SCIENCE IN WARFARE.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 4, Issue 107, 12 November 1915, Page 4 (Supplement)

SCIENCE IN WARFARE.

SOME NEEDED INVENTIONS. War cannot be brought to a successful conclusion without a perpetual cur. rent of fresh men to fill the gaps created by casualties; but the present struggle has resolved itself into one where sheer weight of human material will not of itself guarantee success. Despite her triumphs at the expense of the Russians, Germany foresees that the time is rapidly drawing near —if, indeed, it has not arrived already—when she will be outnumbered, and, with grm determination and an utte. disregard for recognised usages of war, she has sought to neutralise the handicap by appealing to science to aid and abet her. But what German can attain to in this direction, or whatever new and terrible ongines of destruction she may yet introduce to the battlefield, we, with our unlimited resources, can copy and even improve on. To the real inventor, however, and not to the imitator, is the advantage of the first proceeding—the incalculable advantage, in short, which springs from surprise. German gaa was a surprise, a dastardly surprise, or the galling losses occasion:! would have been impossible.

WHAT THE ENEMY HAS TAUGHT US. To beg'n with, the enemy introduced into the battle arena guns of a calibre so huge as to confound our accepted notions of field artillery. But here, and we may fervently say thank God for it, Jack will soon be as good as his master, for the pitiful inadequacy of 15-pounders against guns throwing shells of tw'ce that weight has been realised, just as we are realising that a machine gun in skilful hands is worth the rifles of an entire company. Then, before the war was a fortnight old, of Teuton trenches gave j« material for furious thought, traction. being so elaborate that Ae laughed to scorn our sftjtepnel shells, never designed to search '--*uch excavations. British trenches to-day are second to none, and German shrapnel would be equally scorned, only, unfortunately, the enemy depended not upon shrapnel but on projectiles designed to harry and devastate trenches like h s own—high explosive shells which, if they did not directly slay men, buried their snug cubby-holes and pretentions dug-outs under tons of mother earth. Witi: such an exposition given us at a destructive cost in life, it would bj the madness of pride did we not take immediate steps, as was done, to profit by it. So to-day Brit'sh shrapnel .s kept for the open, where its deadliness has suffered no eclipse and cannot be bettered as a man-killer, and we are straining every nerve to produce an immense reservo of trench-destroying projectiles, which alone can give our brave fellows the required assistance to forge ahead. It was the Germans, too, who first introduced the asphyxiating shell, but, finding that the French had not only followed their lead but improved mme decidedly upon it, they worried their savants for a fresh and more hideous terror, and hence the advent of the deadly and diabolically unsportsmanlike chlorine gas. Had they resorted to certain other chemicals peculiar to the Fatherland it might have put us to our wits' end to retaliate, but salt is almost our native element, and we have enough of it to gas every German born or to be born. We already have ti assurance of the highest military authority in the land that the enemy will get a taste of the product of his own recipo in the very early future.

FIELDS FOR INVENTION. But —and most of us will agree —this game of follow vo ir leader is not quite good enough. AVe are naturally an in. ventive people, while our friends the French are, by common consent, re garded a 6 one of the most ingenious nations in the world. The time has come to strike out without waiting for German precedents —to launch some surprise of our own against which the enemy can have no antidote cut and dry on hie shelves. In a word, we neel the nation's brains as well as its manhood, but until the recent establish ment of an Inventors' Bureau little )- no encouragement had been offered offic'ally to apply the former. The diffidence of private inventors to approach officials with a cold shouldering reputation wa6 natural. But now the «ar Office and Admiralty have given forth in so many words that they are no longer too proud to call upon the brains of the Empire for assistance, no longer too self-sat'6fied to sanction the formation of an inventors' clearing house. And not before time, for there are many desideratums eagerly sought for to-day. Submarines, for instance, call for improvement, and will yet te improved out of al! resemblance. They will run over and under the water with one propulsive power instead of two: the present imperfect periscope will be revolutionised. Appliances to enable the crew to escape will be added, end also a means of seeing under the water, independent of the per-scope. Now, whichever country first attains to even one of these desideratums will eetabli6ft a pronounced submarine supremacy. Much, the same scope for improvement applies to air cratt. An apparatus is badly wanted to calculate wind velocity, and another to lessen the side swaying, so nerve wracking to the war aeronaut, on whose judgment matters of life and death depend. Let a counr try of the Triple Entente be tlje first to produce two other contrivances, and the fate of the Zeppelin as an aggressor is sealed. The first is an effective aeroplane range-finder, and the second a projectile suited to gash instead of merely to pierce thp giant airship. It is well-nigh impossible, without a stroke of great luck, to wing a Zeppelin with the class qf projectile presently used, for the hole it makes would not deflato the huge carcuss in a week. FRENCH REQUISITES.

Ju trench fighting there is a galaxy of wants willing aloud to the Inventive genius. Ame till helmet sufficiently light to be worn without discomfort, yet tough enough to deflect or even withstand a bullet, its not the least among thorn. tor in the majority of cases where our men have been k'llcu by snipers tfie bullet has passed through the brain. Then hand-gren-ades do not reach their billet onco in a do?eu t'me.s, tho reason being that there is no effective appliance to regulate the q'm. Thousands of lives too would be saved by the invention of an excavating tool enabling the digger to work in a recumbent position, while an apparatus whu-h would produce un nbsolute vertically dropping tire on trenches would veritably give a mastery in trench warfare. Steel breast-plates, cloth-covered, hate also made their appearance. They have been tested on the liye body to stand the bullet impact of an army service p'stol tired at point blank range, and on a dummy figure, tho bullet of a German rifle, with a muzzle velocity of 2073 feet per second, at 28 J yards distance. Au "armoured'' mau

struck at the latter range would probably be bowled over by shock, and like ly too, he would sustain a sever© bruise but the bullet would be found to have sprayed itself out from the point oi impact without penetrating. As still further illustrating the possibilities of modern warfare it is an undoubted fact that the lives of hundreds of soldiers have been saved by the growing habit of the men "wearing" in their vest pocket over the heart little trench mirrors made of threa-six-t-eenth inch thick polished steel. In a Dardanelles fight a British seaman hid nn arm completely shattered by a I raiment of exploding shell. Another fragment, found to be of equal size, struck into the brass buckle of his waistbelt causing nothing worse than a bruise on the abdomen. Our War Office, which has given most men the impression that it would rather miss two good things, than be fooled once, has bee nvery slow in taking up the armoured man idea, tiut when it does movt —and it js moving now—we can early expect star ,!.ug deevlopments. It is a notable tact that when the suggestion to armour sh ps was first mooted, one of the greatest naval authorities in the countr; scouted the idea as preposterous, urging that the armour struck by a shell would splinter into a thousand deatndealing fragments. The main objection to armouring men is not 60 farfetched; it is the quite reasonable one of weight. And its opponents also urge that its efficacy could only be temporary, for development would, ot a certainty, be met by bullets, so pointed that no armour carried by man could resist the impact. Let that be as it mny, man armour is to lie given a fair chance, and the results are eagerly awaited.