SEA POWER

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 2, Issue 222, 7 October 1940, Page 4

SEA POWER

THiREE great European nations have striven in the past for mastery of the seas. The English, the Dutch and the French all established wide overseas empires because of their longnaval traditions and the experience of "blue water" which their seamen handed down from generation to generation. To the Germans, the sea is simply an open space, clearly marked on the maps, upon which battles may ,be fought and enemy and neutral property may be captured or destroyed. They persist in thinking of sea-warfare in terms of the land, across which vast armies-can sweep, crushing everything that stands in their path. They visualise their aircraft and their submarines sweeping the seas in like manner. The German hope of world-conquest in 1914 was based on the illusion that submarines could sweep the seas clear of Allied merchant and naval shipping. That hope was doomed. The Germans lost the war. They lost the war in spite of the fact that they then possessed a powerful navy, the strongest army in the world, and had as an ally the Ottoman Empire, whose brave troops could and did keep shut the gateway of the Dardanelles. The: naval action at Jutland (in which the British fleet sustained heavier losses than the Germans whilst endeavouring to bring the latter to a full action which would unquestionably have destroyed their fleet) has been claimed as a German victory. In fact, it was a sorry defeat, for the German Navy was never subsequently able to take the seas. In the closing days of the war, when the order to put to sea was given, the men of the German Navy refused to do so: the German fleet ended its existence ignominiously at Scapa Flow. Today, the Germans are making another bid for world conquest. Their Navy has already been reduced to a status less than that of a small Power. The resolute Turk, this time, stands ready to fight by Britain's side if the war spreads to the East. The Germans and Italians base their ambitions now upon submarine warfare plus/ air attack. They believe that airpower will prevail against sea-power. In this belief, they reveal clearly once again their fatal, familiar failure to understand the sea and sea-power. Can it be a matter for surprise that the Germans,, announcing a new campaign of terror on the seas by unlimited submarine warfare against merchant ships of all countries, are concerned to utter a special warning to neutra] ships not to sail in Allied convoys? They would obvisously prefer that such ships fall a helpless prey to the torpedo, the bomb and the shell, rather than that the remaining Nazi submarines should suffer the dreadful losses imposed on them by the Allied fleets and air •forces, which have already inflicted heavy losses upon the submarine fleet with which Germany began the war. It is on the narrow waters near Europe that the Nazis hope to do their utmost to blockade Great Britain. The futility of that hope has been demonstrated by their utter failure, in spite of a maximum effort in the air, undertaken at the cost of tremendous losses to interfere with the evacuation of Dunkirk. So the Nazis turn in their rage to the war on land. Here Britain will stand firm, her power increasing as Germany's declines. Britain is confident in her strength and growing might, a strength based on that sea-power which the Nazi gangsters neither know nor understand and. neither the threat of aerial bombing nor of invasion, can quell the fighting spirit which animates every one of her peoples.