AIR-POWER SPRINGBOARDS
By J. M. SPA1GHT
WE have been passing through a depressing phase of the war in the last four months, culminating in the sinking of the ' Cornwall ' and Dorsetshire,' and (still worse) the ' Hermes ' in the second week of April. Misfortune has been following hot-foot
upon misfortune. It is hardly surprising that there should be a certain amount of pessimism to be discerned among our people. Yet, on a long view, the outstanding lesson of the past months has been the enormous and increasing power of the air arm, and we and the United States are going to be terribly—I use the word
advisedly—strong in the air. We are going to be stronger than the Axis in all categories of lethal machinery. This, as no war ever before, is a war of machinery—on the ground, on and under the water, and, above all, in the air. We have had demonstrated to us beyond all possibility of questioning the importance of getting lethal machinery into the air at the place and of the kind and quantity that matter and are requisite. The machinery thus made air-borne must have platforms from which it can be hoisted into the air and to which it can return in due course. These platforms may be either fixed (aerodromes on land) or mobile (aircraft-carriers at sea). They are an absolutely essential element of air-power. We hear less of them than of numbers of aircraft or of air-crews' strength, but they are in fact just as important. They are the first of four constituent parts of a country's air-power. The four are these:—(1) The platforms. (2) Protection for them and for the machinery of which they constitute the base. (3) Better and more fighters than the enemy can put into the air. (4) An ample supply of bomber and torpedo-carrying aircraft to destroy the enemy's corresponding platforms, in addition to carrrIng out other operations of an offensive kind.
Our disasters in the Far East were due to the failure to make or .
maintain the necessary arrangements to satisfy these four require- ments, and especially the first three. Perhaps there was lacking something of the wise restraint of Jellicoe, who knew that "he could lose the war in an afternoon," and, in that knowledge, ventured with scientific caution. Farragut's " Damn the torpedoes " is heroic but dangerous in modern war. It was, however, the other causes to which reference has been made that were responsible most of all for our loss of Malaya and the loss of the Dutch islands. The evidence is to be found in the crucial events of the rather confused series which led up to those losses. They were events in which air- power was involved in a kind of vicious circle, influencing each issue and itself being affected by it in turn. What were these events?
The first was the sinking of the ' Prince of Wales' and 'Repulse'
on December 9th through the enemy's wise prescience and good fortune in having his flying machinery and the platform for it just at the right place and in the necessary strength—and our omission to provide an " air-umbrella " for the warships. The result was to
leave the waters round Malaya wide open to the enemy to enable him to plant his own platforms in the peninsula. The second event was the loss to us and the acquisition by the enemy of the many platforms which we had taken such pains to provide all down the length of the Malayan peninsula. The most important of them were the aerodromes at Kota Bharu, which changed hands early in December, and at Kuantan, which fell after hard fighting
early in January. We were left without the means of ge lethal machinery into the air and the enemy became posses abundant facilities for that purpose. The loss of Singapore in February followed. The third crucial event was the sinking U.S. aircraft tender 'Langley ' by air-attack on February 27th. had as cargo enough fighter-aircraft to have turned the scales air over Java and given the deferiders a reasonable measure superiority. The destruction of the .vessel led inevitably to loss of that vitally important base.
Java was undoubtedly overrun largely because there Was or no defence in the air. It was the lack of modern high-pert fighters and of protection for the airfields (platforms again) made the position hopeless. Dutch officers who escaped from island after the fall of Bandoeng early in March disclosed that of their battalions had become demoralised under the strain of tinuous and heavy bombing, without any hope of assistance from aircraft of the United Nations. The fighters used by the g Dutch airmen were mainly Curtiss Hawks, that is, fighters su those used by the French Air Army in 1939. They had no performance and inadequate fire-power. Still more out-of machines were used in Singapore in the last stages of the def Obsolete Wildebeeste biplanes, which might well have been red to scrap before the war began, took off, it was disclosed war correspondent on February nth, to try to halt the Jap advance. " It makes me ashamed of myself," he said, " sitting (Singapore) with my heart beating faster than their old motors, I think what chance those lads have of getting back in their quated machines." We had Hurricanes, too, in Singapore, but were quite hopelessly outnumbered. The American Bre Buffaloes were hardly of higher performance than the Japanese N O fighters, but they did some good work.
" If we can meet the enemy on anything like equal terms can beat him from the skies," said Sir Richard Peirse, the Officer Commanding-in-Chief in India, on March 15th, 1942. assuredly we can. The Japanese Air Force is good against t on the surface, especially when they are not very well protect its work against warships which had no fighter screen has been th rate. It is much less impressive in the domain of horizontal warfare—and heaven help it when it comes up against strong fe tions of our Spitfire V or Hurricane II fighters, not co mention Typhoon or the latest American fighters. They will go thro it like a sharp knife. But we cannot expect to win with a sot ersatz air-power, and that is what we have been trying to el the Far East—with unhappy results. The miracle would have lc if they had not been unhappy.
Japan's successes have been due to her grasp and exploitation the possibilities of the air-borne lethal machine plus the netts platform in the right place. She cannot keep them up, aim because her constructional capacity is low—probably no greater about to per cent. of that of the United States. She is bound go down in the air before the latter's massed strength. We s strike, too ; but our main preoccupation must be for the p with Europe and the Middle East. We shall not be able to of much else when Germany's mighty war-machine moves ag on her eastern and south-eastern fronts and in North Africa. In case, our Air Force will be fairly fully taken up with making industrial plant in the Reich a replica of the Renault one March .3rd) and each transportation centre a fair copy of Lu (post March 28th) before it can give its full attention to the East. Then we from the west and the Americans from the 01 Australians, too, will have to " bite " forward into the occuP territories, to establish the necessary platforms, strongly defod and secure from infiltration, and to blast the Japanese platfo to smithereens and to destroy the Japanese flying machinery by vertical and horizontal attack. Already—and nothing could be significant—American mobile air-flotillas have been dealing fai with Japan's nerve-centres at Tokyo, Yokohama and elsovh Whether 1942 is destined to be the year "made glorious by sun of York " or a longer-term plan is needed, there is shadow of doubt about our capacity to see it through, how long it takes.
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