NOT ACCURATE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 April 1942, Page 4

NOT ACCURATE

LOW=FLYING AIRCRAFT THEIR POWER EXAGGERATED. EXPERIENCES OF SOLDIERS.. Soldiers who have felt the full weight of aerial strafing in this war consider that the constant and understandable emphasis on the need for air superiority is inclined to give an exaggerated idea of the power of aircraft against troops on the ground, says the “Sydney Morning Herald’s” defence correspondent. Talk of enemy divebombers and fighters “blasting a way for the enemy tanks to go through” carries the suggestion that aircraft can cause big casualties among infantry in a defended position or can make troops shift their ground. The comments which follow represent the views of front-line soldiers on “aerial activity” as experienced from below. Soldiers who have been under prolonged strafing in Greece and Crete insist that aircraft cannot move good troops, and that the casualties caused by “strafing” have generally proved very light. The story was told that a low-flying aircraft came racing over a road on which General Freyberg, commanding the New Zealanders, was travelling. The car stopped and, while the driver and others took cover, General Freyberg stood in a field by the road, leaning on his stick and turning so as always to face the plane as it made several runs over him with its ma-chine-guns firing. One man on the ground is a very difficult target for an aircraft moving at 300 miles an hour or more..

Where aerial attack has been useful against troqps on the ground, as in Crete, it has been because the bombing and machine-gunning held the defending troops in their positions, and hampered the counter-attacks which could have stopped the enemy’s ground troops from consolidating. It was because the troops were overwhelmed by troops on the ground that Crete was lost.

Admittedly,, ceaseless aerial attacks exhausted the men who had to stand up to them with no aerial protection for ten days or more. Also, German air superiority prevented the arrival of adequate reinforcement and equipment; but that was a matter of aircraft operating against ships, not troops. A low-flying plane is not an accurate weapon, either as bomber or ma-chine-gunner, or both. In Greece, Bren gunners protecting road convoys would stand at their weapons, firing clip after clip of bullets at low-flying aircraft, sometimes literally engaging in duels with individual machines which roared a few hundred feet above them, and attacked them again and again. It was rarely that one heard either of an aircraft putting a Bren gun out of action or of the man on the ground bringing down a plane.