NICETIES IN BOMBING

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2723, 18 March 1916, Page 14

NICETIES IN BOMBING

REMARKABLE EFFECT OF THE AIR OF FLANDERS. "Most of the bomb-dropping dono by all the belligerents is sheer waste of time and money, unless it is done on a very big scale with a specific object in view," says the editor of "The Aeroplane." ■ "We know to a nicoty how much and how little the German bombdropping is worth, and there does not seem to be any particular reason why our own bombing should be worth very much more. What the more experienced service aviators think about it was rather nicely summed up by some friends of mine the other day. " 'There's something very extraordinary about tho air of Flanders,' said one, 'I suppose it is much clearer than it used to be when I was there early in the war. Some of the chaps we've been training for months, who think they're doing jolly well if they can get a bomb into a patch of an acre and a half from a thousand feet or so twice in four or five shots on this side of the Channel, go over there and hit a footbridge three or four feet wide every tune from niiio thousand foot 1' 1 suggested that it must bo tho result of his assiduous training on this side, but lie would not agree that their form could improve so suddenly.

"Another officer, fresh from France, agreed tlmt the clarity of the atmosphere. might, with tho help of a little eye-strain. lead, N an aviator to believo that ho had dropped his bomb from ROO feet when ho really lot go at 5000 Teet or COOO feet; but lie did not see how eveji that' accounted for tho alleged amount of-destruction wrought by bombs. Of course, tliero liavo been numerous cases where aviators have comc clown most gallantly to -within a couple of hundred feet of the ground to make certain of thoir aim, and scv* oral good men have been lost through doing so for fact can always he 11101-0 improbable than fiction when it likes— but fiction which hoars an air of probability is easier to produce than is tho . imorobabla fact.'-'