Hitting Power: Does Our Air Force Lack It?

I

FOR the conquered democracies of Europe the bitterest memory of 1939 centres on the imperious figure of Britannia, sweeping her brood under the hem of her protection and then turning to transfix the foe with the sharp end of an umbrella. Today England’s bomb-scarred shores, and the conquered nations once under her protection, bear tragic witness to the futility of making gestures of defiance without the assurance of instant and deadly action behind them.

Today the United States heralds itself as the protector of the entire Western Hemisphere. But unless we apply some horse sense to the lesson of devastated Europe, and do it soon, our own destiny is more than likely to be that of the flivver which thought that it could beat the Limited across the tracks.

In Europe 120 million people have been conquered, not by numbers, but by a wholly original conception of warfare, by the adaptation of new and specialized weapons to a radically new technique of fighting. Military precedents have gone down before it like ninepins. We have seen the Allies, with thirty times our armed man power, with a far larger navy and air force, powerless to defend countries smaller in area than New Jersey.

Our unpreparedness for this new technique of war is beyond belief. So much time has been thrown away, so many issues have been muddled, that to say our defense situation is alarming is not enough. It is critical.

If England loses the war, we are next on the spot. The Nazis have already announced their program for South America; we know from Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands that when the hour is at hand they waste no time over formalities. They strike without warning. If they struck at us tomorrow our incapacity would be far more spectacular than that of England. This, actually, is our spot: —

No Mechanized Army. The proposed new Army of between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 men cannot be properly equipped and ready until the end of 1943.

No Atlantic Fleet. The new two-ocean Navy will not be ready until 1945. A Japanese Navy of equal strength keeps our existing Navy pinned in the Pacific. With it, however, we are pledged to protect the coast lines of the entire Hemisphere.

No Double Locks for the Panama Canal. At any time a single act of sabotage can rupture our slender lifeline. The double locks will not be ready until 1945.

No Air Power. For the defense of the whole Western Hemisphere we have no Air Hitting Power worthy the name. The much-talked-of 50,000 planes, even if begun on today, cannot be ready until 1944. If they are completed, we shall still have no Air Hitting Power, along present lines of purchasing.

Thus we face the critical years to come.

II

The production of armies, navies, canal locks, like the production of babies, requires a certain minimum time. No ingenuity, no money, no sacrifice, can shorten the period. Air Power is the sole weapon of defense we could yet prepare in time. But it is in Air Power, the very field in which our designing genius leads the world, that we have today the most confusion and the least policy. Our air is filled, not with planes, but with the wildest poppycock describing impossible rates of production. Every half-baked idea of Air Power is held up as gospel, so long as it has a Name attached to it. Our small Air Force is top-heavy with pursuit planes, although month after month in Europe has proved with sickening monotony that the deadly weapon of defense is not the pursuit plane, but the bomber.

The lessons of Europe are brutally clear. From the last despairing cry of France (‘Send us 5000 planes and we can carry on!’) to the present race-with-death of the British, the constant clamor has been for bombers, bombers, and still more bombers. However criminally Air Power was neglected in the past, the British Government is not neglecting it now. It is suicidal to ignore the experience of the Royal Air Force pilots, who, with incredible endurance and skill, are trying to overcome the tremendous odds brought against them by their own politicians and redeem the perhaps irreparable mistakes that we are so busily duplicating. To England, a plane today is worth twenty a year hence.

As part of our Paper Defense, we have been fed the idea of 50,000 planes a year. Competent testimony shows that this objective would require $500,000,000 of new plants and a minimum of over 600,000 skilled men. How are we to fill these jobs in time, when the aircraft industry cannot even fill the 100,000 skilled jobs required for its present production? The annual cost of producing the planes will be billions of dollars, upkeep as much again, which resolves itself into a splurge of seven billions a year for an unwieldy, inexpedient force far beyond our need — and for years far beyond our achievement.

The time for realism is right now, for tomorrow the United States may have its hand called as abruptly as the British had theirs called last September. The United States, with Western Democracy at stake, must play what is in that hand, just as the British today are playing what is in their hand. Not all the eloquence, nor all the billions, can alter our immediate productive power. The National Defense Advisory Committee has stated the figures. In July we made 716 military planes. The top production for the critical years ahead, including Army and Navy replacements, equipment for the new Navy, exports to England, and training planes, is given by members of the Committee as follows: —

In the recent uproar in Congress, Senator Byrd announced that the present combat plane strength for the Army and Navy was around 2000, and that since the 50,000-plane idea was handed to the American public, last May, 343 combat planes had been ordered, due for delivery in 1042.

The facts in hand define what we cannot do to organize the defense of the Western Hemisphere. Now let us seek, as unemotionally, a definition of what we can do.

III

Europe has underscored a dozen times the fact that in the new concept of warfare no successful attack can be made without control of the air and control of the bases of Air Power.

From this it is clear that no effective attack can be made upon the United States unless enormous air bases and supplies are first established in the Western Hemisphere. These bases must be at least as large as our own, and the great weight of material must be ferried and maintained by ships. This is because there are as yet no military planes in existence capable of striking across the ocean in sufficient numbers to do us serious damage.

As a practical matter the United States can only be attacked by (a) ships, (b) planes brought in ships, or (c) great intermediate air bases established and supported by ships. As a practical matter the United States, therefore, can only be defended by (a) destruction of these ships or (b) destruction or prevention of these air bases. The inescapable conclusion is that the beginning and end of American primary Air Defense must be great Hitting Power at long range, reenforced by and reënforcing Sea Power.

In the new pattern of war the term ‘Hitting Power’ has broken with military precedent. Europe shows us (in blood and tears) that Hitting Power is the heavy bomber, the fast, long-range, weight-carrying bomber. The greater the number, the greater the Hitting Power.

Hitting Power is expressed in tons per day. It varies with the distance, the speed, and the weights the plane can carry. If a force of 1000 bombers, each carrying two tons of bombs, can make only one trip a day, the Hitting Power is 2000 tons; if they can make four trips, the Hitting Power is 8000 tons, and so on, but always Air Hitting Power means large numbers of the right planes.

The fate of England depends on its bombers, on their ability to smash the heart of German war economy. ‘The process of bombing the military industries and communications of Germany, and the air bases and storage depots from which we are attacked,’ said Winston Churchill recently, ‘affords one, at least, of the surest, if not the shortest, of all the roads to Victory.’ Night after night, the Royal Air Force, with its pitifully few bombers, is desperately pounding away at these objectives, trying to make up for the time so obtusely thrown away. The overworked pursuit squadrons, fighting over their own homes for lack of range, can only strive to ward off enemy Hitting Power that should never have been allowed to take off in the first place. Only in the past two months has the Royal Air Force begun its campaign against German bases.

In the face of these life-and-death lessons, it is incredible to find our own Air Corps fatuously duplicating the early mistakes of the French and British. Instead of concentrating on bombers, it is cluttered up with small pursuit planes of no range and no Hitting Power. These planes can destroy neither ship nor air base; their only function in time of war would be to fight enemy bombers over, say, Connecticut or California after enemy bases had already been established. However numerous the pursuit planes, however many enemy bombers they shoot down, undamaged factories and bases can always send more for replacements, and British experience shows that bombers always drop their loads. One’s frontier today is no longer one’s own coast line. It is the enemy’s aircraft plants, and one’s front-line trench is his air base.

Every phase of the European war has underlined this outstanding lesson in Air Power — that the only effective defense is instant and crushing offense. Whoever throws away the initiative throws away overwhelming advantage, whoever waits to defend at home plays straight into the enemy’s hands. England, without aerial hitting strength, was powerless to prevent the relentless advance of enemy air bases which now enflank its coast line all the way from Narvik to Bordeaux.

That we have no Air Power worthy the name is not because we lack the means. America makes the finest highspeed bombers in the world. The Royal Air Force has repeatedly stated that its few squadrons of American bombers are supreme, the deadliest striking weapons it knows, and it is pressing for more.

If we have no Air Power, it does not mean that we could not get it. Definitely we could get it. In a fraction of the time required for our present program, within one year, we could attain such ruthless Hitting Power as would render the United States immune to any successful attack from sea or air. It could be done at a cost of under two billions as against the fifteen to thirty billions required by the present program. Moreover, we should be provided with an ample supply of pilots, bases, engines, and replacements.

This is no guesswork or assumption. It is a fact. Anyone who has eyes to see can read corroboration for himself in every plane of every air line in the United States.

IV

The machine that the Royal Air Force has pronounced so destructive, and so urgently demands, is in effect an ordinary American transport plane, modified to carry bombs instead of passengers. The all-round quality of these planes is unsurpassed. Royal Air Force pilots have bombed with them, fought with them, climbed with them, dived them at 400 miles per hour, and unhesitatingly pronounced them tops.

We lead the world in air transport. Our wonderful chance for rapid production arises from the fact that we, more than any other nation, have developed planes of great speed, strength, weightcarrying ability, and power economy — the basic qualities that are required by Air Power for the defense of the United States. To produce this type of plane we have in existence this very week all the experience and facilities in design, manufacturing, engining, upkeep, and flying, which could go into action immediately!

The basic type we need, and can produce right now, is no wonder plane of the future, no 450-miles-per-hour freak to titillate juvenile minds; it is a stripped, souped-up, adapted version of our latest two-engine transports, such as the Douglas, Lockheed, or Boeing, or our Martin bomber. Radically adapted, it can be given a true speed of 300 miles per hour, at a transit height of 20,000 feet. It can fly 1500 miles out with a ton and a half of bombs, and 1000 miles out with two tons of bombs.

With this type of plane we could create an Air Striking Force of 10,000 planes. The first 5000 could be in the air within less than twelve months and would give the United States a Hitting Power far superior to that of any other air force in the world. The second 5000 could be in the air within another six months.

Give the United States such Hitting Power and at last we give it true Air Power. It can strike so far and so hard that attack can be broken up far from the homeland. It can be available over the Atlantic, the Pacific, or the Caribbean within a few hours’ call. It can prevent the creation of enemy air bases or it can destroy them. It can repel or destroy an enemy fleet. It can reach within three hours ships still three days’ sailing distance away (at maximum speed). It can deliver the unprecedented weight of 20,000 tons of bombs per twelve daylight hours at targets 1000 miles distant from its bases. It can strike on many fronts at once, or it can converge overwhelmingly on a single goal. It represents, in short, such titanic Hitting Power that with it the Royal Air Force could smash the whole of industrial Germany into atoms in a week. It could drop 40,000 tons of bombs a day, against the maximum of 500 tons a day which the Germans have so far dropped on England.

This is the type of plane we need if we are to achieve security. This is the defense it is well within the capacity of our present aircraft industry to produce within a year under a policy of ordinary common sense.

V

The grim aspect of the current United States program of defense is that it has, in point of fact, no air policy at all. It simply clamors for planes and more planes much as a starving man clamors for food and more food.

In Air Power, tens of thousands of the wrong planes are useless. Hundreds of the right planes are next to useless — being too few. The only true defense is the right number of the right planes serving a decisive policy. Our need of a properly conceived air policy is so acute that no matter who wins the war, or who wins the Presidential election, the lack of it will indefinitely hazard the life of every man, woman, and child in this country.

At the outbreak of war, France and England also had no proper air policy. Air production was wholly subordinated to the needs of the Army and Navy. Plans for victory were keyed to formulæ of the past — great ships holding the seas, great armies defending landlines, an endurance contest aimed at the survival of the richest. Aircraft factories worked only on day shifts to produce planes whose assignment was to take photographs and drop pamphlets. As late as last spring, the Allied Purchasing Commission spent four months changing its mind about design, and wrangling with American plane manufacturers over a 7 per cent difference in cost.

It took the extermination of Poland, it took the inability of the entire British Navy to prevent supplies from crossing the Skaggerak, it took the destruction of Rotterdam, the agony of Belgium, the surrender of France, to hammer home to the British Government the stark necessity of having a realistic air policy, however hastily improvised.

There has been no improvisation about the German air policy. Behind the Nazi successes lie five years of singleminded concentration on a set plan, five years of harnessing every resource of industry to its furtherance and improvement. Nor has there been any subordination about German Air Power. From the beginning it has been under the direct personal control of Hitler and Goring.

In the United States no responsible body has ever been appointed to plan an air policy specifically adapted to our need, to consider our problem of Air Power as a whole. For a matter of such pressing importance we need the equivalent of a National Board of Air Defense personally headed by the President of the United States and comprising the finest brains available in the country.

We face risks of the greatest possible reality. We are signing armament contracts which must crush a generation with tremendous taxation. We shall not mind paying if we get what we pay for, but our Paper Defense is so unreal that it leaves us completely exposed for the critical years. The situation cries for an urgent and common-sense examination of any scheme of Air Power which can give us more defense in less time for far less money. If we are to fare any better than the European democracies we cannot ignore their mistakes. For us the successful war can only be the war never fought because of our superiority in the new weapons.

VI

All the recent political oratory has emphasized how the European situation will affect us if England loses the war. The implication is that if England wins the war we can draw a deep breath, relax, and all will be as before. Nothing can be further from the truth.

The dictators have already profoundly changed our way of life. Already our isolation has gone. Already conscription impends. Already we have a tremendous increase in the power of the central government. Already we have hundreds of thousands of men working in war industries directly dependent on the central government. Most of all, we are irrevocably committed to colossal expenditures far beyond our present means. The current increase in income taxes, corporation taxes, all taxes, will hardly make a dent in our expenditures; it is a bagatelle compared to what we may expect.

So far we are committed to more than fifteen billion dollars for new armaments, whether we are drawn into war or not. We are committed also to their upkeep. Our deficit for this fiscal year is nearly six billion dollars. By the time we have built a new Army, a new Navy, and a new Air Force and have met the initial upkeep, the cost may total fifty billions. It may well be that the National Debt will reach $100,000,000,000. Anything approaching these figures must mean inflation and the destruction of the old values.

This is the prospect which faces us in the light of peace. We have only to look at England — with every civil liberty curtailed, with income taxes ranging from 40 to 80 per cent, with excessprofits taxes of 100 per cent, with victory at this late hour only to be bought, if at all, with the impoverishment of the whole people — to know what to expect in case of war.

The steel of Nazi realism has proved to us with brutal finality that this new type of warfare is here to stay. Eight nations are in fetters, nations as freethinking, as liberty-loving as ourselves, because they sought to resist it with the wrong type of defense. Holland, bracing itself, declared that Germany had ‘picked the wrong neutral’; it has learned dearly, as we may learn, that to Nazi appetites no neutral is going to be the wrong neutral unless it has the right defense — the power to exchange blow for blow, ruthlessness for ruthlessness, destruction for destruction.

In the ringing words of General Pershing, ‘We can defend the things we hold most dear only if we make up our minds now to speak the truth without concealment, if we make up our minds to face the truth without flinching, if we make up our minds to act upon the truth without hesitating.’