Part 5

Pressure on “the spirit” is intimately connected with that on “the pocket,” a thorough and long-continued interruption of the normal life of a nation is as depressing and demoralizing as the intimidation of the people by methods of terrorism――which, even if temporarily successful, usually react among civilized nations to the detriment of the aggressor by stimulating the will to resist or by so outraging the moral sense of other nations as to pave the way for their intervention.

In the past a military occupation of the hostile country has generally been the ultimate method of bringing to bear this pressure on the spirit, and may still be necessary against semi-civilized peoples spread out in little self-supporting communities, whose material wants are simple, and who offer no highly organized industrial and economic system for attack or control by an enemy.

But though the indignity and restrictions that arise from a military occupation are always galling, the conscience of the world forbids, or at least limits, the terrorism of earlier times and so makes the mere presence of an invading army less irksome. Conversely, with the growth of civilization the dislocation or control of an enemy’s industrial centres and communications becomes both more effective and more easy as the means by which to subdue his will to resist.

Every modern industrial nation has its vitals; in one case it may be essential mining areas, in another manufacturing districts, a third may be dependent on overseas trade coming into its ports, a fourth so highly centralized that its capital is the real as well as the nominal heart of its life. In most cases there is a blend of these several factors, and in all the regular flow of transport along its arteries is a vital requirement.

As warships are tied to the sea, they cannot penetrate into an enemy country; as, moreover, they are notoriously at a disadvantage against land defences, they cannot even occupy his ports. Hence they are limited to indirect action against the enemy’s vitals――either by blockade, by enabling troops to be landed, or nowadays by serving as a mobile base for aircraft which can strike at “nerve centres” within some 250 miles of the coast.

Armies have hitherto been the means of “direct action,” whether against the resources of the enemy nation, the intimidation of the people, or by the capture or overthrow of individuals who were the mainspring of the opposing policy.

Armies, however, suffer one serious handicap in subduing the hostile will. Being tied to one plane of movement, compelled to move across the land, it has rarely been possible for them to reach the enemy capital or other vital centres without first disposing of the enemy’s main army, which forms the shield of the opposing government and nation. It was because of this age-long limitation that the short-sighted, if natural, delusion arose that the armed forces themselves were the real objective.

But the air has introduced a third dimension into warfare, and with the advent of the aeroplane new and boundless possibilities are introduced. Hitherto war has been a gigantic game of draughts. Now it becomes a game of halma. Aircraft enables us to jump over the army which shields the enemy government, industry, and people, and so strike direct and immediately at the seat of the opposing will and policy. A nation’s nerve-system, no longer covered by the flesh of its troops, is now laid bare to attack, and, like the human nerves, the progress of civilization has rendered it far more sensitive than in earlier and more primitive times.

THE AIR WEAPON

In the Great War aircraft filled but an auxiliary rôle to the established arms, and their action against the moral objective was merely sporadic. The blow planned against Berlin, which might have revealed beyond question the decisive influence of the new arm, was still-born because of Germany’s haste to conclude an armistice. Those who depreciate the value of the air attack point to the comparatively small damage wrought by any particular attack in the Great War, arguing also that the influx of recruits after some of them showed that such “frightfulness” brought its own recoil in a stiffening of the national “upper lip.”

The best answer to this short-sighted deduction is to present a few facts. Between the 31st of May, 1915, and the 20th May, 1918, the German air-raids over the London area were carried out with an aggregate force of 13 Zeppelins and 128 aeroplanes, dropping in all less than 300 tons of bombs. The total result was 224 fires, 174 buildings completely destroyed, and 619 seriously damaged, a damage estimated in money at something over £2,000,000. This was achieved for the most part in face of strong air and ground defences, and in a war where the total British air force was never markedly inferior in size to its enemy, indeed generally the reverse.

Let us for a moment take a modern comparison, simply to point the moral. France has 990 aeroplanes in the home country, Great Britain 312――and this is a notable increase on the situation two years ago. Even allowing an ample margin of aircraft to hold the British air fleet in check, it would be easily possible for a greater weight of bombs to be dropped on London in one day than in the whole of the Great War, and to repeat the dose at frequent and brief intervals.

A damage spread over three years is a flimsy basis on which to estimate the moral and material results of such a blow concentrated on a single day, delivered with an accuracy and destructive effect unrealizable by the primitive instruments of 1915–1918. Moreover, what is an air fleet of a thousand compared with future possibilities, as civil aviation develops?

Witnesses of the earlier air attacks before our defence was organized, will not be disposed to underestimate the panic and disturbance that would result from a concentrated blow dealt by a superior air fleet. Who that saw it will ever forget the nightly sight of the population of a great industrial and shipping town, such as Hull, streaming out into the fields on the first sound of the alarm signals? Women, children, babies in arms, spending night after night huddled in sodden fields, shivering under a bitter wintry sky――the exposure must have caused far more harm than the few bombs dropped from two or three Zeppelins.

Of the crippling effect on industrial output, let facts speak: “In 1916, hostile aircraft approached the Cleveland district in thirteen different weeks――which reduced the year’s output in that district by 390,000 tons (of pig-iron), or one-sixth of the annual output. In certain armament works it was observed that on the days following raids, skilled men made more mistakes in precision work than usual, the quality of the work done was inferior, while air raids made a constant output impossible.”

Those pundits who prate about the “armed forces” objective appear to forget that an army without munitions is a somewhat useless instrument.

Imagine for a moment that, of two centralized industrial nations at war, one possesses a superior air force, the other a superior army. Provided that the blow be sufficiently swift and powerful, there is no reason why within a few hours, or at most days from the commencement of hostilities, the nerve system of the country inferior in air power should not be paralysed.

A modern state is such a complex and interdependent fabric that it offers a target highly sensitive to a sudden and overwhelming blow from the air. We all know how great an upset in the daily life of the country is caused at the outset of a railway strike even. Business is disorganized by the delay of the mails and the tardy arrival of the staff, the shops are at a standstill without fresh supplies, the people feel lost without newspapers――rumours multiply, and the signs of panic and demoralization make their appearance. Perhaps an even more striking parallel may be found in the disruption of the whole life of Japan in the recent earthquake. An air attack of the intensity that is now possible would be likely to excel even this stroke in its disorganizing and demoralizing effect. Imagine for a moment London, Manchester, Birmingham, and half a dozen other great centres simultaneously attacked, the business localities and Fleet Street wrecked, Whitehall a heap of ruins, the slum districts maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud, the railways cut, factories destroyed. Would not the general will to resist vanish, and what use would be the still determined fractions of the nation, without organization and central direction?

Victory in air war will lie with whichever side first gains the moral objective. If one side is so foolish as to waste time――more the supreme factor than ever before――in searching for the armed forces of the enemy, which are mobile and capable of concealment, then clearly the static civil centres of its own land will be paralysed first――and the issue will be decided long before the side which trusted in the “armed forces” objective has crossed the enemy’s frontiers.

If, on the other hand, the decisiveness of the moral objective be admitted, is it not the height of absurdity to base the military forces of a nation on infantry, which would――even if unopposed――take weeks to reach Essen or Berlin, for example, when aircraft could reach and destroy both in a matter of hours?

OBJECTIONS TO THE AIR-ATTACK

To this use of aircraft to gain the moral objective there are, however, two possible objections, one economic, the other ethical. The economic limitation is that by destroying the enemy factories and communications we may so cripple his commerce and industry as seriously to reduce his post-war value as a potential customer. There is a certain weight in this argument, for if one lesson stands out clearly from the last war it is that the commerce and prosperity of civilized nations are so closely interwoven and interdependent that the destruction of the enemy country’s economic wealth recoils on the head of the victor. The obvious reply, however, is that even the widespread damage of a decisive air attack would inflict less total damage and constitute less of a drain on the defeated country’s recuperative powers than a prolonged war of the existing type.

The ethical objection is based on the seeming brutality of an attack on the civilian population, and the harmful results to the aggressor of any outrage of the human feelings of the neutral peoples. The events of the last war have, however, in some measure acclimatised the world to the idea that in a war between nations the damage cannot be restricted merely to the paid gladiators. When, moreover, the truth is realized that a swift and sudden blow of this nature inflicts a total of injury far less than when spread over a number of years, the common sense of mankind will show that the ethical objection to this form of war is at least not greater than to the cannon-fodder wars of the past.

But self-interest as well as humane reasons demand that the warring nations should endeavour to gain their end of the moral subjugation of the enemy with the infliction of the least possible permanent injury to life and industry, for the enemy of today is the customer of the morrow, and the ally of the future. To inflict widespread death and destruction is to damage one’s own future prosperity, and, by sowing the seeds of revenge, to jeopardize one’s future security. Chemical science has provided mankind with a weapon which reduces the necessity for killing and achieves decisive effects with far less permanent injury than in the case of explosives. Gas may well prove the salvation of civilization from the otherwise inevitable collapse in case of another world war. Even with the lethal gases of the last war, the use of which was decried as barbarous by conventional sentiment, statistics show that the proportion of deaths to the numbers temporarily incapacitated was far less than with the accepted weapons, such as bullets and shells! Moreover, chemistry affords us non-lethal gases which can overcome the hostile resistance, and spread panic for a period long enough to reap the fruits of victory, but without the lasting evils of mass killing or destruction of property.

Yet we still find that, in defiance of reason and history, the governments are again striving by international legislation to prohibit the use of gas, and to confine the blows of aircraft to the traditional military objectives.

It is a strange reflection on the all-too-frequent lack of vision and common sense, that the opposition to the use of gas in war comes from an alliance between those unwonted bedfellows, the traditional militarist and the sentimental pacifist.

The humanization of war rests not in “scraps of paper,” which nations will always tear up if they feel that their national life is endangered by them, but in the enlightened realization that the spread of death and destruction endangers the victor’s own future prosperity and reputation.

This deeper understanding of war and its goal, and consequently more humane methods, can only come by stripping war of its professional and pacifist catchwords, and grasping that the true national objective in war lies in the after-war. If the civilized world is to be saved from collapse, there is an urgent need to produce true grand strategists to replace the colour-blind exponents of mass destruction, who can only see “red.”