How Engineers Can Speed Victory

SOMEONE has called this war a war of gadgets. Someone else says it is an engineers' war. It is a war of production, transportation; a war in the sky; a war on wheels; a civilians' war. Let us not quarrel about nomenclature. Call it what you want. If four motored bombers and thirty-ton tanks are gadgets, then it is a gadget war. Engineers, scientists, shop laborers, air-raid wardens all have their highly important jobs to do. The fact remains that this war, like all others, is a soldiers' war. The basic strategy employed today is the same strategy that Philip of Macedon used on the Plains of Thessaly twenty centuries ago. His phalanx was a striking force armed with every known weapon. It was armored with breastplate and casque. It depended for success on superior man power and mobility, upon superior weapons and supply, and upon superior discipline. It executed commands faster than its enemies; it had more catapults and spears, more men in the back areas bringing up supplies. It was a new idea. It used what today we call the scissors movement to cut up its foes. It took sharp advantage of surprise. It introduced terror as a weapon-terror inspired by a vast, moving, shouting army with banners. It laid waste the cities by fire. The Greeks had a word for it but that word wasn't "blitzkrieg."