Can the Panama Canal Be Destroyed From the Air?
By RILEY E. SCOTT
Colonel Goethals is reported as saying, in February: "The Canal fortifications are entirely adequate and I do not think there is the slightest danger of the Canal being captured by any enemy." The great canal builder might have added, in a paraphrase of Paul Revere: "None, if by land, and none, if by sea." But how, if by air? The man who asks this question in the following article is a graduate of West Point and for several years has made a special study of the aeroplane as an instrument of warfare. He is the inventor of a scientific range-finder for accurately dropping bombs from aeroplanes and his device has been adopted by several European armies. In 1912, in competition with the crack military aviators of France, under the auspices of the French army, he won all prizes offered for dropping bombs from aeroplanes. In Europe he is considered an authority as well as a pioneer in this field. At this time he is conducting experiments at San Diego for the War Department, dropping explosives from an aeroplane under war conditions. Mr. Scott believes that the United States, having fortified the Canal against attack by land and sea, must eventually protect it from attack by an aerial foe.
THE Panama Canal—the most stupendous engineering feat of an engineering age—is nearing completion. The shriek and hiss of a thousand locomotives, the monotonous purr of compressed-air drills, the boom of blasts and the creak and groan of giant cranes and shovels have almost ceased. Soon the healing hand of Nature will bind up the scars of conflict and the commerce of a world will float between picturesque tropical hills. Naturally, the American people are proud of the job and proud of the men who have consummated this great undertaking without hitch and without taint of graft or scandal, where hundreds of millions have been involved. It is a magnificent achievement and we have reason to be proud.
But, in our hour of rejoicing, let us pause to inquire what are the responsibilities, as well as benefits, that accrue to us, as a nation, with the ownership of the Panama Canal. In our inquiries, we shall likely find out that the responsibilities are as stupendous as the undertaking and that, from the point of view of national defense, we have taken a supremely important step. We shall learn, to our surprise, probably, that the raison d'être of the Canal is largely a military one and that, ever since the Spanish-American War, the project of an inter-oceanic canal has been considered as much from a military as from a commercial standpoint. As a result of that war, we acquired territorial and commercial interests that thrust us into the arena of great powers and forced us to construct and maintain a navy second only to that of Great Britain. Ever since the cruise of the Oregon around the Horn in 1898, military and naval authorities have keenly realized that our widely separated coast-lines impose upon us a great handicap, and it is no secret that the Panama
