WILL A "NEW WEAPON" WIN THE WAR?

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23618, 30 March 1940, Page 7 (Supplement)

WILL A "NEW WEAPON" WIN THE WAR?

There are Rumours But Inventions Evolve Slowly

By WALDEMAR KAEMPFFERT

SOOX after the outbreak of war Hitler threatened to use "a weapon which is not yet known am,l with which we could not ourselves be attacked." A few weeks later the Germans began to lay elect romagnetically detonated mines, with dreadful results. Is this the new weapon] If so, the problem 0 [ coping with it, presents no grave difficult ies.

Probably the most deadly weapon ever introduced in warfare is the Yet Maxim, its inventor, hfiU'ked it all over Europe and succeeded in having it adopted only after his agents had applied high-pressuro salesmanship. I his is not to say that there are 110 military and naval secrets; merely that secrecy is of a different order from what the public imagines, it is secrecy concerned with such matters as quality of steel, arrangement of ammunition hoists on a battleship, methods of sweeping out gases from a discharged 16-inch gun. These are hardly trifles, yet they cannot bo regarded as revolutionary advances. Military research does not concern itself with utterly new means of killing. Standardised Ammunition An army or a navy is a highly standardised organisation. Artillery conies in standard sizes so that it may fire standardised ammunition. So with rifles, hand grenades, tractors, tanks, all the paraphernalia of war. The very tactics pursued are standardised. Men are drilled to act in a standardised way when an officer gives a command. Everywhere there is system—system in the manner in which a reconnaissance is carried out by airmen, system in the loading of a battery and the firing of shells, system in the preparation for an attack. Au army is a colossal machine which cannot be completely changed while it is in motion during a war. So it happens that such improvements in in weapons as the Prussian needle-gun, first used in the Austrian war, or the mitrailleuse, the French "secret" of 1870, were provided before and not after the outbreak of hostilities and not sprung upon an unsuspecting enemv.

.In peace as well as in war inventors did technicians suggest new modes of tilling, in the United States is Dr. Antonio Longorin stoutly maintaining that he is the inventor of an apparatus which send y s forth "death rays" and with which he says ho has killed birds on the wing at a distance of four miles. In Great Mritain a certain Matthews has been bobbing up periodically with similar claims. A few years ago we lieard of mysterious stoppages of automobiles in Germany, followed by tales of rays which could cripple engines in the air or bn the ground and thus reduce a mechanised army to impotence. Are these mere fantasies? Military history answers. There have always been surprises in war, but relatively few secret weapons suddenly introduced. There is no reason to suppose that the present war will be an exception. No war in history has ever been won solely by the unexpected performances of a revolutionary weapon. Explosives The Catling gun and the Monitor were introduced in the midst of America's Civil War, but the South managed to hold out for four long years. In the end the Union won the Civil War because of its man power, its vast Resources, its strategy and tactics. The innovations of the World War were poison gas, tanks, aircraft, bombs, grenades and such trench weapons as the Stokes mortar. Yet it cannot be said that any of these was jiew in principle or that any revealed its full possibilities in its earliest, form.- All bad to be developed in the light of battle experience. A war is not usually the best time in which to bring a new weapon to perfection. Military engineers prefer peace and the proving ground. They need time to iron out defects.

Whether in industry or war, standardisation is the most formidable obstacle that any inventor must overcome. If several million men have been drilled for years to use standardised weapons in a standardised way so that in battle they act almost like automatons, it is clear that a revolutionary weapon which must be handled in unfamiliar ways cannot be introduced in every regiment in a week or even in a year. Use of Gas One reason why the Germans at first used gas on so small a scale in the last war that the Allies were able in a fortnight to devise effective countermeasures was this very difficulty of retraining large numbers of men. And the Germans might have won the war at one fell swoop if they had accumulated enough chlorine, and if enough men had been familiar with its use. The story of the tanks is the same. They were used experimentally in small numbers in the beginning, with the result that the Germans duplicated them.

Suppose n new explosive is discovered, something a hundred times more 'powerful than TNT. Jt could not be fired in existing guns with the utmost efficiency. Not until the metallurgist had provided the necessary steel, not until guns made of that steel had been tested on the proving ground, would, any army adopt the new explosive. Such at least has been the history of special steels in the past. _ Though 'every army and navy in the world hugs secrets to itself, the more startling death-dealing inventions have always been discussed and exhibited long before they were adopted. It now turns out, for instance, that the electromagneticallv detonated mine is old in principle and that it was actually the subject of experiment during the last war.

Equally formidable is the conservatism, the natural inertia of officers trained in accordance with a military tradition. Every military innovation had to struggle against opposition. Firearms, shells, torpedoes, high explosives were all disapproved by professional soldiers in the beginning. The* truth is that the revolutionary inventions which have progressively made war more* horrible were conceived not by fire-eating, swordrattling, spur-clicking soldiers, but by mild-mannered civilians who never smelled gunpowder in action. Whether or not Roger Bacon; a harmless friar, discovered gunpowder it is certain that explosives were not the creation of soldiers. Ericsson was an engineer in private practice and not a naval officer, and his Monitor was looked upon with such dislike that he had to build it with his own money. Maxim, whose machine-gun spurts bullets almost like water, was a Maine mechanic who knew practically nothing of tactics, and Gatling, his predecessor

The Machine-gun After /the Wright brothers had developed the first successful man-carry-ing flving-machine in history, an invention fif manifest military power both for reconnaissance and bombdropping, it might have been supposed that the armies of the world would adopt it ?t once. The Wrights offered their machine to the United States, Great Britain and France, only to be rebuffed. Finally the French displayed the expected interest, and then only after the Wrights had flown in public and there was no longer any secret about what they had actually discovered.' which was the wa\ to keep n flying machine on an even keel in turbulent air.

ill large-scale slaughter, was an inventive physician. The tanks that proved so deadly in the World War have been variously attributed to .Major-General K. D. Swinton, Hear-Admiral Sir Murray Sueter, William Trittou ami Major Wilson, but it was Winston Churchill who forced the army to experiment with tlieni. The use of gas in the World War was suggested by Fritz llaber, a civilian chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his method of synthesising ammonia, and not by some devilishly cunning general. Not a bloodthirsty naval officer dreamed of blowing up ships with submarines, but a score of gentle civilians, the most conspicuous of whom were Uushnell, Fulton, Holland and Lake.

many million times greater tliau that required b.v tlie most powerful wireless station in existence —he is appalled. Easier than this is the problem of detecting a ship at sea in the dark. A thermocouple would do it—a device now used by astrophysicists to measure the heat radiated by Mars when it is forty million miles away. But is the ship one of the enemy's or not? The thermocouple has not yet been invented that can tell. Equally possible in theory, but very difficult to realise, in practice is a direction-finding delector which would locate moving objects at night and automatically train and fire guns upon them . Radio Devices All these radio and heat detecting devices have the inherent weakness of being too sensitive. Tliev respond to the radiations of friend and enemy. When we hear of crewless aeroplanes equipped with television sets which are to "see" without loss of life exactly how the enemy has placed his batteries, we :ire apt to forget that the screen at general headquarters will show nothing but a blizzard of white streaks if the enemy should jam reception by waves of his own.

Scarcely any progress has been recorded sinf-e the World War in making gases more dreadful, but great progress in devising gas masks. With high explosives it is much the same. Though it is possible that a compound somewhat more powerful than TXT may he discovered, the chemical odds are against, it. So advanced is chemical theory that it can predict what can and what cannot be developed. There is nothing in sight that differs markedly from the explosives now being made.

Novelist's Dreams All this is not to say that the ingenuity of destruction has at last been balked. The dreams of to-day's novelists may well be the realities of tomorrow. meaning tin 1 year 20(10. ihus the full possibilities of radio have not vet been exploited. W irelessl.v controlled tanks and airplanes are probably the next weapons to be expected though not in this war. Electric waves which will cripple the engines of tractors, tanks and aeroplanes are at least theoretical possibilities. It would be the function of the transmitting apparatus to focus a beam along a highway or the lane of an aeroplane so as to upset the proper timing of spark impulses to the various cylinders or to burn out coils. Hut when the engineer thinks of the enormous amount of energy that must be generated and directed to he eflective at a range of miles—an amount

The belief in secret ways of killing on a new and more terrific scale is really a romantic beliel in the black magic of science, a beliel also in the genius who will respond to his country s call and produce an invention or make a discovery which will turn the tide of war. Science has nothing in common with magic, and geniuses are scarce. And even geniuses are only Ihe instruments of the natural evolution ol technology. The real task of the genius, so Far as the war is concerned, is to perfect existing techniques. Kven a two or three per cent improvement in rapiditv of fire against aeroplanes i.a triumph. No scientist lies awake "at night trying to devise unheard-of ways of killing. Whether he is concerned with disposing of potato bugs or infantry on the battlefield, he must of necessity heirjn with procedures and weapons a> he finds them. For which reason revolutions are more likely to occur in government than in warfare.

Ciiiklciisp.l from The New Tinics