One Constant Factor In Warfare Is Simple Merchant Ship

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 94, 31 October 1947, Page 5

One Constant Factor In Warfare Is Simple Merchant Ship

In a Trafalgar Day anniversary broadcast recently, Captain R. K. Dickson, D. 5.0., R.N., of H.M.S. “Theseus” said that the Germans lost the war before it began. Their armed forces ,were designed for a continental war, and all information went to show that right up to the Ist September, 1939, Hitler declared that'England would not come in against them, much less the United States.

The Germans knew that we were depending on sea-borne supplies for the development of every kind of military power in the United Kingdom so once they were committed to war with us their whole naval effort was directed against British merchant shipping, but it was then too late for them to make up for the years which the locusts had eaten. Quite apart from the hazard of invading England, the German Naval staff knew that the whole latent power of the British Empire and America to assult the fortress of Europe depended on the Allies being able to carry that power across thousands of miles of ocean. So if the German sea campaign failed to achieve decisive results then Germany’s defeat, whatever form it took, became inevitable.

“We British have once again been delivered out of the hand of our enemies, and surely for us the. fundamental lesson is still the old one which has been taught us by all our wars,” Captain Dickson said. “It is this: that in the whole changing kaleidoscope of war there is one constant factor, the simple merchant ship, and that for as long as we remain an island at the heart, of a maritime Empire our survival depends on being able to protect the merchant ship against anything an enemy can do. •

“Yes, we have learned our lesson and we paid the Usual price. But, you may say, what has all this to do with Nelson and the old ghost? Can’t we look forward—not back? Shorn of the highlights about his blind eye and all that, has his memory really been the living inspiration to the Navy in this war that it years ago? It is a fair question, and the answer is “Yes.” For Nelson was, above all things, the supreme master of his trade.

“Two great wars have come and gone, but no name has arisen or ever will arise to dim the memory of that wonderful little seaman. But his fighting genius which did so much to give us a hundred years of peace was less than half the legacy that he left to the Navy and the Empire'. He left, something bigger. I mean the ideal of sublime leadership, for of that Nelson was the very incarnation. No one knows did it. His father was a poor country parson and from his mother he got nothing but ill-health, yet when he was killed at the age of 47 he had enshrined in his own person all that was : best in centuries of Naval tradition and so rnuch that was new. Two things he had—a simple faith in God, and a flaming patriotism. His driving power roped in everything and everybody who could help him with the job in hand. And he feared nothing.’