THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15, 1934 THE AIR MENACE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21879, 15 August 1934, Page 10

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15, 1934 THE AIR MENACE

Will the world soon be compelled to discuss the related problems of disarmament and peace chiefly in terms of aircraft? The growing certainty that it must is strengthened to-day by news from the United States. A new programme of naval aviation is being officially drafted. No half-measures are intended. Frankly a big increase in fighting aircraft and pilots is planned. The chairman of the Naval Committee of the House of Representatives announces that 2100 naval 'planes will be constructed in the course of five years, if Congress accepts the recommendations of the committee and the Navy Department. Congress, it would seem, is not likely to demur, for already it has authorised the increase and will be asked merely to make the necessary financial appropriations. This American development is bound to call attention everywhere to the risk of an increasing international competition in air forces. The risk is acknowledged in the recent votes of many Powers. Justifying them by precautionary needs of defence, they have openly declared a fear of attack. Thus the air menace, while viewed—doubtless in all sincerity—as arising beyond their own frontiers, is a very real factor. For the British programme lately approved there was this argument, used before the details of the programme were made public. Sir Philip Sassoon said "We are going on with what is necessary," and Lord Londonderry's words were still more emphatic, "We cannot remain impassive while all other nations are increasing the strength of their forces, an increase nowhere more menacing than in the air." Such statements by men closely acquainted with the technical aspects of the matter were in line with Mr. Baldwin's well-remembered speech last March in the House of Commons.- "The sands are fast running out," he said. "If we are faced with the duty of securing that state of parity in the air which is essential to our safety by building up, simply because others will not come down to a more reasonable level, that is a task from which we shall not shrink." In the American programme is no particular menace to British security, but it is clearly symptomatic of the tendency of the times.

This programme, like that of Britain, follows a period of hesitant action. In 1926 a 1000-' plane programme was initiated. These fighting aircraft, in accordance with the American practice, were meant for use® in conjunction with the Navy. A shortage of aircraft carriers is understood to have long existed, but the 1926 programme, by fixing the maximum at 1000 machines, has recently become the subject of Bharp criticism as inadequate. RearAdmiral King, chief of the bureau of aeronautics in the Navy Department, has complained of the failure to procure additional aircraft in numbers corresponding to the capacity and requirements of additional surface vessels. "TJiis is a most serious condition," he has •written, "as it results in forcing the Navy to reduce the present activities authorised under the 1000-' plane programme by the airplanes needed for this new construction; in order to remedy this condition and so provide the Navy with the number of aircraft so essential for the national defence, it will be necessary to provide for an increase in the 1000- ' plane programme." Criticism so authoritative bore fruit in the larger programme, of which the detailed draft is now in hand. At the same time arrangements are being made, at the instance of the Secretary of War, for a ring of anti-aircraft guns round the whole continental area of the United States, while similar attention is being paid to the Panama Canal, Hawaii and the Philippines. This development, in conjunction with the aircraft programme, is not to be interpreted as a sign of national panic but as the outcome of a realisation that ere long a need may arise to meet a menace in the air. It is related to a general condition of things to which the whole world is drifting. When authorities in the United States feel constrained to talk of the air vulnerability of their coun-1 try, to induce Congress to vote £7,000.000 in the first year of definite anti-aircraft defences, and to plan more than a doubling of the naval-aircraft expenditure authorised eight years ago, it is high time to take notice of the drift. Casual thought would not deem the United States under any great necessity to guard against an air invasion. No near neighbour is to be feared as an invader of this sort, and geography has placed potential enemies at a considerable distance. Concern about vulnerability is therefore all the more remarkable in its significance of the new peril to world peace. The American outlook, it must be owned, takes its cue from the Far East and from Europe. An increase in the range of bombing aircraft is a possibility not to be lightly set aside, and other technical advances are to be included in the possibilities of

the near future. Thus emerges an issue calling for resolute facing before the race in air armaments has got beyond its present stage. That, as Mr. Baldwin insisted, is already disquieting. How to make air disarmament feasible is an urgent question. Ideas about this are indefinite. To abolish flying is absurdly impracticable. To prohibit bombardment of the civil population is a way offering no better success than did the convention about gas attacks: the prohibition would be flagrantly defied by belligerents. "International control" is difficult to achieve; no convincing plan for it has yet been evolved. But nothing is more certain than the wrecking of all projects of disarmament if the air menace is not grappled. Conventions covering only military and naval warfare are futile so long as this new peril is not overcome. To deal with it, not by increasing means of defence—that at best has merely transitory merit —but by reducing the facilities of attack, is fast becoming an imperative necessity.