With most countries embarking on big re-armament programmes the question of manoeuvres assumes greater importance for, faure de mieux, these schemes must be tested in conditions approximating actual service otherwise they remain an unknown quantity. All nations nowadays hold such manoeuvres using their fleets, armies and air forces and attempt to reconstruct as far as possible those problems which involve a country's security and on the results, one way or the other, changes and modifications are made. Not always do these results work out satisfactorily. In joint naval and army manoeuvres off the south coast of England a year or two ago, the weather, that traditional guardian of British security, again came to the rescue and the attacking' forces landed in such a wet, disorderly and unhappy condition, that they had to be rescued by a coastguardsman who communicated with the defending forces and obtained the loan of a field kitchen otherwise the "enemy" would have starved as well as been decisively defeated, The other danger lies in too much realism. According to "Truth," this is the source of considerable worry in naval exercises directed against the electrically-controlled target ship Centurion and the shooting at the "robot" aeroplane Queen Bee. While the object is to register the greatest amount of destruction and reveal the greatest degree of accuracy in fire, there has been an official tip not to overdo the thing. One of the Home Fleet cruisers put up such a good show with her anti-aircraft guns that she brought down the Queen Bee from immediately overhead, but the crew breathed freely when the wrecked machine just cleared the ship and fell into the water alongside for there was every fear that she might fall on the cruiser, which would not have added to the popularity of the achievement.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.