“THE COMING WAR”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21366, 20 June 1931, Page 11

“THE COMING WAR”

VON LUDENDORFF’S PROPHECY LONDON, June 11. Field-marshal von Ludendorff’s recent book, “ The Coming War,” in which he predicts an outbreak of hostilities in May, 1932, unheralded by any formal declaration of war, is criticised by General Sir Inn Hamilton.

Von Ludcndorff’s prophecy regarding the methods to be used in the next world war, General Hamilton thinks, completely misses the point by treating tanks and aeroplanes as mere auxiliaries to huge masses of half-baked, heavily-armed infantry, who will sink underground, ami resume the static warfare of 1914-18. “ How,” he asks, “ can such masses be maintained in action by a side which loses the air mastery? All the same. I am glad to find that the good old English, Scottish and Irish foot-sloggers (the last ordered by the Pope to join up) will go down, as heroes should, with their backs to the wall.” General Hamilton recalls interviewing von Ludendorff, as a fellow-soldier, at his private house in Munich, where, at the foot of the garden, was “ Iser rolling rapidly.”

Von Ludendorff, he says, demonstrated that Bulgaria's defection was an irremediable disaster to the German cause. General Rawlinson, with the Western Army, being then- at the end of his tether, and far from treading on the heels of the Germans.