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Aviation History
1934
1934 - 0092.PDF
FLIGHT, FEBRUARY 1, 1934 At such a time it is refreshing to read the very sane and sensible article on the subject in the Daily Telegraph of January 29, written by Mr. Hector By- water, the naval correspondent of the paper. To read it is like a dose of quinine to a fever-stricken patient. To begin with, he makes excuses for the extremists of each cause, saying that all three Services have been on "a starvation diet for years, and that hunger is not conducive to calm judgment. He admits the backwardness of all three Services, and also admits that it is impossible to bring all three immediately up to a full state of efficiency. " Even our long- suffering taxpayers would rebel at the colossal sum needed to restore the Services to a reasonable stan- dard of strength." But a beginning must be made, and in making this beginning the Government mustj think of the defence of the country and the Empire as a whole, and not show favouritism to any one Service. " As for the spokesmen of the three Services, it is incumbent on them to emancipate themselves from the habit of single-track thinking." These last are words of great wisdom, and we hope that they will be taken to heart. A great deal of time and energy is wasted in dis- cussions about what is the most important element in fighting efficiency. One hears the same sort of argument taking place inside each Service. In the Army some will say " You cannot do without big guns (or tanks, or engineers, or infantry), and there- fore they are the most important thing and the first money available must be spent on them." It is equally true that the Army cannot function without food, and it would therefore be true to say that the most important thing is the Royal Army Service Corps. There are many elements each of which is a sine qua non, but to admit that of one element does not prove the lesser importance of some other element. The air extremist says " London is vulner- able to air attack, and if it were destroyed the war would be lost, and so the most important thing is to have an overwhelming air defence force." It is quite true. It is equally true that if the Navy could not defend our trade routes the country would be starved and again the war would be lost; but the naval extremist who says that for that reason all the money should go to the Navy to the exclusion of the Air F"orce has equally gone astray. Both Services must be strong enough to play their proper part in defence, and the man who would spend the country's all on only one or on only the other, because he personally is interested in the air or in the water, is not a wise adviser. To quote Mr. By water again, " It is easy to perceive that a com- plete enthusiast, armed with plenary power, might with the best will in the world plunge his country; nto the abyss. ... An invincible Navy could do iiothing to shield London and a third of Great Britain from air attack, the moral effects of which are notoriously out of all proportion to the material damage inflicted. Conversely, an Air Force second 11 none would be powerless to prevent the starvation of our home population through the wholesale sink- ing of food ships in the Channel, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean." In fact, it is incumbent on the sane airman to want to see the Navy strong, and it is equally incumbent on a sane sailor to want the Air Force to be adequate for its duties. When we write '' Air Force,'' we mean the command Air Defence of Great Britain, for the Fleet Air Arm, as its name implies, is part of naval defence. All alike want to see the Fleet Air Arm made stronger, pro- 92 vided that naval opinion is satisfied that carriers are not unduly vulnerable craft. Mr. Bywater treads warily in just touching on the subject of whether aircraft attack seriously endangers the battleship or large cruiser. On the one hand, he k a naval correspondent; on the other, he has in this article shown himself a broadminded man, more patriot than partisan. We may certainly agree with him in discounting the proposition of the air extremist, that a wyarship stands no chance against determined attack by aircraft. This proposition, he says, rests partly on theory and partly on incomplete experiments, which suggest much but prove nothing. Theories usually need the test of actual war before they can be pronounced right or, wrong. Mr. Bywater gives it as his considered opinion that mass attack from the air might prove disastrous to a battle- ship or cruiser of conventional type, but that certain modifications in ship design would much diminish the danger. In other words, he would expect that in war some ships would be sunk by aircraft, but that most of them would survive. That sort of thing is what usually happens when a new weapon is first used in war. It is seldom that any weapon achieves and holds for long the supremacy won by the long bow in the Hundred Years' War. It would be a useful exercise for FLIGHT and its readers to take Mr. Bywater's advice, to forget for the moment their special interest in aircraft, and to ask themselves candidly " should we be gratified or terri- fied if it were proved that an Air Force could sink a fleet nine times out of ten? " The air extremists would be able to chuckle and say, " I told you so," but would the safety of Great Britain be increased or diminished by such a result? Probably even the most extreme air enthusiast would confess that in that case his home would be less safe than if the Navy proved itself able to survive. If the British Fleet were to be sunk by enemy aircraft, Great Britain would be lost indeed, and the British Empire would come to an end. It follows that the sentiment which inspires a hope of air supremacy over naval power is misconceived. Patriotic hopes must tend in the other direction. Of course the real business is to deal with facts and not with hopes, and if it were to be proved that air power had brought sea power to an end, we should have to face the disastrous fact. With real thankfulness of heart we may conclude that our rleet is likely to survive the worst that any enemy aircraft may do to it. That enemy fleets may also survive the attacks of our Air Force is less disturbing, for the British Navy has always been able to deal with enemy fleets, and in any case sea power means less to any European country than it means to us. It follows that we, even we of the aeronautical world, must hope that the coming Estimates will do some- thing substantial towards restoring the efficiency of the Royal Navy, as well as doing something sub- stantial for Air Defence of Great Britain. It is the duty also of those who are interested in the Navy to hope for more A.D.G.B. squadrons in the coming Estimates. We are not much interested in the calculation which places Great Britain as fifth or sixth nation in number of warlike aircraft. Aircraft are not all of one genus, and there are different functions for the different classes. We repeat, what is chiefly needed for the Royal Air Force is a substantial in- crease in the number of squadrons in the command Air Defence of Great Britain.
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