The Sun FRIDAY, JANUARY 6, 1928. WARRIORS ON WHEELS

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 245, 6 January 1928, Page 8

The Sun FRIDAY, JANUARY 6, 1928. WARRIORS ON WHEELS

WHEN the first training of Great Britain’s new Mechanised Force began on Salisbury Plain last August, enthusiastic experts asserted confidently that the innovation, instead of being an encouragement of militarism, would help the cause of peace. Armed machines, with a speed of 25 miles an hour and a tough capacity for moving inexorably across country, uphill and dow n dale, indifferent to all obstacles, would take the place of infantrj, while such losses as combatant nations might suffer in the clash of fearsome mechanical contrivances would merely be material. The majority of a nation’s manhood would at least be left unscathed to work harder and pay more taxes for the luxury of war on wheels. It is surprising how military inventors are able to fool themselves and some of the people into believing that warfare can be made impersonal and quite attractive. Peti ol is to take the place of pluck and the heroism of sturdy men. And the wonderful display of armoured cars, mastiff tanks, and whippet tanks, “dragons” and other weird vehicles of war was so convincing as to efficiency that the astonished observers hastened to tell England and the world that all the old ideas and time-honoured military institutions might well be discarded. A splendid picture was limned, for the credulous taxpayer. It was shown that the cavalry—even the Scots Greys, mark you! — and most of the infantry would soon follow the pikeman, the archer and the crossbowman, and the mail-clad knight into oblivion.

But militarism is not easily deprived of its desires. Another development of the Mechanised Force has been announced. This takes a dual form. One idea is to strip the horses of all impedimenta except the man and his rifle, so that they will be in perfect trim for fighting when they meet the enemy, while the material or impedimenta will follow upon six-wheeled lorries. If, however, the enemy happens to be a mechanised force, Heaven help the cavalryman if he meets them before his impedimenta has followed up on the six-wheeled lorry. The other idea is said to be more revolutionary. It is proposed that each cavalry regiment shall be composed of two squadrons of horse and one squadron of fast whippet tanks, accompanied by a fleet of fast lorries carrying machine-guns and their crews. This, if you can see it, will enable the cavalry to establish strategical points in force. Doubtless a splendid, economical idea., but perhaps, by that time, enemy aircraft and enemy gas-tanks would be smothering the strategical points with high explosives and penetrating poison.

It is no doubt right and proper that, in the interests of peace between the nations, their military experts and inventors should devise more economical and more efficient means of slaughter, but if nations go on developing contrivances for conflict, some imbecile in the end will want to try them aut in real warfare. If preparation for mechanised warfare, with murderous science thrown in as an ingenious ally, must go on, an effort should be made at the construction and equipment of Parliamentary tanks. Say an armoured Bellamy’s filled with poison gas, so that the militant politicians of each nation would be the first to take the field and spurt wisdom into their enemy kind.