Evening star., 1925-03-17
The War Over the Air
By Viii Ir1Uin.
Chapter III--New York
By Viii Ir,oir,.

but upon brains. To kill these peo-
pie would have the same effect on our
financial and industrial life as to
kill its general staff and their trained
technicians would have on any army.
The country's finances. to great ex
round rudderless. A daylight gas
bombardment of the Wall Street dis
trict, by the way, would have one
gruesomely odd effect. The gas-cloud
would not rise to the top of the sky
scrapers. The people in their upper
stories would either rush down into
the infected levels and die. or wait
up there in a state of siege for res
cuers with masks.
Forcing People TO Flee.
Probably the enemy would not at
tack certain great local bridges
such as the Brooklyn, Manhattan and
greensboro to Long Island, or the
smaller spans across Spuyten Duyvil
Creek to the mainland. He would
want the city evacuated; these would
help. Nearly two million live on
Manhattan Island at night; probably
three million live and work there by
day. Before this work of destruc-
tion was accomplished New York
would be in a state of panic impos
sible to describe and difficult to
imagine.
If the city showed unexpected
calm, however, a few gas bombs
sprinkled in the residential districts
or among the excitable tenement peo-
pie of the East Side would stir things
up wonderfully. And, at any rate,
as soon as the faucets began to run
diluted mustard gas New York would
be untenable. Across the bridges
two or three million people would
struggle and jam their way-refu-
gees. They would leave behind them
tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds
of thousands, who had died in
strange, unnatural forms. Tangled
knots of corpses would lie at the
bottoms of the city canyons. in the
stalled trains of the subways and
tubes, in the offices Of the sky
scrapers.
Yet perhaps the greatest loss of
civilian life would come afterward.
A modern city, as Herbert Hoover
found when he looked into Belgian
and American food control, has never
more than two weeks Of provisions
ahead. Probably New York never
beats this game by more than 10
days. Here is the greater part of
the city living in the fields, cut off
from rail communication. Here is
a state of attack on all the railroad
communications of the Great Triangle
and state of war 20 boot
Attack Not Possible Now.
Yet, If We do not succeed in re-
lieving these refugees, New York
alone faces disaster comparable to
the retreat of the Serbian populace.
the forced flight of the Armenians In
the late war.
Is it possible? Not at present. No
one has enough combined air power
and sea power. The very nations
which come nearest to having that
power are those with which we are
bound by the strongest community of
interest and emotional good feeling
Leaving out material considerations,
war between us and Great Britain,
our best prepared enemy, is, as an
eminent British friend once said to
me, "emotfonally unthinkable."
But are these things possible in the
future? Yes, 1 think. So do some
of our best authorities on air power.
This peril gives point to the en-
deavor of those strange bedfellows.
President Coolidge and the League
of Nations, to limit by agreement the
extent of air armament That, as l
have said before, is our best defense.
But suppose that Europe makes a
fool of itself again and swings into
an era of competitive airplane build
ing, and that some nation-perhaps
a restored and remonarchized Ger
many-strikes again for a place in
the sun? Then we must look into the
question of defense against aircraft.
C"Defense Against Aircraft" the
fourth article of VIII Irwin's series
on the aircraft controversy, follows
tomorrow
Copyright. 1925, in United States Canada
and Great Britain. by North American News
paper Alliance. All rights reserved.)