THE NEXT WAR

Southland Times, Issue 18817, 10 May 1920, Page 2

THE NEXT WAR

TANKS THAT GAS MILLIONS.

FEW MEN, WITH HORRIBLE MACHINES. Lieut.-Col. J. C. F. Fuller, Chief General Staff Officer of the Tank Corps during the critical years from 1916 to August, 1918, is one of a group of officers trained in the old Army who believe in the future of mechanical war. The great interest and value of his new book, “Tanks in the Great War,’' lie in this, that hj is not merely a careful record of what tanks have done, but also a reasoned statement of what he thinks tanks can do. “Before the Great War,” he says, !< I was a believer in conscription and in the Nation in Arms; I was an 1870 soldier. My sojourn in the Tank Corps has dissipated these ideas. To-day I am a believer in war mechanics—that is, in a mechanical army which requires a few men. and powerful machines. “Iron mechanically moved in its present form is as unlikely as it would have been to expect in 1769 that Watt’s pumping engine was the ‘Ultima Thule’ of all such engines. It is.not the form which is the stroke of true genius, but the idea, the replacing of muscular energy by mechanical force as the motive power of an army.” “To-day we stand upon the threshold of a new epoch in war.” One of the greatest qualities of the tank is that it is not tied to roads but that “the earth has become a universal vehicle of motion like the sea.” “To pit an overland mechanical army against one relying on roads, rails, and muscular energy is to pit a fleet of modem battleships against one of wind-driven threedeckers. The result of such an action is not even within the possibility of doubt; the latter will for a certainty be destroyed, for the highest form of machinery must win because it saves time, and time is the controlling factor on the battlefield as in the workshop.” In the war of the future the earth will be as a solid sea, as easily traversible in all directions as a sheet of ice is by a skater; the battles in these wars will therefore more and more approximate to naval actions. “Fleets of fast-moving tanks, equipped with tons of liquid gas, against which the enemy will probably have no means of protection, will cross the frontier and obliterate every living thing in the fields and farms, the villages and cities of the enemy's country*. While life is being swept away around the frontier fleets of aeroplanes will attack the enemy’s great industrial and governing centres. All these attacks will be made against the civil population in Order to compel it to accept the will of the attacker. “Though Colonel Fuller ia reticent about our present designs, it is possible that tanks of thin type are now being built, as, indeed, are tanks which can cross water. So he is safe in predicting that from the present-day tank to one which can plunge in the Channel at Calais at four in the morning, land at Dover at six o’clock, and be outride Buckingham Palace for an early lunch will not probably require as many as the 52 years which have separated the Merrimac from the Tiger or Queen Elizabeth.” Such are some of Colonel Fuller’s forecasts which may before, long be realised in fact