A NEW TERROR.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 452, 13 March 1909, Page 2

A NEW TERROR.

Thk manufacture of engines of destruction goes on apace with the general march of civilisation. Great brains and long purses find as much occupation in devising means for destroying life as they do in promoting measures for saving life. There will shortly be introduced into the German army a new air torpedo, the invention of one Colonel Unge, of Sweden. Messrs Krupp have acquired-all the patent rights in the new machinery, subject to the one reservation that the Swedish Government shall have the right to use the weapon in every form. The air torpedo, which is one of the deadliest instruments of modern times, can be fired without producing any recoil,hence the torpedo tube is light and is easily moved from place to place. It can be mounted on a motor car and can be unmounted and fired without any elaborate preparations and much more rapidly than the present artillery can be brought into action. In addition it can be employed in any kind of warfare. It can be used against fortifications with deadly effect and can also be used against bodies of troops in the open field. The fact that the discharge of the torpedo does not make the slightest sound will render it difficult for an enemy to locate the position of the weapon by which it is being attacked. In coast defence it can be fired at such an elevation as to drop on the decks of the hostile battleships, so that henceforth vessels will be liable to be torpedoed from above as well as below the water-line. A smaller torpedo has been manufactured for use in rough country, mountain sides and so forth, which would be quite inaccessible to modern mountain artillery of the present type. Military experts declare that the air torpedo is an epoch-making invention, and that it will add a terror to modern welfare which must hasten the time when the world will have cither to declare for universal peace 01 to give itself up to destruction by the force of its own passions. The alternative is depicted in lurid colours in the concluding chapters of Mr H. G. Well’s startling romance of the future, ‘‘The War in the Air.”