Evening Star Newspaper, July 14, 1935, Page 92

i 4 Magazine Section THIS WEEK T'he Next War July 14, 1935 Jleets of light gas-proof tanks spraying bullets; large tanks following, with heavy artillery; planes raining death from the sky: thus this noted British author and veteran pictures Europe’s next war by F. BRITTEN AUSTIN Author of **The Red Flag,” ** Tomorrow?” ‘A Saga of the Sea,” Etc. lllustration by Harry Fisk Tanks, an auxiliary in the last war, may steal the whole show in the next 1Si1BLY and ominously, the govern- ments of Europe are aligning them- selves for the next war. Everywhere is the tension that precedes the storm. The peoples of the world, with the liveliest possible remembrance of the colossal horror of the last war, await with dread the spark which shall detonate the explosion. The existing tension can plainly not endure. When will that spark flash? No one can say. It may be this year, it may be next year, it may be five years hence. Every Power is feeling that with a little more time it could advantage- ously increase its armaments. Probably an accident will precipitate the catastrophe. *aen the catastrophe comes, what will it be like? For years past, the journalists of the world have been torturing their imaginations to invent spectacular holocausts for the ‘‘next time.” Great cities are to be wiped out over- night, their flaming ruins to be filled with the corpses of the gassed. In Russia and in Germany, the populations have been elabo- rately drilled into acceptance (with more or iess stoicism) of the inevitable air raids. There is logic in this. The oldtime doctrine of the sacred character of the non-combatant was in fact humbug. A nation goes to war in order to impose its will upon the population of the enemy state. The oldtime armies, spread out in millions, were nothing but a shield to protect that population from hostile action. When the shield was visibly smashed, the population — incorporate in its government — promptly surrendered. The perfection of the air-arm has pro- foundly modified that traditional situation. The defending army is no longer a shield so long as the air-arm is in effective existence. The attack can hop over it. If the attack is made in sufficient force, and is not restrained by the certainty of identical reprisal, the defending army is merely an expensive re- dundancy. The will of the opposing popula- tion to resist could — theoretically — be an- nihilated in one swift horror. ‘Despite the certainty of reprisals, it is certain that such attacks will be made; it is certain that they will not be so annihilating as is popularly believed. German airplanes could of course easily bomb London or Paris — fitted with the new automatic position- finder, they could drop their projectiles with approximate accuracy even from above a cloud-layer, themselves invisible; or, diving at 300 miles an hour, could make certain of their objective and zoom up again at a speed " to which no anti-aircraft battery could adjust itself. But there are not enough airplanes in Europe to destroy a great city like London or Paris, unless they were given weeks of time to work in relays on their target. Probably, indeed, as the next war proceeds, air-bombing on a large target will not be per- formed by large and expensive machines manned by expensive aviators, but by cheap ‘mass-produced automatically-controlled ma- chines built to fly once only, and to crash in explosion where desired. Nevertheless, it takes a great many explosions, even with burst gas mains, to destroy a great city. This is not to say that such attacks will not have any military effect. The chief military effect will be produced by the. attacked populations themselves. European urban pop- ulations have been propagandized into a ter- ror of the air which will surely make 'them panic at the first hostile airplane in the sky. Imagine, say, four million Paris- ians streaming out of Paris by every road, choking every artery, hindering all military movements, preventing the influx of supplies, paralyzing more or less the nerve- center of the country. That is what is going to happen when the first German bombers appear over Paris. But no nation is going to have it all its own way in the next war. If Parisians flee at the sight of German bombers, Berliners will also flee at the sight of the French avengers. And hereto belongs a little tale. I remember in the last war, early in 1916, some zealous Australian gunners, newly arrived from the Dardanelles, suddenly discovered a German divisional headquarters opposite them. With much zest, they promptly shot it up. The Germans naturally retal- iated. But the German strafe was nothing to the straje the Aus- tralians received from British G.H.Q. ""How did these blank im- beciles think the war was going to be carried on if they shot up one another’'s headquarters?’’ Which was quite sound. War without direction would lapse automatic- ally into a gigantic anarchy. Governments at war prefer an organized enemy which will sur- render in orderly fashion when beaten. So. surely, air-power will not be used to its full potential. It is too dangerous to the user. Probably it is in land-warfare that the next conflict will provide the most far-reaching novelty. Two schools of military thought will be in opposition: one, dating from the French Revolution, to which all oldtime soldiers stub- bornly belong, which thinks in terms of man-power measured in millions; the other, dating effec- tively from August 8, 1918, which Ludendorff called ‘‘the black day of the war,” when some 400-odd British tanks broke into the Ger- man line with a record low of casualties among the infantry whith followed them. The latter school thinks in terms of machine- power. It believes that men walk- ing at a maximum of two miles an hour, their bodies naked to a machine-gun bullet, have no chance against men in armored machines moving at twenty miles an hour. It believes that the larger the mass of virtually naked men with their feet as their only vehicle, the greater the disaster which will be inflicted upon it by an economically small number of men moving in fast machines, particularly if air-action simul- taneously assails the necessarily immense bases and complex lines-of-communication which must feed the million-fold armies. They will be like a medieval mob of serfs rounded up by armored knights. The French general staff still believes in the older doctrine; it regards the tank merely as a valuable adjunct to the mobilized mil- lions, an auxiliary and not the primary arm. The German general staff (not the Nazi " Party, which still thinks in terms of the last trench-war) is supposed to hold the opposite creed. The probability is that after the first holo- causts have been sacrified to the superstitions of the non-mechanical past, land war will approximate to naval warfare — with fleets and squadrons of land-ships trying to out- (Continued on next page) 1