 9

WAR OF TO-MORROW

BATTLE OF MACHINES AIR ATTACKS AND GAS BUT MAN STILL RULES A war in the future between two strong forces would be startlingly different from the World War’s stalemate of trench fighting, writes Hanson Baldwin, in . an American paper. Shells shrieked fheir shrill obbligato then, andwould ■■ to-morrow ; aeroplanes zoomed and looped above the slogging ground troops then, and would to-morrow; tanks crawled across craters and raked the trenches then,' and would to-mor-row ; men fought and bled and died then, and they would again. But in the war of to-morrow the clash of grinding gears, the smooth whirr of powerful engines, the clicking rackets of machines that never make mistakes; would be the mechanistic leit-motif of the terrible threnody of battle. Such a conflict, in which would be employed all weapons now built or building, or those still evolving from chrysalis of blueprint or half-formed idea of the mind, would be a war in the Wellsian manner. Let us picture its battles in air, on land, and sea. The conflict starts in the air, with a gas attack upon an enemy city, perhaps, or a clash between two opposing armadas. In V’s oreqhelon the aeroplanes come: roaring in—bombers faster than the pursuit ships of yesterday, each carrying a 4,0001 b bomb with sufficient .destructive power to blast a hole large enough for the foundations of a six-story building; the lighter bombers; the pursuit and _ attack groups, which can climb almost into the stratosphere and speed _ at 250 to 325 miles an hour. There is little noise—only the hum of propellers and the skirl of the wind against the struts—for mufflers have silenced the motors, and delicate of mechanical parts have reduced friction. The aeroplanes fly high. A formation of bombers soars at 26,000 ft, the pilots, in furred and electrically heated flying suits, masked and goggled against the cold, breathing, like men from Mars, through tubes from tanks of oxygen. But the aeroplane has more than opposing aeroplanes to fear. The scorned lt archies” of the _ World War have given way to anti-aircraft guns from eigth to ten times as effective. That is one reason why the aeroplanes fly high; anti-aircraft shells are dangerous to 25,000 ft. The anti-aircraft guns far beneath are camouflaged—not in the old way with blotches of vari-coloured paint, but growing grass and shrubs, or a system of reflecting mirrors. The huge listening “ears” are still in use, but they are auxiliary to the infra-red ray detectors, which pick up rays emanating from the exhausts of the aeroplanes and thus determine their direction. DETECTOR EYES. The gunners cannot see their targets, but that is immaterial; the detectors can “ see ’’ or “ hear ” them, and they transmit their findings to a mechanical marvel, the anti-aircraft battery's brain—the director. During the day a photographic aeroplane using an infra-red ray camera has taken vast panoramic pictures of the enemy’s territory, pictures which show railway lines, ammunition dumps, and other strategic points 200 to 300 miles behind the frontier. At night, while the aeroplanes sweep on to bomb one of these objectives, the ground troops move up over a vast area and at high speed. It is a confusing but purposive, battle—a warfare of the machine age. At the fighting front, where the machines clear the way for men, flares and star shells and the weaving web of searchlights throw into silhouette the panorama of war. A shell smacks into the ground; a dull cloud of vapour rises from the torn earth. Gas! The men reach for their masks; the machines go on. Phosgene —“ the ' quick killer ” ; mustard, likewise, chlorine—“ gases ” that make you sneeze, laugh, cry, blister, or die the machines go on. Out of , the dark a forty-foot tongue of flame leaps towards the enemy; a man with a cylinder on his back and

a hose nozzle in his hand sprays hqnid fire before him as he strides behind the tanks. It is the dreaded namenwerer,” used in the World War for its moral effect, and now used for the same grim purpose. . The battle goes om—machine against machine, tank against tank tanks, each of which can do the work or eighty World War “ landships.” iho anti-tank troops mine and sap the ground, drag bombs beneath the treads of steel monsters, pierce the tanks heavy armourplate with a projectile which goes through the hard steel in l-200th of a second. Above it all roars the diapason of the guns—guns varying in .bore from a third of an inch to eighteen inches, guns varying in weight from 12 ounces to 170 tons. „ HAND TO . HAND. .

Men die beneath the rolling juggernaut of this mechanised warfare, but man remains to face at last, across the scarred pits of the battlefield, nian armed with a “ spear on the head of a gun.” Face to face, hand to hand, the war ends in the mud, as all wars have, and all wars must. The war at sea does not have the crackling symphony of war on land; .there is less of hell and more of grace and grandeur. But the result is the same. Men-of-war are the most concentrated fighting machines in the world; their steel frames are crammed with instruments whose ultimate purpose is to fling shells at other fighting machines miles away across the sea. As bn the land, the buttle at sea begins with combat in the clouds. On the flight decks of the carriers, aeroplanes pop up out of the ■ cavernous depths of hangar, decks, borne upwards oh elevators like black beetles on chips of wood. Trundled aft, they pant and scream a song of power; their wheels unchecked, they skim along the decks and leap into their element—the air. Aeroplane after aeroplane whizzes from the carriers and circles and soars into formation. Fom.the catapults of battleships and cruisers, and from the flight deck of cruisers— hybrids of the seaother aeroplanes shoot skyward until the clouds are .thick with droning squadrons. . Through a rift in a cloud bank the silver skin of a giant dirigible catches the-sun. Out on her thick body tiny fighting aeroplanes are lowered, hang suspended a moment between sea and sky, and are away to join the melee. Enemy light bombers glimpse the leviathan; stream towards her live a V of wild ducks. One-pounders and machine guns bark from fins and control cabin, from the flanks and back of the airship; but the fight is brief. Bombs fracturu her duralumin girders; her back broken, the dirigible sinks into the sea, the silver skin wrinkled and ripped. The victorious flying fleet wings on towards the surface ships of the enemy, zooms down towards the decks of tlie light craft, turns machine guns on the exposed personnel, drops light bombs on the superstructures. Great geysers of water shoot skyward near the capital ships as 2,000-pound bombs drop close alongside. And teroplanes, flying low and fast, release gas from their exhausts or launch torpedoes towards the battleships. On the surface, destroyers steam at high speed out of the sun path, wheel in a smother of white and fire torpedoes at the enemy battle line—torpedoes capable of forty-five knots or better, • three to four times the speed of the World_ War’s ‘‘ tin fish.” Cruisers spraying the enemy light craft with Sin projectiles loose a cloud of toxic smoke from their high funnels —a lethal smoke Cloud.

As the battleships pass through the smoke and gas, exposed gun crews don gas masks, while the men behind armour breathe air purified by filtering devices fitted in ventilators and voice tubes. In the turrets brilliant lights glare from burnished metal. Shell 1 hoists groan as great projectiles are hoisted up from the magazines below. Automatically, the shells are trundled into trays; an electric rammer whips out and drives home into the yawning gun breech a ton of steel-encased explosive. Silk powder bags are thrown in behind the shell; the breech closes; an electric contact is made; up in the armoured fighting tops the turret “ready light” flashes on. In the hulls of these flighting monsters, pulsing with the life of the machine, black oil jets into cones of white flame, licks against boiler tubes, turns fresh water distilled from the ocean into sizzling steam—steam at a pressure uncontrollable in the dim yesterdays. Pounding through groat asbestos-covered pipes, hurrying to do

man’s bidding, the stream is led to the turbines, streams against the steel bucket blades, turns turbines, propeller shafts, and screws at speeds not long since undreamed of. The propellers revolve through the water in a nutter ot bubbling white; the machines swim on through the battle. Beneath the sea, where life began, life ends in sudden, swift skirmishes. The submarines, no longer clumsy, slow leviathans, skittle about beneath the waters like king crabs. Their reach is longer than ever before; their torpedoes can run further and faster. The ships can the sea for months on end; can travel faster than many liners, can submerge in seconds. MAN STILL RULES. The war at sea is predominantly a conflict of machine versus machine; cutlasses and pikes are trophies of a vanished past. But man, though slave of turret, careful guardian of instruments more precise than human brains, is still the directing genius of naval warfare. The war of to-morrow would start m the air and end in the mud, and on of under the sea; but civilians far behind the front lines,, in cities and on farms, would suffer. The machines that man has made would tear the modern Babylons that man has built. Aeroplanes and gas, shells and explosives, w-ould shatter the possessions and the lives of mankind. War, because of the great mobility and the high speed of its mechanised forces, would be flung across a master map and would inevitably engulf the civil as well as the military- , . ' , More than ever before, the war would drain the resources of mankind. Not only gold and iron, not only nitrates and acids, not only cotton and hides- and wool and silk would be drafted to meet the imperious demands of the machine, but the rarer products of the earth—diamonds and tungsten, and hemp, antimony, and opium—would be drawn into the great crucible. Scarcely any nation, any section of the earth’s surface, save only the Poles and unexplored fastnesses of the tropics, could hope to escape the stupendous drain of natural products, of energy of machines and -their tenders, men, that such a war would create. It would be almost geographically übiquitous, inescapable, supreme. The new weapons of offence—hew and more deadly gases, rays, now unknown or unharnessed, radio-controlled weapons, perhaps bacteria with all their potent viruses—would be met by defences ever stronger, ever new—gas masks, ray-proof protection, disinfectants, antidotes. But back of gun, behind machine, man would face man.