The Crewless Bomber

Like all the "secret weapons" of which we have heard since the outbreak of war, the radio-controlled bomber of the Germans turns out to be no secret at all. It is nothing but an enlargement of the German winged, radio-controlled rocket bomb described by Mr. Churchill last year. Like other secret weapons it has not fulfilled expectations by reducing Allied military forces to helplessness.

The general principle of controlling apparatus by radio goes back to the early days of what was once called "wireless." At the first electrical exposition held in this city over forty years ago Nikola Tesla maneuvered and blew up a model submarine in a tank by radio. There soon followed a score of German, American, English and French inventors who showed how engine-driven vehicles, torpedoes and ships could be steered by radio waves with never a man on board. Both the British and American Navies maneuvered obsolete crewless battleships under full steam in the same way and used them for target practice.

Whether or not the new German bomber is as destructive as the Germans claim, it manifests a trend which goes back to the introduction of cannon. Ignite gunpowder and chemical energy is released. The mechanization of war, therefore, begins with artillery. Every improvement in mechanical engineering has been applied in battle. Troops are carried to the front in trains. Tractors have taken the place of horses, and steam engines the place of sails on battleships and cruisers. Now we have tanks, jeeps, trucks, planes — all engine-driven so that battles are fought by machines as well as by men. And the machines have become more and more automatic until at last a stage has been reached when the crewless bomber, remotely controlled, can be launched against an enemy. Who knows but some day, if war is not abolished, battles may be fought simply by more or less automatic machines?

We have not yet reached that stage of military and naval evolution, but we are not far from it when a battleship is reduced to helplessness, if turrets can no longer be turned or her steering-gear is crippled or if Germany finds it impossible to launch enough planes to ward off an attack on Berlin. The writers of romantic scientific fiction have been telling us for years that wars will be bloodless because machines will do all the fighting, and the radio-controlled devices of the war lend some color to their fancies.