NAVAL LOSSES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 67, 15 August 1947, Page 7

NAVAL LOSSES

IN WORLD WAR 11.

GREATEST' NUMBER IN 1942 The Admiralty issued a statement on July 2 of losses of ships of the Royal Navy between September 3, 1939, and September 2, 1945, writes the naval correspondent of the London Times.

So far as warships are concerned, it adds little to what has already been published, except in one or two cases where a loss was not announced because it was not already known to the enemy. The loss of H.M.S. Codrington, flotilla leader, in Dover Harbour on July 27, 1940, is an instance. But losses of naval auxiliaries were not announced during the war, and probably few of the general public realised that they, together with men-of-war, are classified under 86 separate headings—a figure which does not include the different classes of “landing craft,” of which there are almost as many. The total losses are 1503 ships of the Navy, with *2O landing ships and 1308 landing craft. Of the 1'503, the greatest number was lost in 1942, when the total reached 359; 1940 was not far behind with 317.

Mines were the most destructive of the enemy’s weapons, accounting for 281, closely followed by aircraft —armed with either bomb or torpedo—with 271. Some 114 ships were wrecked, 85 were lost by collision, and 75 by acident or fire. U-boats accounted for 172 though those were mostly in the larger categories—and enemy surface ships, including E-boats, for 109 all told.

Some incidents are publicly mentioned for the first time in this return, notably that the attack on the Tirpitz was made by six of the X class midget submarines instead of the three that alone were mentioned in accounts hitherto issued.

Moreover, it is revealed that there was another class of midget craftintermediate between the X class submarine and the “chariot” or “human torpedo”—known as the Welman craft, of which four were lost in attack at Bergen in November, 1943.

Another unexplained incident is the loss of 11 “chariots” in June, 1944, seven of them at Malta and the other four in west Scotland, the writer concludes.