Air exercises tend only to confuse the issue and to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of staff officers where 1 welcome sense of certainty had settled. But there is nothing to be lone about it. Only guesses can be made and one can only hope that one's own country will have the zood fortune to be backing the right horse if the hour of travail arrives.
The main problem is confined, of course, to bombers and the means of stopping them before they reach their objective. On this subject fresh information has been claimed from a study of the recent air exer-sob in this country. The Press, in reporting these exercises rate extravagant statements on e efficacy of the defence weapons, and the assurance that it had been proved that the bombers could not get through was almost universal.
Was that proved? Were not these exercises so organized that they would inevitably put the defences in a more favourable light than the raids? There are good reasons for these questions. Much was made of the fact that the defending fighters, in almost every case, were successful in intercepting the raids, Yet the very great majority of these raids were made at heights below 8,000 feet. Is it to be seriously posed that that would happen in actual war? Would the fighters have met with such success if the majority of raids had been made at 20,000 feet and over?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.