AIR STRATEGY

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 March 1942, Page 5

AIR STRATEGY

TOO MANY BIG BOMBERS. SYDNEY, February 10. A Press' campaign urging a recasting of the Air Council’s policy, which it has maintained since the war began, of concentrating on building up a monster bombing force with which to beat Germany to her knees, is gaining momentum, reports the “Sydney Morning Herald’s” London correspondent. There is no inclination to underestimate the value of the bombing of the Ruhr heavy industries and similar military objectives, but the question is asked whether Britain is revolutionary enough in the uses to which the most important air weapon is capable of adaptation. The “Daily Express” publishes a forthright, critical article, the point of which is: “The Air Marshal’s longterm strategy was planned before Hitler broke France, "before Russia s entry into the war, and before Japan s adventure, and has not been much altered to fit these new facts. It is the war’s greatest exploded myth, and is a military miscalculation equal to Passchendaele.” LUFTWAFFE’S DEFEAT.

The article states that the threat to use bombers won many victories, notably Munich, but bombers alone have not won a single battle. The German blastings of Rotterdam and Belgrade were not victories, but massacres. When the Luftwaffe for the first time was challenged during the Battle of Britain it was defeated. It inflicted widespread distress and damage, but it did not achieve its military objective. Yet what the Luftwaffe failed to do Britain is planning to do to Germany. , xl , , The article points out that because of the weather a large proportion of Britain’s recent aircraft productionbig bombers has been comparatively idle at a time when extra fighters were urgently needed for Malaya, when dive-bombers might have enabled the Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East, General Sr Claude Auchinleck, to rout Field-Marshal Rommel’s retreating army, when more dive-bombers might have enabled the Russians to recapture the Crimea, and when the Prince of Wales and Repulse were lost because they lacked proper air support. FACT OF GEOGRAPHY. The article adds: “The Air Marshals still cry ‘Give us bombers and we will finish the job.’ When they regaled the public in this way during Britain’s agony under aerial attack, it was pardonable propaganda, but it is ridiculous strategy now.” Working out the proposition in terms of arithmetic and geogiaphy, the article snows that enemy territory covers 321,500 square miles, with the centre about Prague, 600 miles from Britain; whereas Britain covers 88 700 square miles, with the centre about Derby, 200 miles from the French coast. Britain would, therefore, need an air force four-fold as laro'e as the Luftwaffe to inflict industrial damage equal to that which the Luftwaffe has inflicted on Britain, and which events have shown have not decided the war. The periodical “Aeroplane comments: “We need a land equivalent of the aerial torpedo used by naval aircraft in order to knock out land battleships. We have .to revise our ideas and mount aeroplanes with the largest anti-tank weapons. The Russians appear to have found the secret of success against tanks —a rocket-fired bomb. We have to learn from them.”