Then look at the geographical position of Toulon and of the French naval ports on the North African coast, and note how the radii of submarine attack intersect the long single line of British sea communication. Is it not obvious that if in a future war any Mediterranean power was numbered among Britain’s enemies, her fleet would find it difficult enough to protect itself against submarines, let alone protect merchant convoys and troop transports? When to the proved menace of submarine power is added the potential effect of aircraft attack against shipping in the narrow seas, it is time the British people awoke to the fact that, in case of such a war, the Mediterranean would be impassable, and that this important artery would have to be abandoned. Thus, as a strategical asset, the Suez Canal has lost a large part of its value in face of modern naval and air development—for in such a war we should be driven to close the Mediterranean route, and divert our imperial communications round the Cape of Good Hope.
Nor can it do any harm for our politicians and people to realize the unquestionable if unpalatable fact that the existence of this country is dependent on the good-will of France, the supreme air and submarine power commanding both the vital centres of England and our oversea communications at their most vulnerable points—that “Paris” is able to shoot at our Achilles’ heel, and has “two strings to its bow” for the purpose.
THE ARMY WEAPON
Finally, what is the future of this alternative “punch” to the air attack? No future, assuredly, unless the army limb of the body military is thoroughly overhauled and inoculated with the serum of mobility, for the present type of army is suffering from chronic rheumatoid arthritis, its joints far too stiff to deliver an effective punch. The outstanding lesson of the Great War was the powerlessness of the high commands to attain decisive successes—a condition due to three main factors. First, the unwieldy masses put into the field allowed neither opportunity nor room for manœuvre; second, these slow-moving infantry masses were too vulnerable a target to modern fire-weapons; third, their numbers imposed so great a strain on the means of supply that offensive after offensive was stultified by the breakdown of communications—the commanders of the Great War were as unhappily placed as the proverbial puppy with a tin can attached to its tail.
The years 1914–18 show the “Nation in Arms” theory carried to its climax; numbers of troops and quantity of material had been the ruling ideas of the General Staffs of Europe for half a century. What was the upshot? That generalship became the slave of the monster it had created. The artist of war yielded place to the artisan, because we forgot the text preached by Marshal Saxe two centuries before, that “multitudes serve only to perplex and embarrass.” Watching it from across the Styx, Marshal Saxe can be imagined as uttering that favourite quotation of his: “War is a trade for the ignorant, a science for men of genius.”
What are the obvious deductions from the three factors we have mentioned?
The rear communications of existing armies are based on railways, the advanced communications on roads, both of which have proved inadequate to stand even the internal strain of modern warfare. In the last war they suffered little external interference from enemy aircraft, but in the future this is a certainty. Both these means of communication depend on fixed tracks, which cannot be varied save after a long period of labour and preparation; since they are shown on the map they are easily located and can be kept under observation from the air. If railways, because of their visibility and limited number of routes, are in themselves the more vulnerable, no more helpless target exists than long columns of slow-moving infantry on the march. A vivid picture of the chaos caused by air attack is to be found in Major-General Gathorne-Hardy’s account of the ghastly fate of the Austrian columns and transport after Vittorio Veneto in October, 1918. If they are not bombed out of existence, air-attack will at least force them to disperse and take cover so frequently as to slow up their rate of advance to a snail’s pace, while days of bombing by hostile aircraft will hardly be a tonic for their moral.
Thus the nation which continues to base its military communications on railways and roads is running for a fall. What is the alternative? The opposite method to tracked movement is trackless—by means of caterpillar track or multi-wheeled vehicles capable of quitting the roads at will on the approach of hostile aircraft, and of advancing on a wide front, instead of through a bottleneck.
If infantry, because of certain limitations on tank-action, may still survive for a time as a battle-instrument, it is the merest common sense that they should be transported to the battlefield, their 3–5 m.p.h. legs replaced by 15–25 m.p.h. mechanical tracks—not only because they may thus be kept fresh for their fighting rôle, but because otherwise they will never reach the battlefield at all.