The Air Defence of Great Britain W E cannot blame the
Air Ministry for the meagre amount of information it has given us concerning the recent manoeuvres over London. Such reserve is dictated not only by the desire to keep strategic secrets. Another reason, we believe, is that there is and must remain a considerable uncertainty both as to the effects of aerial bombardment and as to the best means of combating it. A saving of £850,000 was announced in the last Air Estimates as a result of the retardation to 1982 of a complete scheme of air defence. Perhaps such a saving was wise, for these manoeuvres will enable the Air Staff to make its plans unhampered by a fixed formula, which in the changing conditions of this new form of warfare would soon become out of date. But we trust that retrenchment and delay will not be carried to dangerous limits, for if we are to spend money on self-defence at all, it is of vital importance that we should be strong in the air.
A further reason for caution on the part of the Air Ministry may be attributed to a desire not to fall foul of the senior Services by urging too strongly its own claim to public support. The importance of the air to Great Britain is becoming so obvious and overwhelming that the Air Ministry may consider it advisable to allow the public to form its own opinion without pointing a moral. However that may be, the average citizen, on whom the brunt of the bombs will fall if there is to be another war, must take immediate account of the situation as far as he can follow it. The materials are scanty, but the lesson to be drawn from what we know is obvious. Our happy breed of men is no longer protected against " the envy of less happier lands." We can cozen ourselves no longer with our silver sea : a modern bomber can cross it in ten minutes. Nor is there any real defence against bombing, except more bombing. Consider the area of Greater London alone. It covers 700 square miles : a huge target which may be hit without ever being seen, by means of directional wireless, and a target, moreover, on which every hit is a bull's-eye, for it will effect its purpose of shaking the morale of our people. Above this 700 square miles there are three or four miles of generally cloudy air in which the attackers may hide. During the recent manoeuvres a hundred tons of bombs could have been dropped on London, in spite of time limits and other safety restrictions. Little could have been done to save us from " infection and the hand of war." Flame and poison would have been our portion. If the imagination cannot portray or memory does not recall the nerve-shattering effects of such raids (and of sprayed poison from the clouds we have as yet had no experience), we need only consider what happened recently at Hamburg when some cylinders of phosgene gas broke open. The gas left a trail of victims in its wake, and its effects were felt six miles away. Invisible and murderous, such poisons have altered, by a process of simplification, the whole problem of strategy. Hitherto it has been necessary to destroy the armed forces of the enemy State. Nowadays it will be simpler to kill its women and children. That, baldly stated, is the truth about modern war.
We need not exaggerate the loss of life which would occur in air raids, nor the speed with which our morale would be broken. We are a stubborn people, and would probably resist the inevitable panic and disorganizations of this new insanity better than other nations. But such a cancelling-out of atrocities as is entailed in bombing opera- tions between civilized nations is a reductio ad absurdum of war. No statesman in any sane country would face it.
Europe, however, remains an armed camp, and we have Soviet Russia close to us in India. We are very far from suggesting disarmament as an immediate possibility, but we do demand a reconsideration of our problems of defence as a whole. We spend £180,000,000 a year on defence ; of this only £19,000,000 is spent on the Air Force. The proportion is all wrong. To go into details is impossible here, but we believe it would be possible to save millions on the total cost and yet have a stronger Air Force. One obvious measure to be taken is to promote civil aviation by every means in our power, for it is gener- ally recognized now that commercial aircraft are efficient bomb-carriers, and that the only real defence against bombing, as we have already said, is measures of re- prisal. According to Mr. Hoover, one-third of the existing air lines in the United States, although wholly unsubsidized, are already paying a fair return on invested capital, and others are nearing that goal. On the day this is written, we learn that Imperial Airways has declared a dividend of five per cent. A big mercantile air fleet could be made to pay, and our Imperial air route's, properly manned, would serve the double purpose of laying a good and economic foundation for aerial defence, and of opening up territories of inestimable value to us in the future. • Now that war has become an affair not of opposing armies, but of populations that must terrify each other into submission, we may take comfort from the fact that it has also become less and less probable. To one who saw, as the present writer did, something of the arrange- ments for the defence of London, the dominating impres- sion was that real war in the air could not last long. The pace would be too hot. He himself dropped bombs in 1915, but that was child's play compared to the whole- sale slaughter that would be involved in 1928. He saw, last week, the Siskin fighter squadrons at Northolt, waiting for the six o'clock zero hour ; one of the young pilots who flew up from the ground at 1,000 feet a minute and then flew at 100 miles an hour to the attack, was a little later parachuting down on to a roof in Richmond, having jumped from his flaming scout. That, of course, would be the least of many minor thrills in real war. Our pilots may even be asked to ram the enemy bombers—the project has been considered, at any rate. And " formation diving " on the enemy is breathless work enough in all conscience, for the speed is something over two hundred miles an hour and the distance from wing-tip to wing-tip something under ten yards, so that the slightest eyelash-flicker of inatten- tion may mean a collision. Small wonder that it requires two years' training to make a scout pilot. One's pulses quicken at the glory of those swooping scouts and those great bombers spitting death. That would be clean fighting, but unless civilization were to agree to a kind of joust of knights, blasting and asphyxiation would follow for those below. All night long in a room at Uxbridge, sleepy-eyed Staff-officers recorded the combats by moving coloured discs on a large map. The clocks and charts and counters here made a very ingenious system of control. Our air defence is said to be the best in the world and there is no reason to doubt it. But it can only mitigate the calamities of aerial war. It can no more save us from death and destruction from the sky than can the Army or Navy. Our best safety is in a merchant service by air such as we have by sea (supported, of course, by a permanent Air Force), convertible should the nec•...sity arise into bomb carriers. Then some day, when war is but a memory of man's ascent from the apes, we may be able to use all our skill and resources in flying to quicken communications and to kindle friendship throughout the world.
To be strong in the air is common sense to-day. To spend large sums on other arms is at least of doubtful value. Yet we are weak where we should be strong and lavish where we should count the pennies. We must take courage to face this change in modern war and our insular safety. For useless armaments we must substitute weapons to engage in the chemical conflicts of to-morrow, should that to-morrow come. If it does not, and a brighter dawn arrives, we shall still be gainers. A scout aeroplane hurtling through clouds and darkness at two hundred miles per .hour needs a hero to ride it. That is a good thing. The world still needs heroes and adven- ture and always will need them. But we also need peace. In flying we may find both.
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