BOMB-DROPPING.

Taihape Daily Times, 13 May 1918, Page 6

BOMB-DROPPING.

GIANT BOMBING EAIDS. 100 TONS NEEDED AT- A TIME. The London correspondent of the Paris Journal, M. Jacques Marsillac, publishes in that newspaper an interview which he had lately with Mr. Handley Page. He recalls the fact that it was a Handley Page machine which last summer flew in stages from London to Constantinople, and bombed the Goeben there in the harbour, It was also, he says, an aeroplane of this type which, through a mistake of its pilot, landed near Lille:some time in 1916, and fell intact into the hands of the enemy.

"It is possible," he adds, "that this machine served as a prototype for the Gothas.'' '

The French correspondent asked MiPage what results might be expected from bombarding aeroplanes. "Everything," was the interesting reply. "They may even prove the deciding factor in the war. All we have to do is to see things on~a large scale, and I think that this has now. been done in this country. It is all very we'll to destroy a battery by a powerful concentration of artillery, but is it not better still to smash up the 'mother of the guns' —the factory which makes them? That we can do. We can shower bombs on the works, the railways, bridges tunnels and training camps, bombarding them unceasingly until work becomes impossible in the great centres. "What matters more than perfect accuracy, which it is almost impossible to assure, is the simultaneously dropping of as large a quantity of explosives as possible. At the front artillery is used in the same way precisely: the aim is to hammer the enemy lines with shells. From the military as well as the oral point of view the effect of 100 guns shooting simultaneously, even if some ' of the shots go wide, is much greater than that of one gun shooting with the utmost accuracy. Out of a large number of shots several projectiles are boond to hit the vital point" "Still.'* obisdvS*-! «h? interviewer, "the Germans have never hit any important objective in their raids over London."

"That was precisely because their attacks were on too small a scale for the aim which they sought to achieve What are two or three tons of bombs? Raids as w,e should carry them out ought to result _ in the dropping of 80 or 100 tons of bombs. I am so convinced of the importance of numbers that I would almost give up a raid rather than attempt it with only halfa:dozen machines "