WHEN EVERY HOUSETOP WILL BECOME A BATTLE FRONT.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 752, 4 May 1933, Page 10

WHEN EVERY HOUSETOP WILL BECOME A BATTLE FRONT.

To-day’s Special Article.

In Those Days of Aerial Death, Gas Will Destroy Fertility of the Soil.

* NEW YORK, April 1. Colonel Edward Vernon Rickenbacker says another great war would be a matter of air forces and that the shadows cast by the swooping planes would be those of the wings of ghastly and unmerciful death. Colonel Rickenbacker commanded the 94th Aero Pursuit Squadron in the World War and was the leading ace of all United States flyers. He is entitled to wear the D.S.C., the Croix de Guerre with four palms, and the Legion of Honour ribbon. Since the war he has been associated with the design of aeroplanes and the forming and operation of aeroplane companies.

** NEXT WAR,” says Colonel Rickenbacker, “ will be a plane war, and I don’t want to see it. Every housetop will be a battle front. There will be no such thing as non-combatants; no neutral ground; no no-man’s land. No agreement was kept in the last war. There will be no rules in the next. “ Death hurled from the air will take no account of whom it strikes. Civilians will be no safer than soldiers; women and children will be no safer than men. Animals and the very products of the earth will die, because the priciple of war is to strike at the base of supplies. The animals become a combatant force, in that they are food for human kind. The produce of the earth becomes a combatant force, because the animals live on it. Even now,” says Colonel Rickenbacker, “ there is a gas developed which will destroy the produce and fertility of the soil. “ But gas will not be the only agency used. There will be bombs, and the chances are that the planes will sow deadly bacteria in the crowded centres. Planes will be able to fly so high, far and fast that there will be small chance of adequate protection against surprise attack. There will be no safety on the mountain top. The people of the cities will desert their tall buildings and burrow like moles for safety. The shaft of an abandoned mine will become a palatial place of refuge. The next war will be one of extermination.” Still, Colonel Rickenbacker contends, a defence always has been evolved for every form of attack, and he believes it will be so in the case of death from the air. “ The answer to planes,” he says, “ will not be planes, but,wireless transmission of power. Invisible electrical waves will fill the air, with power to destroy ignition systems, set planes on fire, or melt the metal of which they are constructed. Already experiments along these lines have shown the power to stop magnetos from functioning,” Questioned as to the stage of development and future of peacetime aviation, Colonel Rickenbacker replied: “ Aviation is now in the stage where you don’t know what it will do when it grows up. It is still an infant industry. Even the structure of the plane is undeveloped. The transport planes of the future will have no wings, only fins. They practically will be sealed oxygen chambers of the rocket type, projectiles capable of travelling 1000 miles an hour through the stratosphere, that ocean of air, the limits of which no man knows.

“ Those planes,” explained Colonel Rickenbacker. “ probably will be shot or catapulted off the ground from rails, and they will land in a long huge funnel, where their speed gradually can be checked, until they come to a stop. Private planes will be of the paddle wheel type, with ability to rise vertically and land in small spaces.” The development of propulsion, said the former ace, will proceed from the four cycle to the two cycle engine, then to the multiple cylinder, the turbine, and lastly to the rocket type. The last development, as he visions it, will be the wireless transmission of power from stations on the ground. This will do away with the weight of engines and fuel. Planes will fly in the stratosphere and be able to stay in the air indefinitely. Deprecates Scoffers. “ When I say I believe this will come in the next twenty-five years,” said Colonel Rickenbacker, “ people think I’m crazy. Well, when the Wrights first made their flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, they would have thought any person crazy who prophesied that thirteen years later men would fly the ocean. Yet, Alcock and Brown made their flight in 1916. The first ten years of aviation,” said the famous airman, “ were creative. The second ten were spent in trying to apply the practical to the creative. The last ten have been commercial, and when anything reaches the commercial stage, progress is swifter. The reason why development in aviation has been slow, Colonel Rickenbacker points out, is that inventors are dealing with a new dimension. Aviation also has had to overcome human doubt. “ But,” he asserts, “ there has been ten times as much development in aviation in the past ten years as in the first sixteen, and there will be ten times as much development in the next ten years as in all the years before. “ Metallurgy has played the greatest single part in the increased efficiency of the aeroplane. Yet the possibilities have scarcely been touched. Aluminium is light, but magnesium is only half its weight. And beryllium is only half the weight of magnesium. “ The development of aviation in the next five years will resemble early railroad development. The automobile was not subsidised, but the aeroplane lines obtain mail contracts. They will be helped in a commercial way because they are the only peace time development which is 100 per cent efficient in time of war.” —N.A.N.A.