The Ka of Gifford Hillary Read Online Free PDF

a paraphrase of Churchill’s message to Roosevelt in 1940: ‘Give us the tools and we will tackle the job.’
    It opened by quoting a statement by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Europe, to the effect that thedisparity in conventional forces between ourselves and the Soviets was so greatly in favour of the latter that we could redress the balance, and hope to win a full-scale war against them, only by the use of thermo-nuclear weapons. Therefore our policy was now founded on this necessity and to plan for any other form of major conflict would be suicidal.
    It then outlined the type of conflict which must be envisaged, the kernel of the matter being that so destructive were the new explosives that it was impossible to conceive of a long war. With the present potential of the United States and ourselves it was estimated that we could kill fifty million Russians in the first five days; and although the present stock-pile gave the Allies a superiority over them in a ratio of five to one, it must also be accepted that the damage they would do us was incalculable.
    It followed that our first defence priority must be to ensure that we were able to win the nuclear campaign in the shortest possible time, and by a bombardment of the utmost intensity force our enemies to sue for peace before we ourselves were totally destroyed.
    The briefness of the convulsion envisaged determined beforehand which arms could be usefully employed in it and which would prove redundant. In so short a time only units already in being, or such as could be mobilised within forty-eight hours, would be able to play a part, and then only if they possessed the qualification of being in a position to engage the enemy.
    For all practical purposes the latter requirement ruled out the Navy, as its contribution during the first week could, at best, be only trifling. And that first week was all that mattered. During it, with due allowance for the destruction of stocks by enemy action, no serious shortage of food could arise in Britain; nor in that time could our reserves of raw materials be increased by imports to a degree that would have the least influence on the outcome of the battle. We should have to fight on what we already had in the national larder and petrol pump; for before even a first convoy, immediately despatched, could cross the Atlantic the war would be over.
    Thus the Navy’s historic task of keeping the sea-lanes open for our shipping no longer arose, and its offensive value in a thermo-nuclear war could be rated at less than that of asingle Bomber Squadron; so the fact should be faced that its maintenance on its present great scale was against all common sense, and an entirely unjustifiable expenditure of both man-power and money.
    Having disposed of the Navy, the paper tackled the Army. It pointed out that alone among the great nations Britain had developed her Air Force as a separate Service, and proceeded to contend that had it not been for this independence we should have lost the last world war. The German Generals had used the Luftwaffe as flying artillery, and only owing to the great initial losses it had suffered in support of land operations had its numbers been sufficiently reduced for the much smaller R.A.F. later to meet and defeat it in the Battle of Britain. Even so, it had been a desperately near thing, and had our Generals had control of the Air Arm they might well have been tempted to use and dissipate it with disastrous results.
    The principal functions of an Air Force were first to seek out and destroy the enemy air force, then so to disrupt the enemy’s economy as to render him incapable of continuing hostilities.
    It was accepted that the Allies must maintain Land Forces on the Continent; otherwise the way would be open for enemy spearheads to advance unopposed and, even in a few days, overrun Western Europe, doing great damage to cities and industrial plant before they accepted orders from their Government to