A MECHANISED ARMY

Hokitika Guardian, 20 October 1927, Page 4

A MECHANISED ARMY

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, .Mr Winston Churchill, this morning inspected the new. mechanical force for the British Army, which was drawn up in long lines and presented a striking appearance. It included tanks, large and small, armoured cars, self-propelled guns, dragon tractors, with gun-waggons, hall-track lorries and six-wheelers used for the transport of troops. .Recent cable message. Did you ever hear of the battle of Adrianople-—not in the Balkan War of H;l2. but on August 9, A.D. .'ITS? It was one of the turning points in the history of war. For centuries the Roman foot soldiers had been supreme. The infantry of thc.Empire had dominated war. On that August day the Emperor Valens. confident in the superiority of the Legion, marched out to attack the Goths under Fritigern. The Goths flung their cavalry against the Roman flank, and the horsemen drove the whole army into contusion and j dreadful defeat, and when the sun j went down that evening on the corpsepiled battlefield it set also on tlie military prestige of the Roman Empire.

The age of cavalry was ushered in. and it was to last for nearly a thousand years until the English bowmen and the Swiss pikemen defeated too heavily armed horsemen and restored superiority to the foot soldier. Xow. says Captain 11. 11. kiddie Mart, in a recent work' on " The Remaking of .Modern Armies,” supremacy has swung back to cavalry, but not the cavalry of the horse. The master of the modern battlefield is the tank. Captain Mart follows a short description of Adrianople in August, 378, with what happened on that wonderful dav, August 8. 191 S. when Haig began that move forward which did not stop until Cologne was reached. According to the author of ” The Remaking of -Modern Armies,” August 8, 1918, was as important in military history as August 9, 378. It was the great day of the triumph of machine attack. The entrenched machine gun had'been the master of the battlefield for lour years, hut the tank defeated it. “The black j day of the German Army in the history j of the war,'’ l.iulciulr.rfl' wrote of Ail-1 gust 8. Captain Mart’s argument, advanced 'in persuasive English, touched i with humour and with many illustrations from history, is that the tank in J its various forms is the weapon of the] future and the present, and that the nation which develops it furthest in , material and tactics will win in war. j •‘The lank assault of to-morrow is hut the long-waited re-birtli ol the cavalrycharge, with the merely material j change that moving fire is added to shock, and that the cavalry tank re-, places the* cavalry horse.” lie* is not at all sure, however, that the military mind perceives this. That mind is deeply conservative. There wore officers in the English army, who. as far hack, as the* 'eighties, realised the pussibiliiv of the machine gun. but thirty j years later that army went into war with two such guns to each battalion, j The* Germans appreciate'! this value j only a fraction more than the British] or the Erem-li. buL that fraction gave] them a great, advantage*. Vet after the war, according to Captain Marl, ‘‘a eharacioristic reaction Look place | towards I iine-lioiioiired and traditional | methods - typified by the officer who on j November 11. 1918, heaved a sigh ol ] relief and said, ’Thank heavens! Non | we shall he able to get "back to real 1 soldiering! ’ ”

Captain Mart gives a vivid dcscrip-j lion of a development he himself saw j two years ago -a single soldier in a motor car no bigger than a medieval knight on horseback. Tearing down i the road as fast as the* knight could | have galloped this 192 b man-at-arms' turned, mounted a four-foot hank at a i single hound, raced over rough ground ! covered with gor.se, climb a steep bill | at six or seven miles an hour and' threaded bis way through a thick plan-j tation. This car was a ” dummy,’' ( but Captain Mart says it needed only] armour on the turret and a machine gun to make it the real thing, and he estimates that these machines can he

turned out for £'loo apiece. Imagine a number of these machines let loose against infantry! The foot soldier would feel ns he did in the old days before machine guns when caught by eavnlarv in the'open. Mechanise your armies, says Captain Hart. Also, he bids us to employ the chemist to the limit of his powers, lie can make gases which will subdue without killing, and subjugation, not killing, is the object of war. Gas promises to do for war what chloroform has done for surgery.