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"FEAR IS A VERY DANGEROUS THING" -
BALDWIN IN THE COMMONS 1932
The Bomber Will Always Get Through
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Baldwin's The Bomber Will Always Get
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It follows the full text transcript of
Stanley Baldwin's The Bomber Will Always Get
Through speech, delivered in the House of Commons, London,
UK - November 10, 1932.
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I find myself at
the close of a most interesting debate which has
been well worth while I myself should not have
regretted a second day in which there have
been a number of most interesting contributions,
in profound agreement with one of two of the
opening observations of Mr. Lansbury. |
Disarmament, in my
view, will not stop war; it is a matter of the
will to peace.
It is often said that two natural instincts make
for the preservation of the race reproduction
of the species and the preservation of the
species by fighting for safety. The right hon.
gentleman is perfectly right. That fighting
instinct, although he did not say it, is the
oldest instinct we have in our nature; and that
is what we are up against. I agree with him that
the highest duty of statesmanship is to work to
remove the causes of war. That is the difficult
and the constant duty of statesmen, and that is
where true statesmanship is shown.
But what you can do by disarmament, and what we
all hope to do, is to make war more difficult.
It is to make it more difficult to start; it is
to make it pay less to continue; and to that I
think we ought to direct our minds.
I have studied these matters myself for many
years. My duty has made me Chairman for five
years of the Committee of Imperial Defence. I
have sat continuously for 10 years on that
Committee, except during the period when the
present Opposition were in power, and there is
no subject that interests me more deeply nor
which is more fraught with the ultimate well or
ill being of the human race.
What the world suffers from is a sense of fear,
a want of confidence; and it is a fear held
instinctively and without knowledge very often.
But my own view and I have slowly and
deliberately come to this conclusion is that
there is no one thing more responsible
for that fear I am speaking now of what the
hon. Gentleman for Limehouse [Clement Attlee,
who proposed the debate's original motion] called the common people of whom I am
chief there is no greater cause of that fear
than the fear of
the air.
Up to the time of the last War civilians were
exempt from the worst perils of war. They
suffered sometimes from hunger, sometimes from
the loss of sons and relatives serving in the
Army. But now, in addition to this, they
suffered from the constant fear not only of
being killed themselves, but, what is perhaps
worse for a man, of seeing his wife and children
killed from the air. These feelings exist among
ordinary people throughout the whole civilized
world, but I doubt if many of those who have
that fear realize one or two things with
reference to its cause.
One is the appalling speed which the air has
brought into modern warfare; the speed of the
attack. The speed of the attack, compared with
the attack of an army, is as the speed of a
motor-car to that of a four-in-hand. In the next
war you will find that any town within reach of
an aerodrome can be bombed within the first five
minutes of war to an extent inconceivable in the
last War, and the question is, Whose morale will
be shattered quickest by that preliminary
bombing?
I think it is well also for the man in the
street to realize that there is no power on
earth that can protect him from being bombed,
whatever people may tell him. The bomber will
always get through, and it is very easy to
understand that if you realize the area of
space. Take any large town you like on this
island or on the Continent within reach of an
aerodrome. For the defense of that town and its
suburbs you have to split up the air into
sectors for defense. Calculate that the bombing
aeroplanes will be at least 20,000 feet high in
the air, and perhaps higher, and it is a matter
of mathematical calculation that you will have
sectors of from 10 to hundreds of cubic miles.
Imagine 100 cubic miles covered with cloud and
fog, and you can calculate how many aeroplanes
you would have to throw into that to have much
chance of catching odd aeroplanes as they fly
through it. It cannot be done, and there is no
expert in Europe who will say that it can. The
only defense is in offence, which means that you
have got to kill more women and children more
quickly than the enemy if you want to save
yourselves. I mention that so that people may
realize what is waiting for them when the next
war comes.
The knowledge of this is probably more
widespread on the Continent than in these
islands. I am told that in many parts of the
Continent open preparations are being made to
educate the population how best to seek
protection. They are being told by lectures;
they have considered, I understand, the
evacuation of whole populated areas which may
find themselves in the zone of fire; and I think
I remember to have seen in some of our English
illustrated papers pictures of various
experiments in protection that are being made on
the Continent. There was the Geneva Gas
Protocol, signed by 28 countries in June, 1925,
and yet I find that in these experiments on the
Continent people are being taught the necessary
precautions to take against the use of gas
dropped from the air.
I will not pretend that we are not taking our
precautions in this country. We have done it. We
have made our investigations much more quietly,
and hitherto without any publicity, but
considering the years that are required to make
preparations any Government of this country in
the present circumstances of the world would
have been guilty of criminal negligence had they
neglected to make their preparations.
[House: "Hear,
hear"]
The same is true
of other nations. What more potent cause of fear
can there be than this kind of thing that is
going on on the Continent? And fear is a very
dangerous thing. It is quite true that it may
act as a deterrent in peoples minds against
war, but it is much more likely to make them
want to increase armaments to protect them
against the terrors that they know may be
launched against them.
We have to remember that aerial warfare is still
in its infancy, and its potentialities are
incalculable and inconceivable. How have the
nations tried to deal with this terror of the
air? I confess that the more I have studied this
question the more depressed I have been at the
perfectly futile attempts that have been made to
deal with this problem.
The amount of time
that has been wasted at Geneva in discussing
questions such as the reduction of the size of
aeroplanes, the prohibition of bombardment of
the civil population, the prohibition of
bombing, has really reduced me to despair. What
would be the only object of reducing the size of
aeroplanes? So long as we are working at this
form of warfare every scientific man in the
country will immediately turn to making a
high-explosive bomb about the size of a walnut
and as powerful as a bomb of big dimensions, and
our last fate may be just as bad as the first.
The prohibition of the bombardment of the civil
population, the next thing talked about, is
impracticable so long as any bombing exists at
all. In the last War there were areas where
munitions were made. They now play a part in war
that they never played in previous wars, and it
is essential to an enemy to knock these out. And
so long as they can be knocked out by bombing
and no other way, you will never in the practice
of war stop that form of bombing.
The prohibition of bombing aeroplanes, or of
bombing, leads you to two very obvious
considerations when you have examined the
question. The first difficulty about that is
this:
Will any form of
prohibition, whether by convention, treaty,
agreement, or anything you like not to bomb be
effective in war? Quite frankly, I doubt it.
And, in doubting it, I make no reflection on the
good faith of either ourselves or any other
country. If a man has a potential weapon and has
his back to the wall and is going to be killed,
he will use that weapon whatever it is and
whatever undertaking he has given about it. The
experience has shown us that the stern test of
war will break down all conventions.
[House: "Hear,
hear"]
I will remind the House of the instance which I
gave a few weeks ago of the preparations that
are being made in the case of bombing with gas,
a material forbidden by the Geneva Protocol of
1925. To go a little more closely home, let me
remind the House of the Declaration of London,
which was in existence in 1914, and which was
whittled away bit by bit until the last fragment
dropped into the sea in the early spring of
1916.
[Sir Austen Chamberlain: "It was never
ratified."]
No, but we regarded it as binding. Let me also
remind the House what I reminded them of before
of two things in the last War. We all remember
the cry that was raised when gas was first used,
and it was not long before we used it. We
remember also the cry that was raised when
civilian towns were first bombed. It was not
long before we replied, and quite naturally. No
one regretted seeing it done more than I did. It
was an extraordinary instance of the
psychological change that comes over all of us
in times of war. So I rule out any prospect of
relief from these horrors by any agreement of
what I may call local restraint of that kind.
As far as the air is concerned there is, as has
been most truly said, no way of complete
disarmament except the abolition of flying. We
have never known mankind to go back on a new
invention. It might be a good thing for this
world, as I heard some of the most distinguished
men in the air service say, if men had never
learned to fly.
[House: "Hear,
hear"]
There is no more
important question before every man, woman, and
child in Europe than what we are going to do
with this power now that we have got it. I make
no excuse for bringing before the House tonight
this subject, to ventilate it in this first
assembly of the world, in the hope that what is
said here may be read in other countries and may
be considered and pondered, because on the
solution of this question not only hangs our
civilization, but before that terrible day
comes, there hangs a lesser question but a
difficult one, and that is the possible
rearmament of Germany with an air force.
There have been some paragraphs in the Press
which looked as though they were half inspired,
by which I mean they look as though somebody had
been talking about something he had no right to,
to someone who did not quite comprehend it.
[House: Laughter]
There have been
paragraphs on this subject in which the
suggestion was put forward for the abolition of
the air forces of the world and the
international control of civil aviation. Let me
put that in a slightly different way. I am
firmly convinced, and have been for some time,
that, if it is possible, the air forces of the
world ought to be abolished. But if they are,
you have got civil aviation, and in civil
aviation you have your potential bombers. It is
all very well using the phrase "international
control," but nobody knows quite what it means,
and the subject has never been investigated.
That is my answer to Captain Guest.
In my view, it is necessary for the nations of
the world concerned to devote the whole of their
mind to this question of civil aviation, to see
if it is possible so to control civil aviation
that such disarmament would be feasible. I say
the nations concerned, because this is a subject
on which no nation that has no air force or no
air sense has any qualification to express a
view; and I think that such an investigation
should only be made by the nations which have
air forces and who possess an air sense.
Undoubtedly, although she has not an air force,
Germany should be a participant in any such
discussion which might take place. Such an
investigation under the most favorable
circumstances would be bound to last a long
time, for there is no more difficult or more
intricate subject, even assuming that all the
participants were desirous of coming to a
conclusion.
So in the meantime
there will arise the question of disarmament
only, and on that I would only say a word.
Captain Guest raised a point there and pointed
out quite truly that this country had never even
carried out the program of the Bonar Law
Government in 1922-23 as the minimum for the
safety of this country. He expressed a fear a
very natural and proper fear lest we, with a
comparatively small air force among the large
air forces of the world, should disarm from that
point, and the vast difference between our
strength and that of some other countries would
remain relatively as great as it was today. That
kind of disarmament does not recommend itself to
the Government.
[House: "Hear,
hear"]
I assure my right
hon. friend that the point which he raised has
been very present to our minds, and, in my view,
the position is amply safeguarded. I would make
only one or two other observations; my desire
having been to direct the minds of people to
this subject. It has never really been much
discussed or thought out, and yet to my mind it
is far the most important of all the questions
of disarmament, for all disarmament hangs on the
air, and as long as the air exists you cannot
get rid of that fear of which I spoke and which
I believe to be the parent of many troubles.
[House: "Hear,
hear"]
One cannot help
reflecting that during the tens or hundreds of
millions of years in which the human race has
been on this earth, it is only within our
generation that we have secured the mastery of
the air, and, I do not know how the youth of the
world may feel, but it is no cheerful thought to
the older men that having got that mastery of
the air we are going to defile the earth from
the air as we have defiled the soil for nearly
all the years that mankind has been on it.
This is a question for young men far more than
it is for us. They are the men who fly in the
air, and future generations will fly in the air
more and more. Few of my colleagues around me
here will see another great war. I do not think
that we have seen the last great war, but I do
not think that there will be one just yet. At
any rate, if it does come we shall be too old to
be of use to anyone. But what about the younger
men, they who will have to fight out this bloody
issue of warfare; it is really for them to
decide. They are the majority on the earth. It
touches them more closely. The instrument is in
their hands.
[House: "Hear,
hear"]
There are some
instruments so terrible that mankind has
resolved not to use them. I happen to know
myself of at least three inventions deliberately
proposed for use in the last War and which were
never used. Potent to a degree and, indeed, I
wondered at the conscience of the world.
If the conscience
of the young men will ever come to feel that in
regard to this one instrument the thing will be
done. But if they do not feel like that ... As I
say, the future is in their hands, but when the
next war comes and European civilization is
wiped out, as it will be and by no force more
than by that force, then do not let them lay the
blame on the old men, but let them remember that
they principally and they alone are responsible
for the terrors that have fallen on the earth.
[House: Loud and
prolonged cheers.]
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