Читать книгу Winged Peace - William Avery Bishop - Страница 3

Table of Contents

Of all the strange phenomena of war none is more amazing to me than the apparent failure of the average man to recognize what has happened in the realm of aviation since Germany struck at Poland in the autumn of 1939 and mankind faced the second world war in a quarter century.

People talk of global aviation as if it were well past the corner of the next cloudbank, not as if it had become an accomplished fact. Actually aviation is the greatest single force which can ensure an enduring peace, or, on the other hand, will be the most destructive weapon man has produced in his history. That is exactly where we stand today. Not even all the recognized leaders in the realm of aviation appear to grasp what has happened, however. Too many of them are still thinking in terms of factors with which they dealt five years ago—comparatively slow planes of comparatively restricted range—and apparently have not noted the revolutionary changes the immediate future will bring. Primarily they seem to be worrying about the routes which are to be allotted to specific nations and people, about interests purely national in scope, about the money to be made in the world of tomorrow by carrying people, mail, and goods from one continent to another. All sort of petty bickering goes on about “chosen instruments” and free competition, about “open sky” and “closed sky.” Every now and then somebody attempts a new definition of Freedom of the Air, which we have never known, and are not likely to know in the same manner in which we have known Freedom of the Seas. Gentlemen in the Senate of the United States have suggested that the various and varied facilities for flight which Uncle Sam has created in numerous parts of the world for the purpose of waging war against the Axis powers should be permanently taken over by the United States—the word “confiscated” scarcely seems too harsh—as a partial payoff for Lend-Lease. Our friends in Britain are equally concerned about what is to happen to British world-aviation interests in the days to come. In the realms of aviation and politics, then, it may be said that most of the talking is being done along lines intensely nationalistic, in so far as the two great English-speaking powers, the United States and Britain, are concerned. My own country, Canada, I am happy to say, tends more to the co-operative approach to the problems of the future, a happy augury in the light of the favorable geographical position in which she stands, at the top of the world and the crossroads of the primary intercontinental routes. But of such matters, more later.

While all these discussions are in spate, the public, as such, remains blissfully unaware of the course of events. That is because what comes to the attention of their eyes and ears talks mainly about tomorrow—what tomorrow’s luxury liners of the air will be like, what distant lands we shall visit some faraway tomorrow with the ease with which we visited next-door neighbors yesterday, but always tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, whereas global aviation is the great phenomenon of today. The truth of the matter is that nations have shrunk to the size of villages and continents to the length of Main Street. The oceans of the world have become ditches. These are not things which are going to happen. They have happened.

As you are reading these paragraphs, fleets of four-engined bombers are winging non-stop from Montreal to North Africa. Others will leave North America and arrive in Karachi in less than forty hours. Men of affairs, military leaders, all manner of people engaged in important war missions are being whisked from continent to continent, not just every now and then in time of emergency, but on intercontinental shuttle routes. The globe has become a network of airways joining the United Nations. Airports in far northern Canada, adjacent to the Arctic Circle, the highway to Russia and the Orient and the main line to Tokyo, boast runways longer than any to be found on New York’s crack La Guardia Field. It is possible that the Old World has been saved from the Nazi yoke by virtue of the ability of the United Nations to fly great numbers of bombers from the factories of North America to the fighting fields of Britain and Russia. Certainly it has been one of the great factors in turning the tide Freedom’s way.

On the day when the shooting stops, then, our civilization will find itself fully equipped with the facilities of global flight. Our job will be to adapt those facilities to man’s lawful occasions, to man’s good, to man’s peace. It is a task in which we shall fail again if our approach to world problems is selfishly nationalistic, or if we think only in terms of individual profits arising from commercial transportation. Our problems go much deeper.

The first thought, then, to fix in mind, is that we can fly from anywhere to anywhere else now. There is no trick to it any longer. The question is: How are we going to go about regulating and controlling this great aerial juggernaut which has reduced the world to the size of a football?

All the people of the world have to be awakened to the implications of this behemoth of the skies. I am at a loss to understand how the true impact of air-power can have failed to impress them with its power and importance during the pre-invasion weeks of the spring of 1944, when every day they were reading of raids into deepest Germany in strengths of thousands of planes—America’s Fortresses and Liberators by day, Britain’s Lancasters and Halifaxes by night—or on June 15, 1944, when the United States government announced the performance of the B-29 in its first official combat test over Japan, and the creation of a new global air force in order best to utilize its mighty potentialities. Daily, during the pre-invasion days and later, the press and the radio drummed into our eyes and ears stories of thousands of tons of bombs which inexorably and mercilessly were reducing Nazidom’s capital and many of its great industrial centers to rubble.

Perhaps constant repetition weakens the power of the story, destroys its effect upon our imagination. But surely the least airwise of us can see in these vast aerial armadas, with their clouds of fighter escorts, and in the soundly documented promises for the B-29, that the Air Age has in fact arrived, that it is no longer something in store for tomorrow. What are we going to do about it? If we think we can dispose of it simply by having a diplomats’ meeting for the purpose of carving up the air routes of the world and distributing them amongst ourselves, and by developing nationally huge military air forces, we shall be much mistaken. If we approach the problem with narrow national outlook, we shall soon be taxiing out for the first take-off of World War III. In fact, I would like to go even further and use a sentence or two which I propose to discuss at length as a point of view later: We have got to trust each other in the air. We have got to become aerial partners. Otherwise we shall ultimately become aerial enemies again. Mankind cannot handle with too great care the new implements of warfare which his brains and hands have fashioned on the blueprint table and in the laboratory.

Here is another totally erroneous concept. Yet it is one which appears to be held even by people closely associated with aviation, some of whom still seem to think that the fundamental problem is how to affix more motors to machines and to lift greater pay-loads without having to carry too much fuel for the long hops. In other words, they fail to take note of the implications of the new and startling forms of propulsion which are just beginning to emerge, even if more or less experimentally, from the production lines.

We are standing at the threshold of stratospheric flight, of forms of human movement (and of new forms of potential destruction) which may revolutionize again all our thinking as the Age of Flight already has revolutionized it. The place to discuss these possibilities, however, is in the body of this book, not in its prefatory remarks. All that I seek to stress here is that these possibilities are here today, that they are part and parcel of the living present. That is the basic thesis of this book.

Some day soon the world will foregather at the conference table to write a new design for living. The hope of every one of us is that what will emerge will be an enduring peace, that we shall fashion a world in which man’s object will be to live in accord with other men, that the policy of Good Neighborliness will become world policy, not simply a hemispheric hope. A very great part of our hope for that enduring peace will depend entirely on our approach to the new era of flight—on how well our leaders are informed concerning the implications of global aviation in the hard school of war, on how determined we are that the new implements our hands fashion shall be used to enlarge, not to constrict, man’s peaceful horizons. We shall succeed only if behind our leaders is marshaled a strong and informed world opinion, an opinion sufficiently strong that these leaders will know before they assemble to write the terms of peace that the peoples of the world demand the Peoples’ Peace they have fought to attain. That Peoples’ Peace can only emerge from the Peoples’ War if we realize and accept in advance the implications of what the arrival of the Air Age means.

The key to peace is in the skies. In these same skies flies the possibility of destruction more appalling than any we have known before. It is because of the urgency of this belief that I have written this book.

William A. Bishop

Ottawa, Canada,

June 1944.