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The War in the Air Chapter 8 Parts 1 & 2 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter eight, Parts one and two of War in the Air.
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  Speaker 1: This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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  Speaker 1: the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
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  Speaker 1: visit LibriVox dot org. Recorded by William Tomko. War in
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  Speaker 1: the Air by H. G. Wells, Chapter eight, Parts one
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  Speaker 1: and two. Chapter eight A World at War Part one.
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  Speaker 1: It was only very slowly that Bert got hold of
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  Speaker 1: this idea that the whole world was at war, that
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  Speaker 1: he formed any image at all of the crowded country
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  Speaker 1: south of these Arctic solitudes, stricken with terror and dismay
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  Speaker 1: as these new born aerial navies swept across their skies.
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  Speaker 1: He was not used to thinking of the world as
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  Speaker 1: a whole, but as a limitless hinterland of happenings beyond
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  Speaker 1: the range of his immediate vision. War, in his imagination,
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  Speaker 1: was something a source of news and emotion, that happened
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  Speaker 1: in a restricted area called the seat of war. But
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  Speaker 1: now the whole atmosphere was the seat of war, and
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  Speaker 1: every land a cockpit. So closely had the nations raced
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  Speaker 1: along the path of research and invention, So secret and
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  Speaker 1: yet so parallel had been their plans and acquisitions that
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  Speaker 1: it was within a few hours of the launching of
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  Speaker 1: the first fleet in Franconia that an Asiatic armada beat
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  Speaker 1: its westward way across high above the marveling millions in
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  Speaker 1: the plain of the Ganges. But the preparations of the
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  Speaker 1: Confederation of Eastern Asia had been on an altogether more
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  Speaker 1: colossal scale than the German. With this step, said tan
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  Speaker 1: Ting Thiang, we overtake and passed the west. We recover
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  Speaker 1: the peace of the world that these barbarians have destroyed.
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  Speaker 1: Their secrecy and swiftness and inventions had far surpassed those
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  Speaker 1: of the Germans. And where the Germans had had a
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  Speaker 1: hundred men at work, the Asiatics had ten thousand. There
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  Speaker 1: came to their great aeronautic parks at Chinsi Fu and Singienne,
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  Speaker 1: by the mono rails that now laced the whole surface
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  Speaker 1: of China, a limitless supply of skilled and able workmen,
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  Speaker 1: workmen far above the average European in industrial efficiency. The
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  Speaker 1: news of the German world's surprise simply quickened their efforts.
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  Speaker 1: At the time of the bombardment of New York, it
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  Speaker 1: is doubtful if the Germans had three hundred airships altogether
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  Speaker 1: in the world. The score of Asiatic fleets flying east
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  Speaker 1: and west and south must have numbered several thousand. Moreover,
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  Speaker 1: the Asiatics had a real fighting flying machine, the Niais,
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  Speaker 1: as they were called, a light but quite efficient weapon,
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  Speaker 1: infinitely superior to the German Drachenflager. Like that, it was
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  Speaker 1: a one man machine, but it was built very lightly
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  Speaker 1: of steel and cane and chemical silk, with a transverse
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  Speaker 1: engine and a flapping side wing. The aeroonaut carried a
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  Speaker 1: gun firing explosive bullets loaded with oxygen, and in addition,
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  Speaker 1: and true to the best tradition of Japan, a sword.
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  Speaker 1: Mostly they were Japanese, and it is characteristic that from
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  Speaker 1: the first it was contemplated that the aeronaut should be
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  Speaker 1: a swordsman. The wings of these flyers had bat like
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  Speaker 1: hooks forward by which they were to cling to their
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  Speaker 1: antagonist's gas chambers while boarding him. These light flying machines
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  Speaker 1: were carried with the fleets and also sent overland or
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  Speaker 1: by sea to the front with the men. They were
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  Speaker 1: capable of flights of from two to five hundred miles
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  Speaker 1: according to the wind so hard upon the uprush of
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  Speaker 1: the first German air fleet, these Asiatic swarms took to
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  Speaker 1: the atmosphere instantly. Every organized government in the world was
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  Speaker 1: frantically and vehemently building airships and whatever approach to a
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  Speaker 1: flying machine its inventors had discovered. There was no time
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  Speaker 1: for diplomacy. Warnings and ultimatums were telegraphed to and fro
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  Speaker 1: and in a few hours all the panic fierce world
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  Speaker 1: was openly at war, and at war in the most
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  Speaker 1: complicated way. For Britain and France and Italy had declared
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  Speaker 1: war upon Germany and outraged Swiss neutrality. India at the
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  Speaker 1: sight of Asiatic airships had broken into Hindu insurrection in Bengal,
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  Speaker 1: and a Mohametan revoltd hostile to this in the Northwest Provinces,
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  Speaker 1: the latter spreading like wildflower from Gobi to the Gold Coast,
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  Speaker 1: and the Confederation of Eastern Asia had seized the oil
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  Speaker 1: wells of Burma and was impartially attacking America and Germany.
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  Speaker 1: In a week, they were building airships in Damascus and
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  Speaker 1: Cairo and Johannesburg. Australia and New Zealand were frantically equipping themselves.
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  Speaker 1: One unique and terrifying aspect of this development was the
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  Speaker 1: swiftness which these monsters could be produced. To build an
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  Speaker 1: ironclad took from two to four years. An airship could
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  Speaker 1: be put together in as many weeks. Moreover, compared with
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  Speaker 1: even a torpedo boat, the airship was remarkably simple to construct.
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  Speaker 1: Given the air chamber material, the engines, the gas plant,
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  Speaker 1: and the design, it was really not more complicated and
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  Speaker 1: far easier than an ordinary wooden boat had been one
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  Speaker 1: hundred years before. And now from Cape Horn to Nova Zembla,
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  Speaker 1: and from Canton round to Canton again, there were factories
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  Speaker 1: and workshops and industrial resources, and the German airships were
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  Speaker 1: barely in sight of the Atlantic waters. The first Asiatic
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  Speaker 1: fleet was scarcely reported from Upper Burma before the fantastic
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  Speaker 1: fabric of credit and finance that had held the world
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  Speaker 1: together economically for one hundred years strained and snapped. A
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  Speaker 1: tornado of realization swept through every stock exchange in the world.
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  Speaker 1: Banks stopped payment, business shrank and ceased. Factories ran on
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  Speaker 1: for a day or so by a sort of inertia,
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  Speaker 1: completing the orders of bankrupt and extinguished customers. Then stopped.
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  Speaker 1: The New York burnt Smallways saw for all its glare
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  Speaker 1: of light and traffic was in the pit of an
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  Speaker 1: economic and financial collapse unparalleled in history. The flow of
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  Speaker 1: the food supply was already a little checked, and before
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  Speaker 1: the World War had lasted two weeks. By the time
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  Speaker 1: that is, that mast was rigged in Labrador. There was
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  Speaker 1: not a city or town in the world outside China, however,
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  Speaker 1: far from the actual centers of destruction, where police and
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  Speaker 1: government were not adopting special emergency methods to deal with
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  Speaker 1: the want of food and a glut of unemployed people.
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  Speaker 1: The special peculiarities of aerial warfare were of such a
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  Speaker 1: nature as to trend once it had begun, almost inevitably
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  Speaker 1: towards social disorganization. The first of these peculiarities was brought
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  Speaker 1: home to the Germans in their attack upon New York.
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  Speaker 1: The immense power of destruction in their ship has over
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  Speaker 1: the thing below, and its relative inability to occupy or
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  Speaker 1: police or guard or garrison a surrendered position, necessarily in
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  Speaker 1: the face of urban populations in a state of economic
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  Speaker 1: disorganization and infuriated and starving. This led to violent and
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  Speaker 1: destructive collisions, and even where the air fleet floated inactive above,
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  Speaker 1: there would be civil conflict and passionate disorder below. Nothing
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  Speaker 1: comparable to this state of affairs had been known in
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  Speaker 1: the previous history of warfare. Unless we take such a
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  Speaker 1: case as that of a nineteenth century warship attacking some large,
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  Speaker 1: savage or barbaric settlement, or one of those naval bombardments
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  Speaker 1: that disfigure the history of Great Britain in the late
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  Speaker 1: eighteenth century, then indeed there had been cruelties and destruction
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  Speaker 1: that faintly foreshadowed the horrors of the aerial war. Moreover,
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  Speaker 1: before the twentieth century, the world had had but one experience,
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  Speaker 1: and that a comparatively light one, in the communist insurrection
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  Speaker 1: of Paris eighteen seventy one of the possibilities of a
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  Speaker 1: modern urban population under warlike stresses. A second peculiarity of
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  Speaker 1: airship war as it first came to the world that
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  Speaker 1: also made for social collapse was the ineffectiveness of the
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  Speaker 1: early airships against each other upon anything below. They could
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  Speaker 1: rain explosives in the most deadly fashioned forts, and ships
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  Speaker 1: and cities lay at their mercy, but unless they were
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  Speaker 1: prepared for a suicidal grapple, they could do remarkably little
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  Speaker 1: mischief to each other. The armament of the huge German airships,
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  Speaker 1: big as the biggest mammoth liners afloat was one machine
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  Speaker 1: gun that could easily have been packed up on a
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  Speaker 1: couple of mules. In addition, when it became evident that
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  Speaker 1: the air must be fought for, the air sailors were
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  Speaker 1: provided with rifles with explosive bullets of oxygen or inflammable substance.
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  Speaker 1: But no airship at any time ever carried as much
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  Speaker 1: in the way of guns and armor as the smallest
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  Speaker 1: gunboat on the Navy list had been accustomed to do. Consequently,
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  Speaker 1: when these monsters met in battle, they maneuvered for the
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  Speaker 1: upper place, or grappled and fought like junks, throwing grenades,
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  Speaker 1: fighting hand to hand in an entirely medieval fashion. The
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  Speaker 1: risks of a collapse and fall on either side came
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  Speaker 1: near to balancing in every case the chances of victory.
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  Speaker 1: As a consequence, and after their first experiences of battle,
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  Speaker 1: one finds a growing tendency on the part of the
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  Speaker 1: air fleet admirals to evade joining battle and to seek
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  Speaker 1: rather the moral advantage of a destructive counter attack. And
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  Speaker 1: if the airships were too ineffective, the early drakenflagger were
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  Speaker 1: either too unstable like the German or too light like
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  Speaker 1: the Japanese, produce immediately decisive results later. It is true
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  Speaker 1: the Brazilians launched a flying machine of a type and
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  Speaker 1: scale that was capable of dealing with an airship, but
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  Speaker 1: they built only three or four, They operated only in
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  Speaker 1: South America, and they vanished from history untraceably in the
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  Speaker 1: time when world bankruptcy put a stop to all further
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  Speaker 1: engineering production on any considerable scale. The third peculiarity of
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  Speaker 1: aerial warfare was that it was at once enormously destructive
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  Speaker 1: and entirely indecisive. It had this unique feature that both
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  Speaker 1: sides lay open to punitive attack. In all previous forms
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  Speaker 1: of war, both by land and sea, the losing side
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  Speaker 1: was speedily unable to raid its antagonist's territory and the communications.
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  Speaker 1: One fought on a front, and behind that front the
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  Speaker 1: winter supplies and resources, his towns and factories, and capital,
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  Speaker 1: the peace of his country were secure. If the war
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  Speaker 1: was a naval one, you destroyed your enemy's battle fleet
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  Speaker 1: and then blockaded his ports, secured his coaling stations, and
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  Speaker 1: hunted down any straight cruisers that threatened your ports of commerce.
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  Speaker 1: But to blockade and watch. A coast line is one thing.
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  Speaker 1: To blockade and watch the whole surface of a country
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  Speaker 1: is another, And cruisers and privateers are things that take
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  Speaker 1: long to make, that cannot be packed up and hidden
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  Speaker 1: and carried unostentatiously from point to point. In aerial war,
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  Speaker 1: the stronger side, even supposing it destroyed the main battle
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  Speaker 1: fleet of the weaker, had then either to patrol and
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  Speaker 1: watch or destroy every possible point at which he might
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  Speaker 1: produce another, and perhaps a novel and more deadly form
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  Speaker 1: of flyer. It meant darkening his air with airships. It
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  Speaker 1: meant building them by the thousand, and making aeronauts by
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  Speaker 1: the one hundred thousand. A small, uninitiated airship could be
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  Speaker 1: hidden in a railway shed, in a village street, in
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  Speaker 1: a wood. A flying machine is even less conspicuous, And
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  Speaker 1: in the air Arno's streets, no channels, no point where
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  Speaker 1: one can say of an antagonist, if he wants to
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  Speaker 1: reach my capital, he must come by here. In the air,
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  Speaker 1: all directions lead everywhere. Consequently, it was impossible to end
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  Speaker 1: a war by any of the established methods. A having
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  Speaker 1: outnumbered and overwhelmed b hovers a thousand airships strong over
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  Speaker 1: his capital, threatening to bombard it unless B submits. B
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  Speaker 1: replies by wireless telegraphy that he is now in the
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  Speaker 1: act of bombarding the chief manufacturing city of A by
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  Speaker 1: means of three raider airships. A denounces Be's raiders as pirates,
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  Speaker 1: and so forth bombards Bee's capital and sets off to
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  Speaker 1: hunt down Be's airships, while B, in a state of
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  Speaker 1: passionate emotion and heroic unconquerableness, says to work amidst his
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  Speaker 1: ruins making fresh airships and explosives for the benefit of A.
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  Speaker 1: The war became perforce universal guerrilla war, a war inextricably
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  Speaker 1: involving civilians and homes and all the apparatus of social life.
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  Speaker 1: These aspects of aerial fighting took the world by surprise.
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  Speaker 1: There had been no foresight to deduce these consequences. If
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  Speaker 1: there had been, the world would have arranged for a
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  Speaker 1: universal peace conference in nineteen hundred. But mechanical invention had
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  Speaker 1: gone faster than intellectual and social organization, and the world
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  Speaker 1: with its silly old flags, its silly unmeaning tradition of nationality,
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  Speaker 1: its cheap newspapers and cheaper passions and imperialisms, its base
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  Speaker 1: commercial motives, and habitual insincerities and vulgarities, its race, lies
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  Speaker 1: and conflicts, was taken by surprise. Once the war began.
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  Speaker 1: There was no stopping it. The flimsy fabric of credit
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  Speaker 1: that had grown with no man foreseeing, and that had
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  Speaker 1: held these hundreds of millions in an economic interdependence that
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  Speaker 1: no man clearly understood, dissolved in panic everywhere with the
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  Speaker 1: airships dropping bombs, destroying any hope of a rally, And
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  Speaker 1: everywhere below were economic catastrophe, starving worldless people, rioting, and
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  Speaker 1: social disorder. Whatever constrictive guiding intelligence there had been among
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  Speaker 1: the nations vanished in the passionate stresses of the time.
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  Speaker 1: Such newspapers and documents and histories as survived from this
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  Speaker 1: period all tell one universal story of towns and cities
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  Speaker 1: with a food supply interrupted and their streets congested with
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  Speaker 1: starving unemployed, of crises in administration and states of siege,
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  Speaker 1: of provisional governments and councils of defense, and in the
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  Speaker 1: cases of India and Egypt, insurrectionary committees taking charge of
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  Speaker 1: the re arming of the population, of the making of
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  Speaker 1: batteries and gun pits, of the vehement manufacture of airships,
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  Speaker 1: and flying machines. One sees these things in glimpses, in
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  Speaker 1: illuminated moments, as if through a driving reek of clouds
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  Speaker 1: going on all over the world. It was a dissolution
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  Speaker 1: of an age. It was a collapse of the civilization
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  Speaker 1: that had trusted to machinery, and the instruments of its
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  Speaker 1: destruction were machines. But while the collapse of the previous
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  Speaker 1: great civilization, that of Rome had been a matter of centuries,
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  Speaker 1: had been a thing of phays and phays, like the
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  Speaker 1: aging and dying of a man, This, like as killing
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  Speaker 1: by railway or motor car, was one swift, conclusive smashing,
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  Speaker 1: and an end. Part two. The early battles of the
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  Speaker 1: aerial War were no doubt determined by attempt to realize
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  Speaker 1: the old naval maxim to ascertain the position of the
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  Speaker 1: enemy's fleet and to destroy it. There was first the
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  Speaker 1: Battle of the bernese Oberlund, in which the Italian and
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  Speaker 1: French navigables in their flank raid upon the Franconian Park
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  Speaker 1: were assailed by the Swiss experimental squadron, supported as the
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  Speaker 1: day wore on by German airships. And then the encounter
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  Speaker 1: of the British Winterhouse dun aeroplanes with three unfortunate Germans.
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  Speaker 1: Then came the Battle of North India, in which the
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  Speaker 1: entire Anglo Indian aeronautic settlement establishment fought for three days
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  Speaker 1: against overwhelming odds and was dispersed and destroyed in detail.
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  Speaker 1: And simultaneously with the beginning of that commenced the momentous
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  Speaker 1: struggle of the Germans and Asiatics that is usually known
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  Speaker 1: as the Battle of Niagara because of the objective of
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  Speaker 1: the Asiatic attack, but it passed gradually into a sporadic
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  Speaker 1: conflict over half a continent. Such German airships as escaped
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  Speaker 1: destruction in battle, descended and surrendered to the Americans and
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  Speaker 1: were remanned, and in the end it became a series
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  Speaker 1: of pitiless and heroic encounters between the Americans, savagely resolved
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  Speaker 1: to exterminate their enemies, and a continually reinforced army of
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  Speaker 1: invasion from Asia. Quartered upon the Pacific Slope and supported
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  Speaker 1: by an immense fleet. From the first the war in
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  Speaker 1: America was fought with implacable bitterness. No quarter was asked,
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  Speaker 1: no prisoners were taken. With ferocious and magnificent energy, the
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  Speaker 1: Americans constructed and launched ship after ship to battle and
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  Speaker 1: perish against the Asiatic multitudes. All other affairs were subordinate
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  Speaker 1: to this war. The whole population was presently living or
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  Speaker 1: dying for it. Presently, as I shall tell, the white
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: men found in the Butteridge machine a weapon that could
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  Speaker 1: meet and fight the flying machines of the Asiatic swordsmen.
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  Speaker 1: The Asiatic invasion of America completely effaced the German American conflict.
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  Speaker 1: It vanishes from history. At first, it had seemed to
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  Speaker 1: promise quite sufficient tragedy in itself, beginning as it did
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  Speaker 1: in Unforgettable Massacre. After the destruction of central New York,
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  Speaker 1: all America had risen like one man, resolved to die
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  Speaker 1: a thousand deaths rather than submit to Germany. The Germans
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  Speaker 1: grimly resolved upon beating the Americans into submission and following
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  Speaker 1: out the plans developed by the Prince, had seized Niagara
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  Speaker 1: in order to avail themselves of its enormous power works,
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  Speaker 1: expelled all its inhabitants, and made a desert of its
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  Speaker 1: environs as far as Buffalo. They had also directly Great
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  Speaker 1: Britain and France declare war wrecked the country upon the
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  Speaker 1: Canadian side for nearly ten miles inland. They began to
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  Speaker 1: bring up men and material from the fleet off the
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  Speaker 1: east coast, stringing out to and fro like bees getting honey.
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  Speaker 1: It was then that the Asiatic forces appeared, and it
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  Speaker 1: was in their attack upon this German base at Niagara
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  Speaker 1: that the air fleets of East and West first met
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  Speaker 1: and the greater issue became clear. One conspicuous peculiarity of
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: the early aerial fighting arose from the profound secrecy with
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  Speaker 1: which the airships had been prepared. Each power had had
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  Speaker 1: but the dammest inkling of the schemes of its rivals,
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: and even experiments with its own devices were limited by
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  Speaker 1: the needs of secrecy. None of the designers of airships
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  Speaker 1: and aeroplanes had known clearly what their inventions might have
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  Speaker 1: to fight. Many had not imagined they would have to
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: fight anything whatever in the air, and had planned them
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: only for the dropping of explosives. Such had been the
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: German idea. The only weapon for fighting another airship with
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: which the Franconian fleet had been provided was the machine gun.
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  Speaker 1: Forward only after the fight over New York were the
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  Speaker 1: men given short rifles with death tating bullets. Theoretically, the
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: Draken flagger were to have been the fighting weapon. They
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: were declared to be aerial torpedo boats, and the aeronaut
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  Speaker 1: was supposed to swoop close to his antagonist and cast
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  Speaker 1: his bombs as he whirled past. But indeed these contrivances
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  Speaker 1: were hopelessly unstable. Not one third in any engagement succeeded
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  Speaker 1: in getting back to the mother airship. The rest were
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  Speaker 1: either smashed up or grounded. The Allied Chino Japanese fleet
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  Speaker 1: made the same distinction as the Germans between airships and
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: fighting machines heavier than air, but the type in both
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  Speaker 1: cases was entirely different from the occidental models. And it
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: is eloquent of the vigor with which these great people
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: took up and bettered the European methods of scientific research,
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  Speaker 1: and almost every particular the invention of Asiatic engineers. Chief
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: among these, it is worth remarking, was Mohini K. Chatterjee,
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: a political exilele who had formerly served in the British
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: Indian Aeronautic Park at Lahore. The German airship was fish
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  Speaker 1: shaped with a blooded head. The Asiatic airship was also
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  Speaker 1: fish shaped, but not so much on the lines of
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  Speaker 1: a cod or gobie as of a ray or soul.
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  Speaker 1: It had a wide, flat underside unbroken by windows or
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  Speaker 1: any opening except along the middle line. Its cabins occupied
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  Speaker 1: its axis, with a sort of bridge deck above, and
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  Speaker 1: the gas chambers gave the whole affair the shape of
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  Speaker 1: a gypsy's hooped tent, except that it was much flatter.
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  Speaker 1: The German airship was essentially a navigable balloon, very much
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: lighter than air. The Asiatic airship was very little lighter
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: than air, and skimmed through it with much greater velocity,
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: if with considerably less stability. They carried fore and aft guns,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: the latter much the larger, throwing inflammatory shells, and in
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: addition they had nests for riflemen on both the upper
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: and the underside. Light As its armament was in comparison
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: with the smallest gunboat that ever sailed, it was sufficient
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: for them to outfight as well as outfly the German
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: monster airships. In action, they flew to get behind or
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: over the Germans. They even dashed underneath, avoiding only passing
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: immediately beneath the magazine, and then as soon as they
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: had crossed, let fly with their rear gun and sent
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: flares or oxygen shells into the antagonist's gas chambers. It
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: was not in their airships, but as I have said
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: in their Flying Machines Proper, that the strength of the
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: Asiatics lay next only to the Butteridge machine. These were
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: certainly the most efficient, heavier than air flyers that had
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: ever appeared. They were the invention of a Japanese artist,
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: and they differed in type extremely from the box kite
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: quality of the German Draken flagger. They had curiously curved,
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: flexible sideway wings, more like bent butterflies wings than anything else,
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: and made of a substance like celluloid and of brightly
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: painted silk, and they had a long humming bird tail.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: At the forward corner of the wings were hooks rather
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: like the claws of a bat, by which the machine
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: could catch and hang and tear at the walls of
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: an airship's gas chamber. The solitary rider sat between the
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: wings above a transverse explosive engine. An explosive engine that
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: differed in no essential particular from those in use in
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: the light motor bicycles of the period. Below was a
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: single large wheel. The rider sat astride of a saddle,
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: as in the Butteridge machine, and he carried a large,
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: double edged two handed sword in addition to his explosive
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: bullet firing rifle. End of Chapter eight, Parts one and two.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Recording by William Tomko