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THE GREAT DELUSION. (A Study of Aircraft in Peace and War by “Neon.”) New York. The Dial Press (Lincoln MaeVeagh). $4.00.
Reviewed by Major General James G. Harbord, U. S. Army, (Retired List).
(Editor’s Note: General Harbord served as Chief of Staff American Expeditionary Force in France; was Deputy Chief of Staff, U. S. Army, after the World War, and retired in 1922, and since has been president of the Radio Corporation of America. He was a member of President Coolidge’s Morrow Board, which investigated aviation and aeronautical conditions.)
The anonymous author who treats of a subject of current interest must produce a book of more than passing merit if it is to carry weight. This is the day of the specialist and readers demand a warrant for the voice of authority. This is particularly true when the work deals with a popular fetich, or threatens such a prolific source of press copy as aviation. So too, when its voice is out of tune with the world’s applause of Colonel Lindbergh’s matchless and heart-stirring flight to Paris—though merit is not measured by the gallantry of adherents and history rings with the romance of devotion to lost and unworthy causes.
For several years there have been few days when the press has not carried the items of contemplated, unsuccessful or accomplished “hops," or the adverse weather or other circumstances which have prevented them. The arrival or departure of good-will or round-the-world flyers; pictures of birdmen singly and in flocks; legislative appropriations for aviation; the organization of airplane manufacturers; the bidding for air-route contracts; and the long melancholy deathroll of eager and gallant flyers, the record of disaster and death, are familiar items to every reader. Somewhere, doubtless those who loved them mourn the departed flyers, but deaths in flying have become so frequent that with our public of short memories and brief regrets, they register now for but a moment. Who now remembers the ten Navy flyers killed this spring within as many days? Less than a month later what memories are awakened by the name of Noel Davis, where and how be died, and who died with him? And gallant John Rodgers, last of his honored line in our Navy? Lansdowne? Geiger? Maitland of the British service who commanded the R-34 eight years ago in the first round-trip by air from England to America, and later died with forty-three others in the R-38?
The natural interest in so romantic, so hazardous and so spectacular an art as flying has been stimulated by every artifice known to propaganda. Soldiers and sailors are still studying the lessons of the World War, but aviators make claims in peace far out of proportion to their accomplishments in that war and already assert the obsolescence of armies and navies. Doughboys and troopers, gobs and gunners, are alike to be written off as a total loss in the national defense. The knights of the air, but a few years ago hailed as the heirs of medieval chivalry, are by their own conception of the next war to be assigned the horrid role of baby-killers and destroyers of helpless cities crowded with non-combatants.
On this subject of aviation, of such tremendous interest to every American believing in his country’s greatness, and keen for her safety, including the plain citizen whose daily duties are not incompatible with keeping his feet on the ground, there now appears a most convincing book. It is entitled The Great Delusion, a study of Aircraft in peace and war, by “Neon,” a name, which for me at least, is a neonym. One may suspect the official character of the writer by his evident access to official documents. His serious and studious approach to the lessons of those documents proclaims him as one who is ' trying to serve his country. His worthiness of attention and that he is a Briton is indicated by the fact that a naval writer so well qualified as Arthur Hungerford Pollen writes for the book a preface of twenty-four pages. It is a work that should be read by everyone interested in aviation, its powers and its weaknesses. I note but one typographical error—on page 165, the date of the German drive on Amiens is given as May instead of March 21, 1918.
The Great Delusion treats:
1. Of the airship, its function in peace and war, its powers and its limitations.
2. The airplane, its place in peace-time commerce, its achievements in the World War and its promise for the next conflict.
3. The defense of London by air against attack from the air, which would be equally applicable to Boston, New York, Washington or any of our populous cities near the sea.
The Airship.—“Neon” lays down certain principles: A passenger and freight carrier should generally be able to start from its point of departure when desired, no matter what the direction of wind, degree of visibility or other circumstance of weather; travel on a time-table approximately reliable, and arrive at its destination when expected. Ships must be readily handled for berthing and he safe when berthed. Any vehicle to furnish safe and reliable transport must be free to stop without risk of disaster, and its stability at rest or in motion must be fairly secure. The useful cargo it will carry must be in reasonable proportion to the effort and expense, whether mail, men or merchandise. It must be safe and reasonably comfortable.
The airship, says “Neon,” seems to meet none of these requirements. It moves with the currents of air as a cork upon the bosom of a stream. It cannot hold its own unless it has a power of motion equal to the rate of the current in which it operates. It cannot make a gain unless it has speed in excess of the current and it gains only the amount of such excess. Were currents of the sea as great as or greater than the speed of ships, forever changing in rate and direction and therefore uncharted and unchartable, regular and reliable navigation of the open seas would he hopeless, and that part of civilization which owes its origin to the sea would be still unborn. When at sea, but in sight of land, an airship may discover her location by reference to charts. When out of sight of land her position can he calculated by observation of the heavenly bodies, but only if those bodies and the horizon are in sight at the same time.
Safety when berthed implies harbors and anchorages, mooring masts, landing fields, repair shops, gas tanks and hangars. A mooring mast is a station where passengers, freight and supplies can be taken aboard, and minor repairs effected, if weather permits. It is not a haven in a storm. There is no haven for an airship caught by a storm en route. It must ride it out. An airship cannot, it is stated he brought out of its hangar in safety in a breeze of over fifteen miles per hour. It cannot land in a dead calm or a strong breeze.
Great airships cannot remain stopped in flight owing to lack of stability; airplanes because of the law of gravity. The airship only achieves stability through motion, and this induced stability is so slight that the loading and trim of the ship are among the most important factors of safety. With her engines stopped, her longitudinal stability is negligible. When some of the crew go forward others must go aft. Ballast, fuel, gasbags, passengers and freight must, on occasion, be shifted.
In airship transport the effort is enormous —the total result in useful load is negligible. Working out the “lift” of an airship as large as the Mauretania; the weight of ballast, fuel, oil, crew and stores; structure and machinery, “Neon” finds its capacity in paying load as eight and one-half tons at sea level. This is the ship intended for service between England and Egypt, a journey of two and one-half days, figured to a passenger list of too at 225 pounds, each being 165 pounds of person and sixty of baggage, It will never be popular with the heavyweights. Heavy dew, snow, rain, humidity, all affect the amount of “lift" available for fuel and useful load.
The cost of five airships completed by the British government in 1919-21 was £1,825,000 or about $9,000,000. The R-38, which was to have been bought by the United States was wrecked before delivery. It flew a total of seventy hours, but cost the British taxpayers £500,000. The airship hangar at Cardington, England, is 812 feet long, 180 feet wide and 180 feet high. Its corresponding unit at Karachi, India, will be larger and £172,000, or over $800,000 will be spent for it. The airship hangar and accessory establishments at Lakehurst, New Jersey, foots up to $5,121,876. The solitary horse in this stable is the Los Angeles. A German expert who has built airships for a quarter of a century, speaking of a proposed trans-Atlantic service, is quoted by “Neon” as believing the art so far advanced that airships can now be built to carry fifteen tons of paying load. Assuming three appropriate ships, making 100 voyages per year, fifty each way. the operational cost would be about £700 per ton, including in this tonnage passengers, mail and freight. Commercially organized to pay interest on investment and, with full loads, the rate would be £1,200 per ton or about sixteen cents per ounce. The appropriate cargo at such a tariff might perhaps be rubies or radium. The ordinary freight rate for the same trip by steamer is under £5 per ton. Steamships last, generally, for many years; airships are fortunate if their working life is as many months.
As to the safety and time-table reliability of airships, “Neon” points out that all airship flights have been thus far begun in favorable or promising weather with the exception of forced flights due to breakaways. Their experiences have shown that they are unreliable, exposed to danger from structural failure, lack of stability, lack of lift, striking high ground or obstructions, from fire, thunderstorms, of which there are an average of 44,000 daily, from vertical upheavals, from exhaustion of fuel, from uncertainty of landing and lack of havens. A means of transport that waits for favorable wind and weather is retrogression, not progress. The Norge of North Pole fame was arranged to leave Rome on April 2, 1926. Due to the weather she was unable to start until April 10. She arrived at Spitzbergen May 7. A ten-knot tramp steamer starting on April 2 could have covered the 3,780 sea miles between Rome and Spitzbergen in sixteen days, reaching the latter port on April 18. The thought may be ventured by some that ships of the air are still experimental. A generation has passed since the first modern ones were flown. Gifford flew a steam-propelled dirigible in 1852. Other models flew in 1872 and in 1884. Until man can control weather, airships will remain experimental.
The case for the airship in war is no better than its claims in peace. Sixty-one Zeppelins were assigned to the German fleet during the war. Seventeen, with their crews, were destroyed by the enemy; twenty-eight were lost by accidents; six bad to be put out of service as useless; ten survived. Day after day the airship commander reported to the admiral that the weather would not permit them to ascend, and the information they brought in before, and the one report received during the Jutland engagement, were misleading and unreliable. Alike on land and sea their military failure was complete.
The American experience with airships has not been a happy one. The Roma in 1922 crashed to the earth in flames—death roll thirty-four, injured eleven. The Shenandoah was wrecked in 1925—death roll fourteen. The Los Angeles, still surviving, is limited by treaty to use in peace.
The Airplane.—“Neon” believes that since 1914 the airplane has had some opportunity to show what it can do in war and peace. From 1914 to 1919 the most highly skilled and completely equipped industrial nations of the world, under the merciless lash of war, competed in research, experiment, construction and flying of airplanes. Probably more was spent on flying planes in those five years than on the development of steam transport on land and sea during its first fifty years. The internal combustion engine which makes the modern automobile possible, and which is the very soul of the airplane, has been improved continuously for thirty years. It is safe, the author believes, to say that in all vital respects it has reached the limit of perfection. Modifications in size, shape or design of wings, and so on, may be made but the airplane is its engine, and there is no real scope for generally effective improvement in performance. Mere increases in size, weight, or power, and constant multiplication and alteration of types are symptomatic that the efficiency limit has been practically attained. There is a certain unalterable balance between the desirable characteristics of airplanes, and usually super-performance in one essential characteristic is gained at the expense of others. The British Air Ministry are quoted, that “the commercial airplane has emerged from its experimental stage.” Sir Alan Cobham, until the meteoric advent of Colonel Lindbergh, admittedly the most experienced and successful airman in the world, testifies of his Australian flight— “ . . . . from a mechanical point of view the airplane was as near perfect as any form of transport could be.” Colonel Lindbergh, whose devotion to his plane includes it in “we,” has uttered no criticism of its performance on the trackless road to Paris.
The World War ended, every important nation in Europe began and to this day continues to subsidize air transport. There, and generally in the United States, no airplane goes on a commercial errand without being helped by a subsidy either open or concealed. The expense of the U. S. Air Mail Service for the year ending June 30, 1926, was $2,944,648. The total receipts for the same period were $980,271. After fourteen years of the most exhaustive research and intensive striving for efficiency to justify the commercial use of the airplane, it still costs approximately as much to carry a pound of freight one mile in an airplane, as to carry a long ton of 2,240 pounds one mile in a railroad train. With all the encouragement given and the money lavished upon commercial aviation it fails to show any real progress. Apart from discomfort, danger and dependence upon weather, the airplane can never be seriously regarded for commercial travel or transport, for the reason that four-fifths of the total power installed is required to maintain the plane and its load in the air against gravity, only one-fifth remaining to push or pull the load along. The tractive effort necessary to pull a plane through the air is over ten times as great as that required per pound of gross weight by freight train. Commercial aviation is inherently unable to operate on a profit-making basis. The newest passenger planes from London to Paris can carry for each horse-power but three pounds of paying load. A railway locomotive can draw a paying load of approximately three tons per horsepower, with nearly perfect safety, and with passengers in comfort, at a speed that bears comparison with that of commercial airplanes in still air. Without night travel long-distance railway journeys would be more costly, less convenient, and the time taken would be doubled. Airplanes are “half-timers,” and must remain so even with the tremendous outlay for lighting of routes, and of intended landing places.
Some interesting comparisons arc made: In the flight late last year of four British planes from Cairo to the Cape and from the Cape to London, eight persons were conveyed 14,000 miles in 114 days, an average speed of five miles per hour, a little faster than a cavalry horse can walk. The machines kept to a scheduled time-table. The cost was tremendous. Two tramp steamers with the same horse power, at trifling cost could have conveyed 4,600 tons of cargo a similar distance in half the time. The rapidity of aerial transport is illusory except for short or relay flights. The Round-the- World flight of American Army aviators covered about twenty thousand miles and consumed nearly six months. Meantime 87,000 miles of steaming was done by U. S. naval vessels, alone, to make the flight a success as against 26,103 miles flown by the airplanes. One recalls that Phileas Fogg, fictitiously, and Nellie Bly, actually, beat that time before an airplane flew. Franco, the Spanish aviator, flew 3,649 miles from Spain to Brazil. It was the season of the constant north-east trade wind which from Cape Verde Island to Fernando Noronha (1,447 miles) favored him thirty miles per hour. The air current did 442 miles and 1,035 were covered by engine power and fuel consumed. With the same wind and the amount of fuel his plane could carry, he could not have crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction. Had a large comfortable passenger liner, sailing as slowly as fifteen knots, left the same port in Spain, at the same time, she would have arrived at Rio with Major Franco. Everyone who has read the newspapers is aware of the favoring wind that helped The Spirit of St. Louis in her never-to-be-forgotten flight from New York , to Paris. “Neon” states that generally all cases of transoceanic flights by any kind of aircraft have owed their success to favoring air currents. Plans in detail were submitted to the Imperial Conference, which met in London last October, for providing man-made islands of concrete as links in an All-Red air route for the Empire. These artificial landing fields were to be anchored at convenient points in the seven seas, provided with hotels, lighthouses, power plants, duly protected by aircraft, anti-aircraft and torpedoes, with possibly a few obsolete craft of a once sea-ruling navy. The record is incomplete in not stating whether all the assembled premiers laughed or only part of them.
Some day, “We may,” says “Neon,” “discover and be able to employ an entirely new source of motive energy, an energy which implies little or no weight, hut gravity will still exercise its unerring and relentless force and the winds—the currents of the air—will always govern the operation of aircraft.” Bad weather will continue to Ire unaffected by the activities of meteorologists, and the Law of Gravity defies research. They are now as they were in the Beginning, and ever shall be, World without End.
"Neon” assays a slight trace of British humor. The Air Minister points out that the use of airplanes alone made possible the rescue of the leader of the Spanish flight to Manila, who in passing over Transjordania was lost, and that twenty-four airplanes scoured the desert, covering some 16,000 square miles, adding that "nothing hut the search of airplanes could have saved this man’s life.” “Neon” comes grimly back with: “Nothing but an airplane would be likely to land itself in a predicament calling for such a great and friendly—if costly— effort on its behalf.”
In the World War the airplane was a new weapon, and history repeated itself in acclaiming the new weapon as in other days it had hailed Greek fire, the catapult, the arquebus and long-how, gun-powder, artillery, breechloaders and automatics. Slings were probably urged for Saul’s army after David brought Goliath down “out of control.” Airplanes were used for reconnaissance, photography, spotting, for air combats and bombing. “Neon” believes them an unreliable weapon, ineffective and unprofitable—achieving so little, costing so much, lie states that it can be demonstrated:
1. That aerial reconnaissance is unreliable.
2. That aerial combats in themselves have no influence upon the advance of the enemy or the ultimate result of the war.
3. That bombing is inaccurate and therefore can only be indiscriminate and against non-military population (including women and children), offending civilized opinion and international feeling if not international law.
4. That such bombing is inherently expensive, is utterly ineffective so far as winning the war is concerned, and that air operations can only be carried on at enormous and disproportionate cost.
Taking these claims categorically, the author’s views may be condensed about as follows:
Accurate observation and regular reconnaissance arc most desirable in war, but warfare is not confined to fine days. Airplanes cannot go out in bad weather, observation may be difficult even in fair flying weather, and on foggy, rainy, misty days and at night aircraft can see nothing. They cannot see through woods or camouflage, or into cities, nor get identifications, nor communicate with people of the country to check and verify the truth of what their observers may think they have seen. They can only give positive information of movements observed. They cannot bring in complete negative information. On March 21, 1918, when the Germans pushed back the British Fifth Army towards Amiens the prevailing weather was “very hazy and aerial observation almost impossible.” It was a day of thick white mist. The airmen neither warned of that great attack nor could help the army when the attack began. Dazed by their own impotence they could only “watch” it. What, on that day of disaster, would have been the value in the line of all the men immobilized by the air service and its supply service? Weather stops the air service but does not stop the war. Speed, an inherent necessity for flight, is a grave disadvantage for observation from the air. Height in flying to .avoid fire adds to the difficulties in reconnaissance. Reconnaissance at sea by a plane out of sight of land or its carrier, which therefore cannot determine its position, can report nothing of importance. If near its carrier its reconnaissance can be better done by surface craft. Spotting, the observation of long range fire, is considered as an important function of an airplane, but weather may prevent it from leaving the ground or its carrier; airplanes dashing about at a hundred miles an hour, dodging anti-aircraft fire and looking out for hostile planes cannot give to spotting that calmness and deliberateness which secures the precise observation necessary for good gunnery. If many guns are firing rapidly the air observer cannot say from which guns certain shots were fired. Airplane observation came in with trench warfare and generally went out when war of movement was resumed. Even the numerous airplane photographs of muddy trenches do not seem to have hastened the Armistice. The difficulty in recognizing what the observer sees from the air is well illustrated by the case of the British pilot who mistook the big red cross, laid out in the open to protect a hospital at Calais, for an iron cross meaning that the Germans were in occupation of Ostend, over which he thought he was flying. The classic instance is cited where the American First Division Headquarters were repeatedly bombed one June day in 1918, by a British aviator who later was brought down by a French plane and turned out to be an American in the British service.
The real battle, the battle which determines the final result, is on the ground or on the sea. Air combats in themselves are irrelevant to the issue and have no influence upon the advance of the armies or the retention of captured ground. Air combats between opposing planes or squadrons achieve nothing but the destruction of life and airplanes. Air combats were episodes or diversions for those who watched them from the ground. The enemy were never so victorious in the air as on that eighth of August, 1918, which according to their own accounts was the “black day of the German army in the World War.” The air battle lost by the Allies that day, when with slight losses the enemy brought down, eighty-three of our planes behind his lines, signified nothing in the final fortunes of the day. With all the undeniable heroism, the knightly sacrifice, the Homeric fighting above the lines, the hideous casualty list, and the sacrifice of wealth and man-power devoted to the air arm, the actual contribution of air fighting to the victory is shadowy and elusive when you try to define it. The aces fought and fell but there was no panic when they fell; no ground gained or held as a result of their sacrifice. Their survival or their passing did not effect the final decision.
Aerial bombing is from its nature absurdly inaccurate and therefore indiscriminate. Knowing its inaccuracy one cannot acquit the advocates of bombing of intending war on helpless non-combatants, including woman and children. The non-combatants are expected to coerce the combatants into surrender, but it will never work that way with the women of any race worth saving. The band still plays the Marseillaise or God Save the King, and the soldiers of the race are but nerved to undying effort.
All the limitations that apply to air reconnaissance obtain in greater degree in finding and recognizing the target to be bombed. Foggy or misty weather, the speed of the plane, the height to which it is forced, inevitably make the bombing indiscriminate. There is abundant evidence that bombers flew as high as they could—they were forced to do so if they would survive. Sighting in bombing, says “Neon,” is an attempt to navigate a bomb to the point in space which the particular conditions at the moment determine as the one and only spot from which a hit can be obtained. The “spot” depends upon the altitude of the plane, its exact speed through space, and on its direction and angle of flight. These factors introduce wind at that particular height and locality, which no mechanical sight in the world can do more than help guess. It is a question of navigation to a three-dimensional spot, not a question of aiming. When one considers that ships may be steaming into the wind, or with it, or may be across it, and the speed of both wind and ship may be variable, or the ship be affected by currents and tides —bombing does not look to a layman like an exact science especially when the anti- 1 aircraft guns are firing. The Gocbcn, the German warship that was turned over to the Turks, was ashore in 1918 not far from the Dardanelles and was repeatedly bombed by the British Air Force. Two hundred and seventy flights were made and fifteen tons of bombs were dropped. One bomb is believed to have hit the cruiser.
The Germans crossed the Channel many times to drop bombs in England, but they took no hostile note of the many ships crossing the Channel from shore to shore laden with troops, munitions and coal. Only the difficulty of hitting them saved this vital cross-Channel traffic. “Neon” cites other attractive targets—the locks and canals of Zeebrugge being the heart of the German submarine warfare, against which no bombing raids were ever carried out, and one wonders why?
Air war is expensive. A viaduct, name not given, which cost only £14,000 to repair cost the Germans £80,000 to destroy. Bombing a battleship at sea costs enormously. One modern aircraft carrier, the Saratoga or Lexington, costs about $40,000,000 and carries seventy-two planes, costing an additional $1,500,000; thirty-six bombers, carrying each one bomb, and thirty-six pursuit planes to protect the bombing planes. Under war conditions, in average weather, with anti-aircraft guns on the battleship and freedom of maneuver, the probability of one hit would be doubtful, two would be remote. Allowing, for the sake of argument, the luck of one hit out of the possible thirty-six in action, no matter what harm were done the ship, the effort would have cost $45,000,000 in capital expenditure on craft alone. When the planes go out and drop their bombs they are done. They can never go back and get more during that action from a carrier chased by destroyers and fast cruisers. This huge effort is directed against one ship only, and meanwhile the ships of the line are proceeding with the sea battle proper.
When lack of replacements forced Sir Douglas Haig, in 1918, to change the organization and tactics of his infantry, 405,000 workers at home were used in turning out ninety planes per day. For every plane in service eighty-four men were retained on the ground! Probably two million of men were employed in the manufacture and operation of the planes the British had in October, 1918. Even now in peace the British Air Ministry employs fifty men for every plane in service! In the United States Air Corps, 80 per cent of the personnel are ground men and establishments. The cost of training a pilot in the Royal Air Force is given as £2,000. With 2,163 pilots in service in 1925, the cost for their training had been £4,326,000 or about $20,000,000. Planes in war went at the rate of 80 or 90 per cent a month according to "Neon.” In the British Air Force during the year ending June 30, 1926, 262 planes were written off as a result of “crashing.” Such figures could he almost indefinitely quoted from “Neon,” hut why do it—for surely no one doubts the cost of aviation. Since April, 1919, while still drawing on their war stocks, Great Britain has alone, yet now has hut one plane for every thirty-six it possessed at that date.
The Defense of London.—A brief consideration of the opinions of British air authorities as to the defense of London is of interest to Americans for it would be applicable to our own coast cities if they could be reached by hostile bombers. There appears much variation in the opinions of airmen—in fact, they are seldom unanimous except in their enthusiasm. This was true of the hearings by the Morrow Board, and “Neon” finds the same characteristic situation in Britain. Air enthusiasts without responsibility believe that the only way London can escape “devastation and utter ruin from the air” in a next war that “can only result in unprecedented horror and misery, and probably in the destruction of the civilized world” is by having an Air Force “supreme in the air.” Other air enthusiasts but with responsibility, such as Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, agree that an Air Force is impotent to defend the country against air raids. Replying to interpellations in the Parliament the Air Minister appears to be in grave doubt as to the methods and means by which air power can be applied in war, but is quite confident as to the value of aircraft for commercial purposes. Sir Alan Cobham in no way intimate with agencies of war, hut a great trade pilot, does not consider aerial transport a paying proposition and states, “commercial success is not the issue.” In his opinion the raison d’etre of long distance flights and all that is implied in the development of aerial routes is the defense and safety of the Empire. The Air Minister for a fighting service is lukewarm and uncertain as to the military role of the Air Force hut enthusiastic and confident as to the commercial future. The greatest long distance commercial pilot (Cobham), convinced of the futility of planes for commercial undertakings, is confident of their military value.
General Trenchard says the airplane was a “shockingly bad weapon of defense against an airplane.” The British Air Staff in France in 1916 agreed that it was impossible to prevent hostile planes from crossing the lines, the sky being “too large to defend.” “No matter how many millions are expended on air service, how many pilots are available and fit to fly, and how many single fighters or bombers are on charge,” says “Neon,” “immunity from bombing attacks cannot be ensured by this means, ‘the space of heaven cannot be closed.’ ” Apparently the only way to keep from being bombed is to have your men off bombing someone else.
Again quoting General Trenchard: “Although it is necessary to have some defense in order to maintain the morale of our people, it is far more necessary to lower the morale of the enemy people, for nothing else can end the war.” There you have the intent at the declaration of war to penetrate into the enemy’s country for an attack on his centers of population, his mobilization zones, his defenseless non-combatants, the reign of poison gas, bacteria, and baby-killing. If the policy of “frightfulness” is adopted by the nation, “Neon” believes it will logically object to “frightfulness” being the prerogative of one service only. The haphazard achievements of air power can he easily surpassed in terror by an army and navy to whom such practices have hitherto been alien. By such token the Royal Navy, a truly mobile force, should, on the outbreak of war, proceed to subject every undefended town and village on the enemy coast to a hail of high explosive, incendiary and poison shell.
As to the efficiency of the air power for this kind of warfare, “Neon” points out that during 1918, 483 hostile planes were directed on Paris, of which only thirty-seven reached Paris, and thirteen of these thirty-seven never returned to their own lines. They were brought down by anti-aircraft defenses. During four years of war there were fifty- one airship and fifty-two airplane attacks over England. London was bombarded twelve times by airships, and nineteen times by airplanes. The total thus killed in Great Britain during the whole period was 1,413. In four years of peace, 1922-25, inclusive, the number killed in street accidents in England was 11,346.
No anti-aircraft artillery was in existence before the war, and it had to be improvised and developed from such materials as was available.
Notwithstanding its crudeness, one-fifth of the airplanes destroyed by France, Italy and Germany were brought down by anti-aircraft fire. While the mission of this arm is to destroy enemy aircraft, its effectiveness is not to be judged by the number of enemy planes that it may bring down, but rather by its success in limiting and hindering enemy aerial activities within range. Its efficiency above the infliction of casualties will be measured by its ability to disturb the aviator, to force him to change his course and altitude, and to fly so high that he will be beyond the range of good visibility.
No nation, however powerful its air forces and anti-aircraft defense, can hope to safeguard absolutely its homeland from the raids of the enemy whose air strength is not negligible. There can never be in the air that sure line of defense for an island nation which a powerful fleet constitutes at sea. Apart from the dictates of humanity, it is the fallacy of force misused that condemns attacks on non-combatants. War is decided when the armed forces of one side are destroyed or paralyzed by the other. The first and most fundamental of all military maxims is to concentrate on securing the ultimate victory by such destruction or paralysis. No country’s resources are limitless. If you expend your money and your effort on planes—the costliest of munitions —for bombing civilians you weaken to that extent the pressure you can bring upon the enemy’s armed forces.
This book should he read by all those charged with or interested in our policy of national defense. It certainly should he studied by every national legislator. It is most convincing as to the excess to which the propaganda for aviation has led 11s. Air service in proper proportion will unquestionably form a part of every army and navy. That it will continue to be an auxiliary arm for both army and navy, but an often unreliable one due to causes which man cannot control, cannot be doubted. That it will ever replace armies or navies, is a neurotic dream. Cavalry, infantry and artillery will still win wars on land; battleships and their naval auxiliaries will still rule the sea. No matter how high or how far he may fly the aviator in war to be fed, clothed, rested, and paid must come back to the shelter of his army or navy. He can neither take or hold hostile soil, and that is how wars are won on land.
As to civil aviation it is as Mr. Pollen says: “Speed may at certain conjunctures be of vital importance. This possibility may justify a national subsidy to keep civil aviation in being. But if the nation chooses to keep it going it should be for reasons that can be clearly stated. We should not be fooled into thinking that in time it will pay.”