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Aviation History
1944
1944 - 0772.PDF
4°4 FLIGHT Where Hat lies The Post*<war Responsjbjji GENERAL MONTGOMERY, in his bo*k Air Power,"" makes the very signiftca; that the battle of the air must be won battles on sea or land are begun. This means in effect that the Royal Air Force has become Britain's most important fighting Service, on which the whole success or failure of war depends. To appreciate how this affects the aircraft industry we must consider what it is that determines the success or failure of battles in the air. In the "Battle of Britain" the odds against us were ten to one, and yet we came out victors. To say that this was entirely due to the famous "J^w" is, with all due respect to them, a slight misrepresentation of the facts. If, instead of having Spitfires and Hurricanes in that battle, our equip ment had been Bulldogs or Furies, I think everyone will agree that the result would have been just one more defeat for us. The effect of the technical superiority of our fighters over the German equipment at that time is well known. But what is perhaps not fully realised yet is just how important the quality of the fighting tool is in modern war. The morale of the pilot, for instance, with' the 1 letter machine is bound to be higher than that of his enemy who knows what he is up against. The Germans, 1 believe, took great pains to conceal their true casualties in the " Battle of Britain " for just this reason. CA /O */y \y APRIL I3TH' I944 e won ircraft Industry Iht this controversial article our contributor advances the view that in the next war it will be the aircraft industry which will decide the issue, and that it is upon the tools available rather than on the men who use them that success or failure depend. Machine-operator Fighter But this is not the only effect of better equipment. The man using the more advanced fighting weapons such as aircraft is playing a rdle that is approaching more to that of a machine operator rather than that of a fighter, in the way the Commando is a fighter, for instance. He can only fight his machine within the limits for which it was designed, and no amount of courage or skill on his part will increase its speed, fire power or other decisive fighting qualities. The "best pilots, I believe, are those who can keep cool and calculating minds, minds that are continually working with the same mechanical precision as their machines; such old-tyja*?" fighting assets as excessive bravery, blind courage and so on, may now be more of a danger. A brave pilot might fight his battle till his petrol was exhausted, or engage superior machines against which he stood little chance of success. Circumstances might be such that his loss would lower the morale of his own side. In modern mobile warfare, a planned retreat may become more than ever a tactical move for victory. To explain the point more clearly, one might say that modern war is like mechanical production of commodities. In industry, machines weave the cloth, cut the metal and do the actual work, while man's role has become that of servant to the machine, to keep it running. So in war^* machines—shells, guns, aircraft, bombs—do the kijkng, while man's role is that of their operator. The mine, torpedo and shell ars all weapons that do the work of killing with only remote guidance by man. As weapons develop, we shall probably have bombers and • fighters without crews—worked by radio—for the tendency seems to be towards annihilating the enemy from ever greater distances. - One result of this is that the men who now take the real responsibility for the country's success or failure in war are no longer the products of institutions like Dart- nwell or Sandhurst, but the designers, men and other technicians in the engineering u«ry. The credit for success in future battles will go sjpto people like Sydney Camm and R. J. Mitchell, and omy secondly to the Montgomeries and the Tedders. Factories such as Vickers and Hawkers will claim the first credit for the victories, much as regiments have done in the past, and the defeats will reflect back on the makers of the weapons used rather than on the men who serve them in battle. But the most significant effect will be that war will begin long before the politicians have decided ' who the enemy or allies are to be. The most important part of the fighting will take place in the design offices and works of the weapon-making industries, which must utilise the peace, to strive for technical superiority, for only on this will future wars be won. One might perhaps even say with truth that the '' Battle of Britain'' was won in the drawing-offices and works of Supermarine's and- Hawker's in the years before the war started! All this, if appreciated as it should be, is not going to allow the aircraft industry (or at least its design side) to sink back for a rest after its efforts in this war. So long as there is a danger of war on the horizon, the air craft industry must be continually fighting -for technical superiority. This will mean that our ridiculously inade quate engineering colleges will have to be swollen to the dimensions of Sandhurst or Cranwell. Because the hall-mark of good engineering is the ease with which its products can be used, aircraft of the future will not need nearly such trained crews to fly them, and what crews (if any) they do need will probably be engineers first and foremost. Training engineers takes many years longer than teach ing people to use the things they manufacture, and one has only to consider the skill required by makers of cars, and the time it takes to learn to drive, to appreciate this. In order to fight this peacetime war, therefore, we must have a large standing army of "backroom boys," or trained engineers, in addition to soldiers and pilots. Secret Industry The aircraft factories themselves will have to undergo a change. Some of them will have to remain little short of secret arsenals, with no commercial interests through which potential enemies might gain access to their secrets. Furthermore, since they are likely to be the first targets in another war, as will be the homes of their employees, their layout and location will have to be altered in case (as in Germany now) the anti-bomber defences become inadequate. I suppose that to be doubly safe, the air craft industry and its supporting population had better be buried beneath the earth in case we should happen again to lose the first round in the next war. All this talk of the next war must, I know, "sound foolish when we still have a long way to go in this one. But when the peace comes, the aircraft industry will have to carry this heavy responsibility of the nation's security if other wars are going to occur. That there will be other wars may, of course, be a point of doubt. But since war seems to be the only effective cure for unemployment that man has practised, it is hardly likely that we are going to change our ideas,' scrap our huge weapon-making industries, and accept this alternative instead. Or are we^
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