The Reverse Of The Medal

That war has come to owe an enormous debt to industry is so obvious a truism that it has found universal and unqualified acceptance. Nowadays strife between nations in many respects resolves itself into a life-and-death struggle between the industrial resources of the respective countries involved. More and more, conflict has come to rely upon the co-ordinated mass production of the factory, the technical skill of the workers, and the organizational ability of managements. The fighting-man, to a considerable degree, is becoming just a finger on the trigger of a weapon manufactured in one workshop, designed to bring about the disruption and immobilization of a similar plant on the hostile side of the line.

War, in short, has become as much a question of the quantity and quality of the military matériel fabricated by the worker, as of the skill and resolution of the fighting-man who employs it.

War owes industry so much, indeed, that it is salutary to pause for a moment to consider the tremendous contra-account whose details demonstrate so cogently what industry owes to war.

War, as the physical expression of the intention of one group of individuals to impose its will upon another by force, goes back into times immemorial. But in the early stages of its progression it made little or no demand on the resources of manufactory, such as they were. A tribal warrior intent on expelling a neighbor from better-stocked hunting grounds turned to nature for the heavy club or pointed stick which were his weapons. The first, very elementary attempt to call in a “scientific” process to his aid was when he took to hardening in the fire the point of his rude javelin. This Paleolithic age was followed by what is known as the Neolithic period, wherein man learned to chip flints to a sharp edge and haft them with sinews to a wooden stick or helve, or fasten them to slender wands to make a missile weapon in the form of an arrow—processes involving a purely personal activity, which called on the aid of no outside skill or organization whatsoever.¹ Even in the succeeding Bronze and Iron ages the manufacture of specific weapons of war and the chase was, at the outset, very largely a matter of personal responsibility; although there were doubtless craftsmen prepared to undertake the fabrication of swords, lance-heads, and daggers for use by others. But it was a period wherein infinitely superior skill, on a far wider scale, was devoted rather to the design and perfecting of articles of personal and domestic adornment, than to the construction of weapons of war. Strife and “industry” were as yet on no more than nodding terms.

It was not, indeed, until the small, sporadic “robber baron” wars of early medieval days gave place to the mass concentration of troops brought about by the Crusades that the demands of the armed forces impinged upon and deflected the ordinary course of civilian life and the craftsman’s technical skills, to any appreciable degree.

In the harsh, inhospitable wastes of the Holy Land the erstwhile happy-go-lucky expedient of “living on the country” had, perforce, to be abandoned. Men, in large numbers, had to be fed from central magazines, a process which in its turn made new and exacting demands upon the purveyors responsible for furnishing the supplies. “Mass-production” methods of pickling, salting, and barrelling meat and fish had to be devised; and there was also the urgent but wellnigh insoluble problem of brewing the ale, to which the English rank and file were so adhesively devoted, in such a manner that it would not only “travel” but refrain from going “ropey or tail.” This was—- and remained—a very real and vexatious responsibility, since in those times men were accustomed to drink their ale virtually fresh from the vats and never more than a few days old; and there were most unholy ructions if it were not forthcoming in the condition in which they preferred it.² Indeed, so late as the reign of Henry VIII, when the English king sent a small expeditionary force to the support of the Spaniards in Guienne, the troops threw down their arms and insisted on being transported home, their grievance being that the beer and beef with which they had been supplied was neither in the quantity nor had the quality to which they were accustomed. None the less, “trade”—which had contrived to salt down 25,000 oxen³ and brew a commensurate quantity of beer, to cater for the wants of a force of little more than brigade strength— was beginning to learn something of what is entailed by war-begotten mass production. And, however faintly, the stock-yards of Chicago and the rum-vats of Jamaica were discernible on the horizon!

The demands on shipwrights occasioned by the Crusades brought about considerable progress in the design of vessels, since the first time in history a wide demand arose for craft capable of making long-distance voyages, loaded to capacity with men, animals, and supplies. Such a ship could only be propelled by sail, since the space in the hull hitherto devoted to the many rowing benches was now required for the men and beasts, together with the considerable store of provisions needed to sustain life throughout the lengthy period spent at sea. New problems arose for the shipwrights and their many associates, whose solution challenged all the resources of contemporary industry. The increased industrial employment of women was yet another outcome—they had long played an important part in the ever-expanding wool trade—since their services were found invaluable in the construction of the silken sails, backed in places with canvas, which the type of craft demanded.

The rise of the English bowman and his consolidation as the dominant figure of the 14th-century battlefield, coinciding with, if not actually occasioning, the far wider scope of battle-fighting, had almost immediate repercussions on the civil life of the community. With an archer who could loose up to twelve aimed shots a minute and have three shafts in the air at one and the same time, the manufacture of arrows took on, by contemporary standards, all the attributes of mass production. More and more fletchers (arrow makers) were apprenticed to and became proficient in a craft demanding a high degree of skill. And with their numerical increase and burgeoning importance, there developed a resolute tendency on the part of the fletchers to band themselves together in a craft-guild, complete with rules and regulations, and not above indulgence in certain restrictive practices which only too faithfully anticipated those favored by certain sections of organized labor today. On the other hand, with all the craftsman’s lively resource, they taxed their inventiveness to the utmost to render the missiles they manufactured ever more protean and effective. Thus there came into use the “screaming” arrow, which wailed like a banshee in its passage through the air, adding the same note of terror to conflict as did the “whistling” bomb employed in the war of 1939-45. At the same time, their ingenuity furnished the bowman with a choice of missiles—the slender “cloth-yard shaft” for long range shooting, and a short, heavy-headed, reinforced “sheaf arrow,” which the archer, pulling his bow-string right to the ear, would discharge point-blank at the armored knight seeking to ride him down, nearly always with the most deadly effect.

In short, spurred by war’s demands on it, industry was already searching for more effective devices, better methods of production, and greater command over the raw materials from which its lethal products were contrived.

Then, in the words of Shakespeare’s disgruntled, innovation-hating “old-timer,” “this villaneous saltpetre” was “digg’d out of the bowels of the harmless earth,” and the world found itself confronted with all the problems that followed on the discovery of gunpowder. For not only did the whole face of war undergo steady transformation, but those industrial forces whose toil made war’s prosecution possible were forced to give very serious thought how best to cope with the new and extended demands that would obviously be made on them.

So far as possible, the manufacture of the propellent itself had to be centralized and brought under responsible control. So state powder mills were promptly established; where industrial technicians were soon busy endeavoring to improve and refine the black grain, with a view towards increasing its potency. It was not long before it was being produced in at least two varieties—the coarse powder to be used as the propellent for the missile, and the fine “corn” powder, “sarsed and sifted, with apothecary’s quick pale . . . first sprinkled over with aqua vitae or strong claret wine,” for priming. Thereafter, the grain was barrelled, which led to a brisk and expanding demand for coopers; the quality of whose work, to meet the need for more close-fitting receptacles, soon improved out of all knowledge.

Another and entirely new industry brought into being by the introduction of cannon into warfare was that of the “shott mason.” His task was to fashion cannon balls from stone, pending the increased production of the iron ore which would permit their manufacture in metal. This called into being a considerable body of specialists and “tradesmen”; as may be gathered from an order promulgated in A.D. 1416, directing John Louth, “clearke of the Ordnance,” and “John Benet of Maidstone, mason,” to repair to the quarries of that fair Kentish town and there recruit “a sufficient number of masons and laborers for the making of seven thousand stone shott for guns of different sorts.” For as a standby, in the event of a shortage of metal balls, stone shot continued to be made and stored even after the mining industry had been put on its feet and was well in a position to meet any call that could be made on it.

With the elementary hoop-bound leather guns being superseded by pieces cast or drilled from the solid ingot, the introduction of cannon foundries speedily brought into being a new kind of craftsman with a growing knowledge of metallurgy. Recruited, in many instances, from erstwhile bell-founders, they brought an enthusiasm and technical accomplishment to their labors which was never content to rest on its oars, but at all times continued eager for experiment. With the arms race that characterized the mid-years of England’s Henry VIII (circa 1528 A.D.), that shrewd and enterprising monarch did not hesitate to bring over from sunny Cesana the three brothers, Raphael, Archangel, and Francis Arcanus, with their workmen and families, to strengthen the staff of the Owen brothers’ celebrated gun- foundry, hard-by the Church of St. Botolph, in London’s Aldgate.

With Hans Popenruyter’s Mechlin foundry turning out superb artillery pieces for all who could afford the stiff price he charged for them and the English gun-founders, Johnson, Tyler, and Walker, seriously rivalling the celebrated Owen brothers, the new “heavy” industry had come to represent all that is meant by “big business”—and all by kind favor of war.

The gradual adoption of the hand gun— arquebus or caliver—led to further demands on industry’s inventiveness and powers of expansion. Thus by its very reliance on what were approximating to mass-produced supplies, war was in a fair way to becoming entirely dependent upon the resource developed by a nation’s industrial economy.

With the increased consumption of iron ore that the new weapons and their missiles involved, mining was vigorously extended; while the need for expanded sphere of operation called for additional expenditure, not only for the mines and the engines of destruction themselves, but for the heavier fortifications, the better roads, the wider canals, and the stronger bridges found necessary to facilitate their transport and supply. All this in turn opened the door to capital investment, loans, mortgages, and all the other appurtenances of high finance. Supported by the stockholder, “heavy industry” started out on that adventurous journey which, with war’s recurrent stimulus to aid it on its way, was to establish it as one of the two most vital of the world’s activities.

The introduction of cannon and gunpowder into sea warfare also exerted a far-reaching influence on the ship-building industry. Up to that time shipwrights had been content to turn out craft which, so long as they could keep afloat and waddle along at two and a half to three knots an hour, did all that was required of them. With the aid of improvised “castles,” erected fore and aft, they could be made to serve temporarily as warships, although their power of maneuver was so slow and clumsy as virtually to be negligible.⁴

But with the necessity to cut gun-ports in the vessels’ sides, through which the new cannon could be brought to bear, the temporary conversion of merchant ships to warlike purposes speedily came to be ruled out. For the gun-deck, cutting the hold horizontally, drastically reduced cargo space, as it debarred the use of sweeps—the long, manhandled oars—and committed the ship to movement under sail alone; a departure into a new technique of propulsion which was accompanied by many novel problems of design. Faced with the necessity to think of his craft as something specifically devoted to warlike purposes, in effect, as a floating gun- platform, the shipwright was forced to reconsider the whole question of layout and construction. Speed of maneuver, for example, could only be assured by balancing the claims of length and beam. The call for speed and maneuverability, indeed, led to the restepping of the masts and, ultimately, to that revolution in sail which goes by the name of fore-and-aft rig. In the outcome, no one benefited more profoundly by the fresh thought brought to bear on ship design than did the mercantile marine—i.e. water-borne industry.

With their new and ever-increasing demands on civilian resources, the wars of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries not only witnessed a revolution in the structure of armies and navies and the methods of warfare employed by them, but saw them emerge as a powerful factor in shaping the industrial economy. At the same time, a tremendous stimulus was given to the development of capitalism. The demands made upon the community at large and upon industry in particular for arming and subsisting a large army and navy inevitably led to important changes in the economic order. To begin with, the need soon arose for the standardization of weapons and the missiles they discharged⁵; with an equal demand for greater range and a nearer approximation to precision in their fire. These were problems which kept the brains of industry at constant pressure, intent as they were on achieving a progressive improvement which one day might lead to near-perfection.

The onus of providing subsistence and something in the nature of a uniform throughout the whole of a campaign, and not for part of the time, as heretofore, was first acknowledged, however grudgingly, by the Tudors. When, at the time of the expedition to the Low Countries of 1589, Queen Elizabeth signed the order directing “And for their apparell yit shall be convenient that you see them furnished with redd clokes, without sleeves, and of a length to the knee, doublets, hose, hatts, boots, and all necessary apparell to the bodies,” the tribe of military tailors came prosperously into being, and have flourished ever since. At the same time, women were brought into public employ as sempstresses to fashion what can only be termed an elementary form of battle-dress, made of a strong, wear-resisting, subfusc material known as tyrtine, hitherto utilised for serving wenches’ working dresses.

The increasing obligation of the state to equip and uniform its fighting forces led in due course to the creation of a great mass market for the sale of a bewildering variety of commodities, from pickled beef and “powdered eggs rammed down in barrels” to that highly ornamental but scarcely practical green and white “No. 1 dress,” issued, at one time, to the Tudor Navy for wear on high days and holidays.⁶ It followed that to meet the heavy demands made upon it entailed industry’s increasing use of machinery and its wholesale employment of labor, in a manner which in every way anticipated the factory system, inseparable from quantity production, which came to widespread fruition with the 19th century’s industrial revolution. For that phenomenon was only the logical outcome of the development of the blast furnace and the adaptation of the Dutch hand-loom which had characterised the reign of Good Queen Bess.

The French, with their new concept of “total” war, in 1793, first harnessed the entire resources of a country to the prosecution of conflict. A levee en masse, although many sought to evade it, lined up the manhood of the nation in the service of the state. A huge conscript force obviously demanded all the resources of the civilian population to arm, equip, munition, and feed it, no less than a high national revenue to yield the taxation required to meet the enormous expense involved in keeping so extensive an army in being. By recklessly extravagant issue of paper scrip in the form of assignats—virtually a kind of promissory note on a somewhat dubitable future prosperity—the wage bill was met for the many state arsenals and factories. The same progressively deteriorating “currency” served for the toilers slaving on government contracts farmed out to private enterprise, while such “hard money” as was in circulation went to line the pockets of such racketeers amongst the administration as Paul Barras and his immediate clique and the venal and unscrupulous entrepreneurs who formed their pinch-penny entourage. But corruption, coupled with a sad want of substantial national resources, had the effect of committing the French Revolutionary armies to purely predatory campaigns —such as those of Holland in 1793 and Italy in 1797—designed rather to replenish yawning coffers than to further any far-reaching strategical concept. For as that Yankee Nathaniel Greene once affirmed, with all the authority of one who had worked miracles with scarcely a dollar at his disposal, “Money is the sinews of war, and without a military chest it is next to impossible to employ an army with effect.”

Matters were not materially improved, from the point of view of finance, with Napoleon’s assumption of power, first as Consul and then as Emperor. The 1803 sale of Louisiana for sixty million francs proved nothing more than a stopgap; and it may fairly be said that throughout the twenty- years’ struggle between the French and the allied forces ranged against them, the superior industrial resources that Britain could place at the disposal not only of her own troops, but of those of her allies, had as much to do with the outcome of the conflict as the fighting quality of Wellington’s well-supplied and well-equipped redcoats and the ubiquity of the British Navy. A superior industrial economy tipped the scale, as it always must in any war of materiel. In the process it greatly enhanced its knowledge of industrial processes and the technique of mass-production—and, withal, not unprofitably!

Such, indeed, was the plenitude and exuberance of British trade resources that they even enabled Napoleon’s legions to take the road to Moscow clad in greatcoats made of Yorkshire woolens and booted with the excellent footwear for which the Midland town of Northampton was so justly famous: “big business,” like art, recognising no frontiers! It has to be recognised, however, that a moiety of the huge profits made by this illicit, if winked-at, traffic was promptly drained off by taxation and diverted into the national Treasury; enabling Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger to keep some of his needier allies in the field by generous subsidies. In effect, a steady flow of Napoleonic gold materially helped to sustain many of the troops by which he continued to be opposed.

It is a point of some significance, however, that with the virtual standstill which had long supervened in the design of cannon and personal firearms,⁷ stagnating inventiveness had made no new calls on industry, no demands for new machinery for the fabrication of novel types of weapons, despite the efforts of the ingenious Robert Fulton and his compatriot, David Bushnell, to interest the authorities in their somewhat precarious torpedoes and submersibles. All that the Powers-that-Be seemed to require was the amplification of existent means of production.

But the great problem of war remained— as it still remains—to raise the power of maneuver so far above that of the enemy that he cannot hinder a superior concentration of fighting strength for the final battle. This was—as it continues to be—very largely a matter of the fighting-man’s own load and the mobility of his supplies, both in munitions and for alimentation.

Since, from the first quarter of the 19th century onward, the tendency was for munitions to increase not only in weight but in variety and number, attention was perforce directed to the task—at first sight, the hopeless task—of reducing the “load” of consumable supplies—food. The long, creaking columns of rumbling bread-wagons, with great herds of cattle—“beef on the hoof”— that lumbered so pedestrianly in an army’s wake, acted always as a dragshot on celerity of movement. So it was upon these that the reforming eye was turned.

So early as the Thirty Years’ War (1618- 48) Wallenstein had succeeded in persuading his bakers to devise and manufacture a type of biscuit that not only remained reasonably fresh and palatable, but demanded infinitely less wagon space for its transportation on the line of march than the bread whose place it came to usurp.⁸ This was an innovation which founded an industry destined to enormous expansion, when the superior “maneuverability” of biscuit came to be recognized. For as Napoleon was quick to remark, “Biscuits make war possible.” This was after he had exchanged the fertile, produce-yielding plains of Italy for the barren wastes of Syria, where Elisha fed no military ravens and supplies were at the mercy of such inadequate transport as could be kept in movement over the difficult terrain. Small wonder, that, when supreme power became his, the little Corsican should have offered a substantial reward for anyone who could perfect a method of preserving field rations, while at the same time reducing their bulk for transportation. The prize was won by a certain Nicholas Appert, whose method of preserving carcass meat was distinctly in advance of his device of a glass container in which to transport it. For the weight and fragility of the container greatly militated against the general utility of the innovation, from the point of view of an army in the field.

But all unknown to Nicholas Appert and others working along similar lines, industrial experiments were going forward in England which resulted in the production of a variety of tinplate which could be relied upon not to contaminate its contents if utilised as a receptacle for food.

Thus by 1813 the London firm of Donkin and Hall were able to supply the Royal Navy with a small quantity of meat in theoretically airtight tinplate containers. Labelled boeuf bouilli, with rough-tongued sailors impatient of the niceties of foreign pronunciation, it soon came to be given that name of “bully beef” by which it was to become known, with only too painful a familiarity, to its military consumers in all parts of the world. After a rather discouraging start, following a further try-out with certain Arctic expeditions, it found general acceptance aboard Her Majesty’s ships, where it was compared not unfavorably with its immediate predecessor—maggoty “salt horse.” The British soldier made unenthusiastic acquaintance with it during the Kaffir War of 1851-2, and it also put in a tentative appearance in the Crimea. There is also mention of canned meat during the War Between the States; when John William de Forrest, novelist and Captain of the 12th Connecticut Volunteers, noted down in his diary for July, 1864, that, at Georgetown Heights he had received a present from the Sanitary Commission of “a sort of food in tins” and some “tinned milk”; which selfsame tinned milk had first been marketed in Connecticut in 1848.

By the time of the Ashanti campaign of 1873, improvements in canning methods had succeeded in establishing “bully” as the staple of the active service ration. And with that the stock-yards of Chicago and the tinplate industry of South Wales started on that road to expansion along which, but for the demands of war, their progress would certainly have been far less speedy, even if they had embarked upon it at all.

If the conflict of 1793-1815 was the first clash between nations which saw the acceptance of the principle of “total” war, the Secessionist struggle can no less be characterised as the first major war of materiel. For it is no reflection on the gallantry and resolution of the troops fighting under the Federal banner to affirm that the victory of the North was appreciably aided by the superior industrial resources at President Lincoln’s command. Furthermore, Herman Haupt’s staggering demonstration of the facile manner in which the railroad could be made to serve the purposes of war went by no means unremarked, particularly in Prussia. Whereafter, Moltke’s strategic network of railways, reaching out ever nearer to the Gallic frontier, concentrated universal attention on the part the “iron horse” was obviously destined to play in all future conflict; and the mining, engineering, and iron and steel industries, with a host of ancillary activities, benefited accordingly.

Incidentally, the crusade to lighten the soldier’s personal load scored another victory, and industry found yet another fruitful opportunity for enterprise, when Napoleon III saw the possibility of utilising aluminum for the manufacture of water bottles, mess-kits, and the like. At the outset, the prohibitive cost of the metal, at $16.00 an ounce, threatened to inhibit its widespread adoption for military purposes. But industry was far from blind to the possibilities lurking in this new field of production; and in 1886 an American inventor succeeded in perfecting a process for freeing the aluminum from its ore by the employment of electricity, and the price fell well within the limit of economic consideration. Thus the way was paved by the demands of war which led not only to the build-up of a stupendous aircraft industry, ultimately utilising up to 80% of aluminum in the construction of its monster planes, but to the widespread use of the metal in the fabrication of everyday commodities, for use by the civil population.

The development of weapons of war, strangely halted for something over a hundred years, got into its stride again with the adoption, in 1803, of Major Henry Shrapnel’s “spherical case,” by the perfection of the percussion cap by Alexander Forsyth in 1806, and by the production of Colonel Boxer’s device of the brass cartridge in 1866. All were inventions which had an immediate effect on the general prosperity of industry, while the Bessemer process of hardening steel grew out of the dissatisfaction over the inefficient cannon employed in the Crimea. The strong, durable steel alloys, so essential to automobile manufacture, were first developed for use in the construction of the “ironclad” immediately gave rise to a demand for more powerful propellents by which its armored sheath could be penetrated. So the Swedish scientist, Alfred Nobel, renewed the experiments with Sobrero’s compound of nitroglycerine, which he had begun in 1863.⁹ By “harnessing” nitro-glycerine to certain solid substances he produced, among other things, a violent explosive which he named dynamite; and while mining and quarrying reaped the immediate benefit, it became feasible to inaugurate the long-term project of piercing the Alps—together with many other hitherto impenetrable obstructions— with those tunnels which added so tremendously to the facilities of travel by rail. Thus from locomotive and coach builders to the exporter and the hotelier, a tremendous number of people came to benefit from an invention inspired, originally, by the needs of war.

The world struggle of 1914-18 gave an astounding impetus to research and to production methods, particularly in the fields of the internal combustion engine and aerodynamics.

It is almost impossible, in these days of motorised infantry, self-propelled guns, and the ubiquitous jeep, to realise that the British Expeditionary Force of 1914 went overseas with horse-drawn artillery, less than a dozen mechanical-transport “Service” companies, and an allotment of eight automobiles to an infantry division. It is true that the tank was an innovation of that period; but at the outset its performance was so problematical and vagarious that its sponsors experienced great difficulty in advancing its legitimate claims to continued attention.

Even greater strides were made in the war of 1939-45. The mobility of the infantry was vastly increased, as their protection against tank action was bettered by increasingly effective anti-tank weapons. Armored cars took the place of the erstwhile cavalry screen; while the tank, like the aeroplane, underwent swiftly progressive improvement. For there was all the difference in the world between the clumsy, uncertain mastodons of September, 1916, and the superbly efficient “Shermans” of 1942; between the precarious “banana crate” that took the air in 1914 and the “Hurricanes” and “Mustangs” that lorded it in the skies thirty years later. The introduction of the snorkel breathing device gave the submarine an added maneuverability and extended underwater life undreamed of by the “submariners” of the earlier conflict, although such detection devices as “Asdic” served very largely to redress the balance.

Coal, iron, steel, chrome, nickel, tungsten, bauxite, and, above all, oil were demanded of industry in hitherto unheard-of quantity; and to meet the demand it was under the necessity not only of surviving the strains and stresses of its own expansion, but of amplifying, accelerating, and “streamlining” its methods of production—a process from which its subsequent peace-time activities could not fail to benefit.

Perhaps the most striking war-begotten contribution of industrial science to conflict —and to industry’s own future—was the perfection of that method of detecting an aeroplane’s position and course which came to be known as radar. For it was a device which undoubtedly would have long lingered in the experimental stage but for the demands of an air service in a position to underwrite the cost of experiment and research.

When Hitler, in March, 1936, marched into the Rhineland unopposed and virtually unrebuked, the Luftwaffe was already a mounting threat to any country within range of its potential activities. But a good year earlier Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding had begun to concentrate his energies on the production of a fighter plane with a speed of three hundred miles an hour and an armament of eight machine guns. With the stage set for another tussle with Germany, and London—the seat of government and the hub of commerce and industry—as inviting and helpless a target as could well be offered, only a screen of such fast-moving, hardhitting machines could hope to furnish anything in the way of adequate protection. But Dowding and the Air Staff were perfectly well aware that the punch which these fighters could deliver would be of little avail if it could not be scientifically thrust home at the right place at the right time. Warning and control were the dual keys for any defensive plan for Britain in general and London in particular; for it was obviously impossible to provide standing patrols on a large enough scale to prove effective.

But up to the end of 1935 the only available means of warning were by sound detector and visual observation. Even the most efficient sound-detector had a range of only sixteen miles at most. Yet it was obvious that if the enemy were to be turned back before he had a chance of effectively dropping his bomb-load, it would be necessary to intercept him well off the English coast

For a time the problem seemed insoluble. Then news reached Dowding and the Air Staff that a Scottish scientist, Robert Wat- son-Watt, had been experimenting at the National Physics Laboratory with the use of radio waves for direction finding; his object, at that time, being of no greater significance than to follow the movements of thunder storms! Called upon to adapt and improve his embryonic device for the purpose of detecting aeroplanes, in a remarkably short time he had devised a primitive kind of radar equipment capable of picking up an aircraft at a range of eight miles. With rare and refreshing percipience, the Air Council immediately promised the scientist every possible support, while even the Treasury was persuaded to open its purse-strings sufficiently to provide the money for further research.

By March, 1936, Watson-Watt was able to demonstrate that radar’s magic eye could now detect and report the range, direction, and approximate height of an airplane flying seventy-five miles out to sea. Begotten of imminent war and subsidised at the instance of far-sighted men who perceived its infinite possibilities, radar had come swiftly into being. By the same token, a new industry had been born, which could look for progressive prosperity so long as vessels sailed the ocean and aircraft sped down the traffic- ways of the sky.

Jet propulsion was yet another innovation whose development war conditions enormously accelerated, while its effect on the expansion of the engineering and allied industries has not yet reached its zenith.

The most recent major conflict also provided an answer to the problem of nuclear fission. If that solution first expressed itself in the form of the terror-inspiring atomic bomb, that is not to say that the possibility does not exist of harnessing the energy provided by nuclear fission to more constructive domestic purposes. Such is the belief of at least one optimistic individual, who was recently reported by a London newspaper to have cancelled the contract for a central heating installation of the orthodox pattern, in the firm belief that the time is close at hand when his radiators will be warmed by regular infusions of atomic energy!

For that matter, the fabrication of the atomic bomb has already made a preliminary contribution to commerce. For the demand by atomic installations for new and even more robustly resistant metals has turned the technicians’ attention to the possibilities embodied in the long-neglected titanium, germanium, and zirconium. The value of these esoteric substances has already been persuasively demonstrated, with the result that the American production of titanium has leaped from thirty tons in 1952 to an anticipated 10,000 tons in the current year.

All of which serves to drive home the lesson of the vital part played by industrial science in war, as it equally lends emphasis to the fact that many an industry might well have lagged behind its opportunities had it not been given that impetus that only warfare can be relied upon to furnish.

Nor should it be forgotten that, with its ability to provide money accommodation for the fighting services’ needs, high finance has been among the first to benefit from the increasing scale upon which wars have come to be fought, and the extended demand on handsomely remunerated privately-owned industrial resources which they have entailed. As the economist, Alvin H. Hansen, has commented:

“The development of credit institutions made possible the financing of wars in a manner which added stimulus to the economy through the net additions of purchasing power injected into the community through the use of credit. . . . Thus the emergence of private and especially public credit institutions aided the waging of expensive wars, and these, in turn, powerfully reinforced the development of modern credit economy.”

Hansen’s verdict can stand; although whether expanding credit made possible the extension of war, or whether extending war rendered feasible the expansion of credit, is rather in the nature of the old conundrum, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

Lurking in the stupendous expansion of industry begotten by war there lies, of course, the grave danger of over-standardization, with its inherent bias towards too great a centralization and its abiding threat to individuality, to those diversities of taste and preference which form the only barrier restraining human nature’s descent to the grey, inhuman, unsentient level of the robot.

However that may be, there is no getting away from the fact that war has progressively had the effect of stimulating and intensifying organised human effort in the realms of industry to the highest possible pitch; that the debt which industry owes to war is in no degree smaller or less significant than the debt that war itself owes to industry.

Ethically, that may be something very seriously to be deplored. But if war be regarded not as a moral but simply as a human problem, it will be seen that not once nor twice in the world’s long history has a great people reached a point where only the stimulus of danger from outside enemies has served to spur them to make those efforts which have ended in their own salvation as communities.

In these days war has acquired a peculiarly odious name—mainly, one submits, because it has ceased to be the business of a limited number of “professionals” and becomes everybody’s business. In the past a good eighty-five per cent of the community was free to regard it as a righteous, patriotic and entirely glorious activity . . . since there was virtually no chance of their being called upon to take an active part in it. Hell knows no fury like that of a noncombatant!

Nowadays, all the impassioned gibes and denunciation that used to be hurled—at a safe distance—at the head of the enemy are reserved for war qua war itself.

But the basic fact remains unaltered—it takes two to make a bargain, whereas only one is required to start a fight.

In these days of rampaging totalitarian imperialism it is imperative to face up to the cold, hard fact that the only alternative to submission and bondage is a readiness—- moral and actual—to fight through to victory in war. “No nation can afford to be a carp in a pond where there are pike.”

“ . . . men are hastened still

To evil to guard against worse ill”

In accepting this ineludible responsibility, it is as well to profit by such consolation as is to be found in the fact that, through war’s gargantuan amplification, the world’s inventive faculties and industrial processes have been expanded and improved on a far greater scale than would have been even remotely possible without the tingling urgency that strife alone can stimulate.

That, at least, should be put to war’s contra-account before it is condemned out of hand as lacking a solitary redeeming virtue.