Читать книгу Winged Peace - William Avery Bishop - Страница 14

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While it would probably be oversimplification to say that the United Nations almost lost World War II because they had neglected to study geography, the statement is too close to bald fact to be comfortable. I will enlarge on it by saying that if we do not learn more about the geography of the Air Age than seems to be our inclination at present, we may easily lose the peace and, at no far-distant date, confront mankind with the even greater calamity of World War III.

The long and short of the matter is that North Americans—or perhaps I should say the Western Democracies—have not taken the trouble to ascertain the tremendous implications of flight in its relationship to the new map. It could almost be said that anything we have learned up to this time we have picked up from our enemies. Let me give one brief example of the difference between our approach and that of Germany, one which goes back a great many years, as the history of aviation is measured, but which is still valid. When Blériot made the first Channel flight from France to Britain, English-language newspapers the world over acclaimed the feat as an act of tremendous heroism and daring. The newspapers of Germany, however, took an entirely different view. Blériot’s daring left them cold. What intrigued them was that the French aviator had ended the status of the United Kingdom as an island and made it part of the European mainland. That was geopolitics at work—and times have not changed the German outlook.

Geography has always been founded on communication, and geographical knowledge has always increased in ratio to improvements in communication. The Romans invented the hard-surfaced highway and over it carried their culture and conquest to the thithermost parts of the then-known world, “discovering” it and therefore adding to the knowledge of geography. The Mohammedans spread their culture throughout the East through the medium of the horse which, they realized, could carry men great distances and bring Mohammed’s influence to other men living far away. Genghis Khan overran half the world because he hit upon the idea of the war-chariot pulled by many horses—the panzer divisions of the early war-like world. North American culture, which had its origin in Western Europe, was brought across the ocean by the sailing vessel and later by the steamship. Continentally, the United States became a great nation, developed its great natural resources, and learned about its own internal geography through the railway and finally the automobile, which robbed local or regional cultures of the isolation they had possessed in ox-cart and horse-and-buggy days and developed the modern American outlook. These things are the very stuff of the science of geography.

What do you think is likely to happen now that man has developed a means of communication which releases him from imprisonment on the surface of the earth, and carries him through the skies over every barrier which yesterday’s geography placed in his path? The first objective is that of achieving a world outlook to replace the national and regional approach. The horse and buggy developed purely local geographical cultures. Railway trains and motor cars developed nationalism. Now the airplane makes essential the establishment of world culture, a world view of the responsibilities of citizenship.

I am not suggesting that regionalism, or regional cultures will disappear entirely because people are now able to move in a hurry from one region to another. Norwegians will still be Norwegians. They will still give loyalty to Norway and be prepared to die to maintain its integrity, if need be. Americans are not going to become Germans or Russians or polyglot. But you cannot create a society in which the peoples of nations hitherto widely separated suddenly establish contacts which may be consummated in a matter of hours without tremendous world repercussions resulting. The Air Age must bring us entirely new concepts of citizenship, of national and international relations. First amongst these must be world-wide acceptance of the oneness of all nations, the indivisibility of peace. If our leaders do not realize this in fabricating the coming peace and in organizing the world beyond victory, mankind is going to be in for a peck of trouble.

Well, we cannot permit ourselves to walk in fear of change, because change is upon us now. The only way to have prevented the coming of the Air Age and its new geography would have been to strangle all the air scientists twenty years ago, before they could emerge from their laboratories with the inventions they have made available to man, and which man is now using. All we can do, therefore, is to accept these phenomena as science continues to make them available and as quickly as possible reorient our way of life, praying the while to whatever gods we profess that we may be able to keep pace with the scientists in our own political development. Most of the troubles we have encountered in trying to create a stable civilization have arisen from the inability of political man to keep pace with the man of science. Scientists fear nothing. They are always ready for anything. Politicians, on the other hand, walk in deadly fear of their own shadows and of those of the people from whom they draw their power.

We have embarked upon two world wars since the turn of the century. We speak of World War I and now of World War II and some people talk about World War III as if it were just around the corner. But it is all one war and it will not end until one of two things happens: either man will destroy the civilization he has worked through the centuries to create (the culminating force of which is global aviation) or he will bring that civilization into control and use its new forces to create a greater and finer civilization. Let us look at the record.

We have never taken the trouble to ascertain what the repeated clash with Germany is fundamentally about. But Germany knows. She knew in 1914 and she knew in 1939. In 1914 Germany set upon us because we were in control of the sea highways, through the medium of British control of the inter-ocean bottlenecks. Germany launched her thunderbolts against the world again in 1939 because she believed she could gain a world-wide advantage through air-power before the rest of us were alive to its implications. But let us go back to World War I for a moment.

The German plan, we know now, was to crush Russia and France and make the German people masters of Europe. Then she would have made use of all the ship-building potential of the Continent to challenge and destroy British and American sea-power and acquire complete domination of the oceans of the world.

Very few people realized it at the time, or even later. Certainly none of the world’s isolationists did—and most of us became isolationists as soon as World War I was over, if we had not been so before. In the United States from 1914 to 1917, for example, most people regarded what was going on beyond the Atlantic as a purely European squabble, and Uncle Sam finally became enraged because the Germans would not leave American shipping alone. When they finally declared war, the American people did so as if it were their own private war and not one in which they were engaging as anybody’s ally. They were joining in as “isolated Americans” whose business had been tampered with by Germany, not as partners in a world-wide social conflict.

Virtually the same thing happened in World War II. The power of isolationist elements in the United States (and before them that of Europe’s appeasers, which is simply another name for sufferers from geopolitical blindness) was so great in the beginning that the few leaders who visualized the conflict as global, and as a direct threat to the freedom of the world, including that of the continental United States itself, dared not issue a call to arms in defiance of a public opinion which insisted on looking inward when it should have been looking outward. They were not able to do so until Japan saved the life of America by bombing Pearl Harbor. It is eminently doubtful if many free men know to this day what they are really fighting for or against, choosing to believe the war is for national, not global, survival.

But back to World War I. The original Allies, plus the United States, succeeded in beating the Central powers to their knees. As soon as that was done, however, the American people withdrew to their cave in the Western Hemisphere and refused to have anything to do with the idea of world security or world organization. That was simply because their leaders had never taken the trouble to instill the rudiments of political geography into their people or even to learn geography themselves. The result was that the great majority of Americans came to believe that they had sent their young men across the Atlantic to “rescue” France and Britain, whose motives soon were painted as by no means altruistic (possibly a correct assumption). Soon the opposition to the League of Nations, which began as a domestic political putsch to “get Wilson,” reached new proportions and, finally, touched the nadir of almost 100 per cent isolationism. Without doubt many Americans were completely idealistic in their isolationist views. Their republic had been founded on isolationism, on a determination to escape from the bondage of the Old World to fashion a completely independent nation in the new. Washington and Jefferson were isolationists in a day when isolationism was almost synonymous with liberalism. Many isolationists of the between-wars years, therefore, were merely following the dictates of conscience and upbringing, true to the doctrines of some of the greatest of their founding fathers.

So the greatest power in the Western Hemisphere withdrew from effective political association with the rest of mankind, a seclusion maintained for more than twenty years. Remembering that we were still living in the sea world when World War I ended, I do not think it an exaggeration to say that America convinced herself that so long as she remained behind her ocean barriers no harm could come to her. We know now that the assumption was entirely wrong. It was wrong in a sea-power world. In the Air Age any such assumption is suicidal folly. The airplane has destroyed isolationism forever.

Germany and her associates came within a whisker of winning the First World War, thanks to her use of the submarine, the only weapon with which an inferior sea power could attack a superior one. Her failure was in large measure due to the fact that Germany’s U-boats could not destroy enough Allied shipping quickly enough. Otherwise the free peoples were doomed, even in a sea-power war. World War II has been waged on Germany’s new assumption that air-power, supporting mechanized land forces and attacking shipping at sea in conjunction with the submarine, is invulnerable. We shall succeed in turning back the challenge again, but I do not believe that we can continue forever to accept these challenges. Sooner or later, if the practice continues, we shall lose a war, and with it our freedom. Not forever can we hope to win through a combination of the courage of our young men, the productivity of our industries, and the help of God Almighty. I think some of our military leaders, and certainly many of those who lead in the field of aviation, are fully alive to the factors at work. But I am not sure that many of our statesmen are and I am positive that our populations as a whole are not. How can they be? No intelligent instruction has been given them. By no means all the young men who fly from the Pacific Coast of the United States to Australia, or from Montreal to Karachi, know what is happening. They simply have jobs to do and are doing them to the best of their skill, ingenuity, and courage. Most people (and I include a great many political gentlemen, particularly those who still think that the most important thing in life is to be re-elected from a given Congressional District, or to the Canadian Parliament from a constituency in Ontario) are still thinking of the airplane solely as a weapon of war, or as a means of commercial communication capable of covering long east-west distances as shown on the old rectangular map.

Well, it is neither. If the airplane is regarded primarily as a weapon its ultimate use will be destruction. Commercially the airplane has not simply made it possible to get from one place to another over the old routes, but to its own new dimension it has added the new global geography, taking that geography into partnership and flying its traffic lanes to shrink the world to a tenth of its prewar size. If we fail to shape what has happened for the good of all men new troubles lie ahead. That is a point I shall discuss at length as we go along. Here I am concerned solely with driving home the facts of life as they are contained for all of us between the covers of the geography of the Air Age.