FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1953
1953 - 1392.PDF
546 FLIGHT, 16 October 1953 SERVICE AVIATION Royal Air Force and Fleet Air Arm News PRINCE OF WALES' FEATHERS: The Fighter Command aerobatic team from Duxford break upwards, outwards and onwards at the end of their display—described on page 532—for the Swedish visitors at Waterbeach last week. ON PREVENTING WAR: A NOTABLE SPEECH BY LORD TEDDER BRIEF reference was made in our columns last week to the important Air League luncheon which took place at the Mansion House, London, and at which the Lord Mayor presided. Air Chief Marshal Sir Guy Garrod, chairman of the Council of the Air League of the British Empire, first proposed the toast of "The Lord Mayor and the Corporation of London," and his short but apposite speech, like the reply by the Lord Mayor, was clearly much appreciated by the 180- odd guests present. The principal speaker was Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Tedder, and there can be no doubt that he had given long and serious thought to his address. He began by referring to Cromwell's injunction to put one's trust in God and keep one's powder dry, saying that the advice was good morally, shrewd politi cally, and sound from a military point of view. Some people would hold that trust alone was all that was needed, but in prac tice this would mean unsupported trust in individual politicians who happened to be in power in various countries. Despite all the hopes which buoyed people up during the trials and horrors of the late war, the world had been forced to the bitter conclusion that the law of the jungle still prevailed; that security without strength was a mirage; and that, in fact, weakness invited and indeed pro voked aggression. National strength was not solely a military affair; it was a complex of moral, political, economic and military factors, and weakness in any one might be fatal to the whole. It could not be said too often, or emphasized too strongly, that the military strength which the free world had felt it necessary to build up had one primary objective—to prevent another war. Lord Tedder thought it was questionable whether the two world wars, or indeed the Korean war, would ever have happened had it not been for political and military weakness which misled the aggressor into thinking he could get away with it. Our object was to secure peace not by winning, but by preventing another war. How to organize the collective defence of the free world—to develop and main tain the military strength of a voluntary association of democratic people who by their very nature abhorred war—was no simole problem. What form should the military strength of the free world take? The primary objective was to constitute an effective deterrent but they must also be such as to be able to fight a successful war if the deterrent failed. The shape of war had been changing drastically during this century and Lord Tedder believed that we would be making a fatal mistake if we were to shape our forces on the basis that a war in the future would be on the same lines as those of the last war—a struggle for lines. The tragic mistake was made before 1940 of preparing for another war of that character. He hoped that the bitter tragedy of the Maginot Line and the lesson it afforded would never be forgotten. During the last conflict it was the war in the air—unforeseen by many and still not understood by some—which was largely responsible for altering the shape of war. It became one of areas and it might well be that if there were a war in the future it would be one of continents. Lord Tedder said that so far he had deliberately left the possible aggressor anonymous, but unless and until a new regime in Moscow clearly by word and deed renounced the Stalin aim of world domination the potential aggressor was, in fact, Soviet Russia. This posed specific military problems. All the NATO nations, particularly Britain, depended upon sea borne supplies and were therefore vul nerable to attack at sea. All, and again especially Britain, were open to attack from the air, and all Continental nations were open to attack by land over the relatively short distances from Russian-occupied territory. Did this mean that in peacetime we had to build up and maintain massive armies with all their supporting air forces on the continent of Europe on the scale which it took four years of the combined efforts of the British and American nations to attain? Did it mean also that we must build up again vast numbers of ships, vessels and specialized aircraft which we had in 1944 to secure our sea communica tions? And did it mean that every nation must build up the great network of com munications, anti-aircraft and fighter defences which proved necessary in the last war? Lord Tedder thought that to attempt to build up military strength on these lines would be not to provide a deterrent but to bankrupt the free world and hand it over to Communism and chaos without a blow. Looking at the other side of the picture, the speaker said that Russia's seaborne Marshal of the R.A.F. Lord Tedder, G.C.&., D.C.L., LL.D. supplies were negligible and, against her, our traditional weapon of Naval pressure was virtually innocuous. The history of Napoleon and Hitler should be sufficient proof of the folly of attempting land invasion of those vast areas. Only from the air was Russia open to attack. Lord Tedder had no simple solution to offer, but he thought that we made the problem unnecessarily difficult by failing to consider it as a unity. There was still a tendency in this country to regard the war at sea, on land and in the air as separate problems. People forgot or ignored die force which in the last war proved to be the one common factor, and did, in fact, unify the operations in the three dimen sions—the bomber force. It was forgotten or not known that the bombers played a vital part in limiting the production of submarines, that the waters around Denmark were littered with German shipping sunk by bombers' mines. The end of the Tirpitz was forgotten. It was forgotten that it was the bombers which were mainly responsible for strangling Rommel's supplies; that the bombers knocked the Luftwaffe out of Sicily and made the entry into Southern Europe possible; that the bombers strangled the communications in Northern Europe, hamstrung the German transport and grounded the Luftwaffe for lack of fuel, making Operation Overlord possible. It was forgotten or not realized that, after the first round of the Battle of Britain had been so gallantly fought by day and night fighters, it was the bombers that pushed the air war away from British skies to be
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
