The Waterbury Democrat., 1937-02-26

DhIDhEIC COuItIy. 1ICIC AldVC been exceptions, upon a small and with small Augmentation bombs, one was the bombardment of the enemy concentration at DesSye. which, judging from the resultant howls of protest, may nave been extremely effective. The accusations of bombardment of hospitals marked with the red cross are answered by the Italians as being unavoid- able because nearly all the houses in the town bore this insignia which incidentally is the conventional sign for a brothel in Abyssinia. This point, if true, can easily be proved by photographs which were undoubtedly taken by the attack ing planes. Adding insult to injury the Italians are said to have dropped a note to Emperor Halle Selassic asking him if his umbrella had been of any use!
 Bombing Power Great
 There is no doubt that the Ital- ians could easily have put the rail- road from the capital to the coast out of commission and demolished Addis Ababa, but probably re- trained from doing so for political reasons as the former is French controlled and the latter is of no great military importance, and a bombardment would only result in great non- -combatant loss of life and consequent moral repercussions throughout the world. So that the tremendous destructive power of aerial bombardment against the urban and industrial regions of civilized countries can in noy1 way be realized by this frontier warfare.
 The history of aerial bombing, curiously enough, was initiated by the Italians in 1911 against the Turks in Tripoli. The bombs used were thrown by hand from plane and were nothing more than sticks of dynamite which exploded upon contact with the ground. Any sighting done was pure guesswork and the effect was largely moral In the Great War aerial lombard ment was begun with the bombing of Paris by lone German plane on August 30, 1914. The Germans quickly recognized the potentialities of long distance bombing and im- mediately afterwards organized the "Ostend Carrier Pigeon Squadron" for attacks against industrial cen- ters in France and England as well as the nearby channel ports and vulnerable points behind their en- emies' lines such as intuition dumps and rail centers. The small radius of action of the planes of 1914 lim- ited their action for awhile but by December, 1914, the Germans made bombing raid which reached the outskirts of London.
 Allies Were Backward
 The Allies were somewhat back ward in aerial bombardment activ- ities at first, although the British made one raid in 1914 which suc- cecded in destroying the Zeppelin Z-2 in it's hangar at Friedrichshaf- cn. But they soon gathered mo- mentum and were we'll organized in this branch by the end of war; especially the British who, with American cooperation, were assem- bling a huge bombing fleet known as "The Independent Air Force" with which it was planned to carry on continual raids upon a grand scale into the industrial Rhineland.
 The equipment used by the bel- ligerants was, by present day stand ards, crude to an extreme. The bombing planes were slow, unma- neuverable, practically unprotected against hostile air attack. and only had a radius of action of about 175 miles. The bombing apparatus was no better, for the bomb racks were rough improvisations and untrust- worthy and more than one plane failed to release all it's bombs upon the target and was blown to bits by its own load by the landing im- pact at the home airdromc. The sights. too, were highly inaccurate.