A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
ONE startling, perhaps I should say appalling, sentence in a despatch from Times correspondent at Shanghai one day this week has, so far as I have seen, provoked no comment anywhere. " From one aeroplane," he wrote, " two bombs were seen to drop where Tibet Road crossed Avenue Edward VII. Then followed immediately a huge belch of red flame and a tremendous explosion. These two bombs killed 45o persons and wounded 85o. They also destroyed 12 motor- cars." Another pair, dropped elsewhere, produced similar though rather less devastating, results. It was estimated that in last week's air exercises over London some zo per cent. of the bombers reached their objective—say 40 out of 200 in a normal attack in a future war. When all allowance is made for the congestion of a Chinese city and the absence of effective shelter the possibilities, opened up by the object- lessons spread before us are, to repeat, appalling. Inciden- tally, a new danger is suggested if there is anything in the explanation of the Chinese aviators that the bombs responsible for the carnage were not released by them, but fell because the bomb-racks were injured by anti-aircraft fire. That may be technically impossible, but no expert seems to have said so. Air-bombing may some day be prohibited by international convention, but it is hard to believe that a nation in extremities would refrain from resorting to a weapon so potent unless it were certain that its action would bring on it not merely retaliation by its enemy but collective punish- ment.
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