WHAT GERMANY THINKS OF AIR RAIDS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LX, Issue 17123, 26 October 1917, Page 6

WHAT GERMANY THINKS OF AIR RAIDS.

THE HUN'S HOPE OF TERROR-

ISING BRITAIN

(By Professor Sefton Delmer, an Australian, late of Berlin University, who recently returned from xne German capital to London, and whose articles in "The Times" and "Daily Mail" caused a sensation.)

Anyone who - remembers Berlin just before the war will recollect that the air above the town, especially on the outskirts, used to be full of all sorts of machines. They were like mosquitoes over a siimmer pool. Big Zeppelins would come buzzing along, like immense insects., sometimes at a great height, sometimes so low that you could almost see the faces of the men in the gondola. Smaller, wasp-like, yellow-ochre Parsevals, and occasionally a Schutte-Lanz, a type now seldom seen, would appear ovei1 the city, and high in. the blue, no bigger than dragon-liies, aeroplanes flittei about.

What was the meaning of all this aircraft activity? It was looked upon by peoplo in Germany, as it was by th«j. part of the English public who attached any importance to doings in Berlin, as a form of sport, as an interesting struggle between the mind of man and the forces of nature. But most peopld in England forgot that sport for the German is merely a branch of military preparation.

A few, it is true, knew this, and to their timely efforts to induce the Government to _ interest itself, if ever so little, in aviation we owe an immense debt.

At the Staff College in Berlin, where about five hundred officers were being trained, it was noticeable for quite six months before the war that there was an immense «nd s"dden development of the scientific military study of aviation. Several of the lecturers, of whom I was one, whispered their forebodings, and I mentioned the matter to some of our press people.

The military authorities, we could see, were leaving 'nothing' undone to make Hying •fiasmonable among the more ambitious cihcers, and day after day ia.rge numbesr of them were ex- • empted from work in other important courses to enable them to become proficient in aviation. When the war broke out the Germans were ready, end they had got ready, so far as the. i employment of aeroplanes is concerned, in a remarkably short time. From the very fisrt the German mil- ! itary authorities conceived of the air machine not only in its legitimate spheres of warfare, but also as an instrument for terrorising the civil popu- i lation of the enemy, but they did not say so. They pretended that the French had begun by bombing Nurnberg, and they did this in order to prepare the German people for their own indiscriminate and criminal use of bombs. \ No more artificial product is thinkable than the "furor Teutonicus." The Government ha. s only to accuse the enemy of some dastardly action that t intends to do itself, and it breaks down any rudimentary moral resistance m its own people to such actions. Without a qualm the German public took to the idea of bombing defenceless cities. It soon became cne of their most de Itghtful pastimes to picture London 'nimST> at ,the mer°y of th-ei r Zeppelins, -he Bank of England was to vanish in •smoke, and the Houses of Parliament with the the nefarious "Sir Grey," were to be levelled to the ground At \\ ertheim's, the Berlin Whiteley's, as a special Christmas treat for the child i ren, a very elaborate piece of mechanism was shown, representing a part of London with airships hanging over it. John Bull was seen through a window' comfortably reading his newspaper On the alarm of "Zeppelins!" he rushed to the skylight, pushed his head and shoulders through, and scanned the sky with a telescope. On catching sight of the Zeppelin he quickly bobbed down m great I fear, and the skylight slammed behind him. This particular movement always brought the house down. The Germans felt that they were having a real bit or Christmas festivity. In another part of the, building one saw German soldiers spending Christmas in some ruined church, reading letters from home and gazing sentimentally at their lovegif ts of sausage. and schnapps or the stars that shone through the roof. I knew an old official who made ail English " poem" with the' refrain : "Germanin, Germania, Germania rules the sky, Germania, Germania, with thee no one can vie." The Berlin population rejoiced with one accord whenever they heard of a Zeppelin raid. The only voice ever i used m public against such raids was that of Dr. CoJin, a member of the International Group of 'Socialists. He aroused the bitterest resentment when from his place in the Reichstag he accused the military party of having invented the excuse that London was a fortified town, merely in order to wreak their vengeance' upon it. Asa lawyer, he accused them of the illegal-, ity of their action, and as a man of its cowardice I chanced to meet him in the street not long afterwards, and congratulated him on his courage. I told him that the day would come when the German people would be thankful that at least ono man in their midst had had the courage to disavow these crimes committed in the name of war.

Quite lately, with the same object m view, Dr. Cohn proposed to introduce some fomi (f supervision over the military authorities in cases where they let war degenerate into crime. His proposal _ was received with scorn and vidieule in the Reichstag, and I heard Graf lleventlow, at public meeting, defend what he called "die starke Hand"—the strong hand—that commits such actions as the! surest way to bring about a Geriran pe:ice. He jeered at Ferr Cohn." "This Mr. Cohn has made a proposal that he should supervise the miiltary authorities," ho said with characteristic distortion of his opponent's statement, and the audience, deeply moved for the first and only time in the course of his long harangue, *pafc out, "Pfiri! Pfuij" like so many wild cats. . When the news of a Zeppelins raid reaches Berlin the press will have ns the most attractive headline, right

across the page,. '* Zeppelins Over London." German, readers are horrified and indignant when they read the reports of the destruction of one of these machines—horrified and indignant at the heartlessness of the British people, who can cheer when they see a Zeppelin falling in flames. "Just think of the frightful sufferings of the brave men on board!" they say. The only way to make such people see the other side is to do as the French airmen -lid at Karlsruhe. The German is a man of unscrupulous violence. His imagination is stolidly selfish, and he easily falls a prey to the one-sided and perverted statemeuts -A his press. Ine only way to teach him the xiselessness of his cruelties—:in the ease of his bomb attacks on open cities at least—is to nit him, and hit hard, with similar weapons. Service on board a Zeppelin was, until about a year j-go, when the English defence measures against them began to prove effective, coveted by German soldiers as one of the safest forms of warfare. The public thought so, too. My brother is quite well, thank you. At ? present he's on a Zeppelin, so we're not at all anxious about him, but who knows how -oon he may be transferred to some dangerous 'duty !" a neighbour once sighed to me. But so many Zepelins have failed to return home that this particular form of travelling has now lost much of its charm. I heard from a young engineer I lately that when volunteers are now called on for Zeppelin duty the men show not the .slightest alacrity. The recent aeroplane attacks on a big scale against England are prompted by various reasons :-— > 1. To quicken the waning confidence of the German people by showing them that in. one direction at least the offensive is still- in the hands of Germany. 2. To encourage the hope that England may, perhaps, by dint of the repeated terrorising of its citizens, be made to yield. The authorities themselves cannot share this opinion. 3. The remote possibility of doinosome damage of military importance! 4. The idea of causing much larger numbers of aeroplanes to be kept^in -England. The first two reasons seem to me the most important. They belong rather to the domestic than to the military policy of Germany. —"Weekly Dispatch."