Speeding-Up War

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 400, 14 July 1928, Page 5

Speeding-Up War

Mechanical Transport and 35 m.p.h. Tanks

LECTURE to army officers

The Napoleonic maxim that an , rmy marches ot« its stomach will no application ,n the next ” r> when troops w,ll be rushed action in speedy six-wheeled to which the roughest ioTntry offer, no obstacle.

Mechanisation has revolutionised not n lv transportation. Speeding ahead °r the swiftly-moving armies of the future, faster than' the charge of cavalry, thousands of two-man tanks yi s pit death into the enemy’s lines. Behind them yet larger tanks will hurl destruction. These in turn will be followed by infantry in fast, sixwheeled motor-lorries, to “mop up” the c;i ptured territory. This terrifying futurist vision of a battle was conjured up by Major W. j K. Jennings. D. 5.0., of the New "ealand Staff Corps, who lectured on the mechanisation of the British Army at the Auckland Officers’ Club last evening.

At the end of the war, he said, practically the whole of the army’s transport service was horse-drawn. To-day a division, with all its equipment, guns, ammunition, food sup-

plies, field kitchens, and ambulances, ia whirled across country at a speed which in wartime would have been considered impossible. The maximum rate of advance then was 10 miles a day. Now it is 50.. With the aid of lantern slides, Major Jennings traced the development of the tank, from the 30-ton monster moving at a walking pace, to which General Ludendorff has attributed the German failure in France, to the deathdealing 35-m.p.h. ‘‘Whippet” of the present time. Flesh and blood, however, has not given place to steel and petrol. Cavalry will still have its work to do, reconnoitring in conjunction with tanks, and in wooded and other difficult country where mechanical arms, in spite of their mobility, would be powerless. The amazing: strides that army transport has made was demonstrated In a special film of recent tests carried out in England in hilly, roadless country. Six-whegled cars and lorries climbed grades of one in two, plunged down steep bracken-covered hillsides, through ditches, bogs, and streams, as though their makers had never heard of roads. The driving power in these vehicles js distributed equally between the four rear wheels, each of which is sprung separately, and over rough country, while the wheels bounce up and down in turn, the' body rolls evenly and smoothly, like a ship at sea. About 140 officers, including Colonel Jl. R. Potter, O.C. Northern Command, Colonel R. Tracey Inglis, Lieut.Colonel J. E. Duigan, and Lieut.Colonel Dawson, were present. The president of the club, Lieut.Colonel J. Hardie Neil, after thanking Major Jennings for his lecture, urged military officers of the Dominion, although they had as yet seen nothing the mechanical marvels at Home, to keep in touch with its latest developments, so that in a war fought under such conditions as Major Jennings had described they would not be unfamiliar with the rapid changes that have taken place since the war.