War Worries

Like most of the world, Britain was last week worrying about the next war. On that subject her leading citizens were highly vocal. Pink-cheeked George Bernard Shaw led off with a short-wave radio broadcast on the subject "Whither Britain?" Through yawps of static, the U. S. heard his pleasant Irish voice : "The big question is, for instance, is Britain heading straight for war? That is what you want to know, isn't it? At present Britain is not heading straight for anywhere. She is as likely to drift into war as anybody else, providing somebody else starts the war. You must not be put off by the humbug about disarmament. The possibility of diabolical war must be faced, though I hope and trust it will peter out in general ridicule." In the House of Commons moon-faced Winston Churchill, a jingoist since he first marched off to the Boer War at the age of 22, roared the loudest: "An entirely new situation has been created by rubbing the sore of the disarmament conference until it has become a cancer, and largely by the uprush of the Nazi movement." Mr. Churchill demanded four things: 1) denunciation of the London Naval Treaty (1930) so that Britain could build any type of ship she desired; 2) an air force equal to that of any power "within air range" (i. e. equal to France's); 3) preparations for the conversion of all factories to war purposes; 4) coordination of the entire national defense. Bumbling Stanley Baldwin, leader of the Conservative Party, was milder, but even he admitted that strengthening Britain's armaments was no improbability. He attempted to soften the news by blaming everything on the U. S. : "There was no more reeling blow struck at that new attempt in Europe [the League of Nations] than when the American Congress refused to support Wilson. The security that France, with her wounds still bleeding, thought she had got from Wilson, disappeared in a moment. . . . If we fail [in maintaining the League] it will be the duty of the Government to look after the interests of this country first and quickly. If an agreement is reached we will then . . . have limits up to which we can arm, and it will be our duty to make ourselves as competent as we may up to that limit." To pacifists the only crumb of comfort was thrown by Captain Basil Henry Liddell Hart, Britain's best-known and most articulate military strategist. Capt. Liddell Hart is the author of The Real War, the successor of the late great Lieut. Colonel Charles A'Court Repington as military expert on the London Daily Telegraph and the inventor of the Battle Drill System and the Expanding Torrent Method of Attack. He too agreed that another war is not unlikely, but insisted, contrary to general opinion, that it will be a very tame slaughter compared to the last one. His reasons: "Europe's general staffs still believe in the effectiveness of mass movements and think the larger their armies are the more powerful will they be. The fallacy of the theory was exposed a generation ago by the mechanical progress which made one man, sitting behind a machine-gun, the superior of a hundred or even a thousand who were advancing against him with rifle and bayonet.* "Machine guns of every kind have multiplied everywhere since the last war, increasing the already overwhelming advantage of defensive forces on land. In contrast, artillery has decreased in proportion. That perhaps matters little, because at its utmost the larger gun was an inefficient and uneconomic machine-gun destroyer. "Gas, particularly mustard gas, will increase the helplessness of large armies. . . . It is doubtful whether the armies would ever come to the point of sighting each other. "Most likely air forces will strike in the first hour of the next war before mobilization has begun. . . . The intricate mobilization machinery of the modern horde army is the easiest thing in the world to throw out of gear. The centralization of water, light, heat and power supplies all make dislocation easier and paralysis more certain." Scarcely had these gentlemen spoken before the Austrian riots wrote finis to Great Britain's attempts at reaching immediate disarmament agreements. Rendered particularly negative was a meeting of Disarmament Conference officials called at London by Arthur Henderson. And still unanswered by Berlin and Paris were the latest disarmament proposals of Sir John Simon. So the British Cabinet turned its attention to Austria, sure that the riots would lead to Fascism under Italian influence, then to Naziism under militaristic Germany.

* One who agrees thoroughly with Captain Liddell Hart's theory of small armies of technical experts is Germany's General Hans von Seeckt, builder of the Rcichswchr. Because of the Nazi cry for a great army General von Seeckt is at present very much out of the German political picture.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.