(Contributed)
"When I strike it will be like lightning in the night," Hitler has said. Goering broad-east to his tiers, apropos of the crisis last September, "You men know best how Germany's unconquerable air force stood ready then, One command, and an inferno would have been prepared for our opponents, a quick blow, but one which would have litterly destroyed them." There is evidence aplenty that belief in perfect plans, quick Victories and unconquerable German might—delusions which have already played a disastrous part in German history—persists in the Reich. And consideration of the new German forces reveals strikingly to what extent the Nazis have concentrated on arms {intended to win a quick war; the aeroplane, the tank and the submarine, This being the case, the present menace of a "lightning war" must be grappled with. It would, we are told, begin with an over~ whelming aerial blow. All the air power of Germany would strike at the various concen~ trations of the British and French navies in an attempt to smash this one arm in which the Entente Powers have decisive superiority, The oceans would then be delivered over to the German commerce raiders and submarines, At the same time the lightning would be turned against the British and French aerodromes, power stations, arms factories and great centres of popula: tion. This knockout blow by air would be followed by land attack on France, possibly from several directions, But can a battle fleet be wiped out by air bombing? Formidable anti-aircraft defences have been devised, and British battleships have been fitted with heavier deck armour.
Some 50 over-age cruisers and destroyers have been equipped as special anti-aircraft auxiliaries, And with fourteen aircraft carriers soon available, the British navy will carry along a sizable air force of its own. Could so many British and French ships be sunk in a sudden attack as to raise Ge many from her present position of hopeless inferiority? (She has only five battleships to 22, and less than half a million tons to two and a quarter millions). And it she made the experiment, only to find out afterward that she was wrong and that sea power still plays its traditional role in warfare, then her naval position would be desperate indeed, In the air, at present, Germany has a superiority, but according to reliable information, " this superiority will pass its peak this autumn. After that the Entente Powers—which are determined to continue the race if necessary until they are back at their 1918 production of 5,000 planes a month—will pass their opponents, whose air fleet is backed by a monthly production of certainly less than 1,000 units.
Many ingenious defences against the tank have been devised: rows of upended steel rails set in conereto—"asparagus beds" the French call them; marshy pits covered with grass, in which the tank sinks and drowns; underground mines which may be set off by contact or by remote control, Tanks which survive these hazards must face the active defences behind, such as field guns and the new high-velocity anti-tank rifles, If tanks could gain only five or ten miles a doy against Spanish Loyalist de~ fences, if they fall out even in peacetime reviews, as I have seen them do before Der Fuehrer in Berlin, and are left all along the road in a parade to Vienna, they are not going to overrun France suddenly, We may take it that the 2,000-odd German tanks would fade away in the defiles of the Jura and the spurs of the Vosges just as the 3,000-odd British and French tanks did in the battles of 1916-17-18. The impetus of the attack would be lost, and the war would settle down to a malter of trenches and machine guns on land and blockade at sea, It is apparent that Germany places great reliance on the submarine as a means of blockading England and France. But the submarine menace is an example of those empty terrors with which the dictators frighten us into preferring peace at any price. In the three months following their Gcclaration of unrestricted submarine warfare on February. 1, 1917, the Germans sank without warning over 1,000 Allied and neutral ships, Yet by the end of the war courage and ingenuity had completely turned the tables on the U-boats. Thanks to the convoy system, over 1,500 merchant ships had been brought into the British Isles by October, 1917, with the loss of only ten torpedoed and fourteen through straying. Another most effective barrage caused untold trouble for German submarines in the North Sea and English Channel, Along with these defences an active campaign for "killing" prowling U-boats, including the use of planes, depth charges and the famous camouaged '"Q-boats," forced submarines to stay under and use an expensive torpedo, of which they could carry only a small number, By the end of the war 199 submarines were destroyed. In Winston Churchill's words, "It
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