12 
LAND & W A r E R 
April 13, 1916 
of aircraft, but diHorenres as to tl]c strategic administra- 
tion and command of the air service as a whole. 
The arf^unient in favoiu- of a supreme and independent 
air force, for employment in a purely air war. is put in 
such terms as this. " Command of the Air " is as essen- 
tial in this war as " Command of the Sea." It must be 
sought and won as an object in its?lf. It cannot be won 
by an air service if that service is under a divided admini- 
stration. The air fleet which is at the dii.po.al of the 
navy cannot be taken from the navy and employed upon 
the main jiurpose for which tiie air ;.ervice should exist. 
Similarly the <-raft belonging to the army must be left 
severely alone. So long as the organii.ation and.conniiand 
of the air forces are in the hands of a mixed commis:;ion, 
military and naval needs will be given the first claim, 
and the existence of an independent air force neglected. 
But this neglect is ruinous, tor air raid:; on enemy vital 
points may. and indeed must, be regarded no longer as 
secondary operations, but as primary, and i)rimary 
because they may easily be decisive. Who. for instance. 
can doubt that the effective bombardment of Essen would 
isolate the (lerman army from its chief gun and munition 
supply, and achieve at a stroke almo:.t all that an army 
marching victoriously to the Rhine coidd do ? Would 
not then such a bombardment be a far heavier blow to 
Germany than the loss of. say. Paris would be to France ? 
Tiie capacity of aircraft to deliver r.uch attacks is well 
enough established for it to be worth a supreme national 
effort to carry them out on the desired scale. We must 
then have a force entirely free from naval or military 
control. 
The Obvious Weakness 
This may be an extreme, but it surely is not an unfair 
repre:.entation of what we may call the forward party's 
case. Its weakness is obvious. There can be no such 
thing as command of the air in the sense in which there 
is command of the sea. \Vhen Mr. Billing tells us that 
in the future the first will be more important than the 
second, he seems to me to be saying w-hat is absolutely 
meaningless. This is because except for military pur- 
poses th.ere is no use made of the air as an clement at all. 
It cannot be used for the transport of troops, for the 
exchange of commodities, or for supply. There is not 
s.omewhere in the air, as there is at sea, a concentration of 
force which commands it as a means of communication. 
Airr.hips and aeroplanes can rise from the land into the 
air, and opposing airships and aeioplanes can pursue and 
engage them, and then for the moment, the destruction 
of the enemy craft is an object in itself. But the 
ntltimatc object of attack and counter-attack is not, as at 
sea, to seize or dispute the possession of an element, but 
to use the element momentarily for some purpose imme- 
diately or indirectly military or naval. Thu* the ultimate 
object of every air raid is to assist the army or the navy 
in its task. 
It may be said that raids like those of the Zeppelins over 
I^^ngland. or the proposed raid on Essen, are so remotely 
connected with naval or military operations as to make it 
quite scientific to regard them as ends in themselvts. .\ 
case no doubt might be established for this philosophy. 
What is more immediately to the point is, that we have 
no experience to show that such raids ever ha\e or ever 
can achieve so definite a success a;; to justify a war 
carried on by air being treated as a thing apart "from land 
or sea war. The ain.hip raids on England have in a 
military sense achieved less, on each occasion, than the 
battle cruisers' raids on the East Coast. They have 
acliievcd far less, altogether, than the submarines' raids 
on shipping. If Germany's fleet had been of sufficient 
power to be an active fleet, had it been engaged from the 
firs.t in trying to find opportunities and means of forcing 
the British fleet to action — by having squadrons con- 
stantly at sea. by disputing the passage of our transports, 
by sending their cruisers to interfere with our sea services 
— would (iermany. in these circum;;tanccs, have devoted 
her Zeppelins, whose scouting capacity must at times be 
of the highest naval strategical and tactical value, to such 
indirect methods of obtaining a military result as scatter- 
ing boinbs over the country in the hope that some vital 
damage wbuld be done ? in fact, are not the Zeppelin 
raids strictly spreaking, just as much confessions of naval 
weakness, as is the submarine camp:\'gn ? And is it 
not in each case the pursuit of a secondary or indirect 
military purpose, to be explained by the fact that the 
German navy is not strong enough to use these devices for 
any direct na\'al .object'?: 
The Purpose of Raids 
Now what is the indirect objective which the 
enemy has in view in these raids ? They are first and 
foremost «to make a demonstration of a frightful and 
terrifying use of 'power to cheer and console the 
(lermans, who are the victims of a real and direct 
u;;? of naval power, and next frighten and exasj^erate 
the linglish who are made the victims of them. But 
the moral effect sought by an e)iemy is not limited 
to inspiring terror and anger. He seeks to create 
a diversion of naval and military force from its true 
])urpose. The Admiralty, after the Yarmouth bom- 
bardment, \ery properly announced that the pursuit 
by the enemy of an unmilitary object would nut 
lead the Admiralty to alter the distribution of the Fleet. 
But if the air raids on England result in the diversion 
of our air policy from its true purpose, the enemy will 
have achieved his end. For it is useless to deny that if air 
war becomes an object to be sought for its own sake, 
if Mr. Billing's thousand " best aeroi>lanes in the world " 
are to be produced by a vast national effort for the 
destruction of Essen and so forth, then it is as certain as 
anything can be that the air needs of the army and navy 
wiil take a second place. There is at least one excellent 
reason why this must appear as a very serious threat. 
If the accessory utility of aircraft, always to the army 
and sometimes to the navy, is proved by experience to 
the point of its being absolutely indispensable, the utility 
of aircraft in making raids of decisive military value is still 
to seek. All the Zeppelin raids on England put together 
have not yet achieved the casualties of the Lusitania, 
nor military damage that is more than nominal. The 
raids made by ourselves and our Allies over German 
communications and depots and the enemy's counter 
raids, are not, I believe, rated by military authorities as 
of one-tenth of the value of aircraft in more direct .services, 
such as scouting, the correction of fire, and so forth. 
The real reason why raids are not more efficient than 
they are is, that the aircraft bomb has not a destructi\-e 
capacity sufliciently great to compensate for the lack of 
])recision in its use. In other words, if aircraft only 
existed as a means of attack no v'ery notable addition to the 
implements of war could, on our present experience, be 
supposed to have been made. Their real value is as 
accessories to naval and military force. To get the best 
out of aircraft they must be used in combination with the 
fleet or the army. If this is so, it is quite unscientific 
to treat this branch of war as if it were as separate from 
the other branches as they are from each other. Thej' are 
separate because the units of naval and military force arc 
utterly different, are employed in totally different ek 
ments. and have a technique entirely separate and di>- 
tinct. It is the exception for them to be used together, 
and consequently to deal with land and sea forces as 
separate is strictly scientific. But it is the exception 
for air forces to be used otherwise than in combination 
with land or sea force. 
If the agitation for the reform and the infusion of 
greater vigour of our air policies is limited to supplying 
more and better machines and distributing them as the\ 
are wanted to the army and navy, reserving what is wis. 
for the defence of these islands against raids — and; o' 
course, for counter-raids if the force is available for them- 
then the agitation may do nothing but good. But if honu 
defence and reprisals are to be regarded as ends in them- 
selves, and the air force is to be organised primarily witii 
these objects, then the danger to the army is manifest. 
ARTlilR POI.LK.V 
The twenty-four short stories which make up Richard 
Dehan's last book. Earth to Earth (Heinemann, 6s.) seem tc 
bear little relation to the rather ambiguous title, which is als; 
the title of the first--and in many ways the best —of the storios 
They are all mere sketches, often commonplace in themselves, 
yet in each is an underlying motive that makes it worth the 
reader's while. Man\- of them concern the MacWaugii, a 
character very reminiscent of Du Maurier and the Trilh\ 
trio of artists, but the autiior is obviously more at home out- 
side the studio than in, and t!ic first and last are the best 
stories in the hook. 
