BRITISH NAVY’S SUPREMACY

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 148, 18 March 1939, Page 11

BRITISH NAVY’S SUPREMACY

Mammoth Programme For 1939

MINISTER’S SPEECH ON ESTIMATES Survey Of All Branches Of Service’s Work (British Official Wireless.) (Received March 17, 6.30 p.m.), RUGBY, March 16. During the financial year now. ending 43 warships had been added to the Navy, and in the course of 1939 another 60 would have joined the fleet, declared Mr. Geoffrey Shakespeare, Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty, in introducing the record peacetime Navy Estimates in the House of Commons today. This year’s estimates total £149,000,000, which is an increase of £23,000,000 on. the 1938 estimates, themselves a peacetime record.

Dlr. Shakespeare said he thought that the House would be impressed with the magnitude and balance of the 1939 building programme, which included two fast battleships of 40,000 tons with 16-inch guns, four trade protection cruisers, a large aircraft carrier, two flotillas of destroyers, and 20 escort vessels of a new type of high speed and with armament designed to meet submarine and aircraft attack. The fact that dockyards and shipbuilding yards would in the course of the year be engaged in building some 200 vessels of a total of 870,000 Jons was a measure of national productive effoit for naval defence which had never before been approached in peacetime. This output would exceed by nearly 30 per cent, the annual tonnage completed in the years just before the last Great War. More Complex Design. They would be completing 220,000 tons this year compared with an average of 170,000 tons in the years between 1912 and 1914, and the ton for ton productive effort involved —taking into account the increasing complexity of design, the fuller protection and the heavier armaments —would be three times greater for battleships and as much as six and a half times greater for destroyers. As an example of this Mr. Shakespeare mentioned that the cost of fire control gear in the King George V, which was launched in 1912. was £ll,OOO, and that in the battleship of the same name launched recently by the King was £213,000. Mr. Shakespeare went on to show that it was not only in respect to ships that production was increasing. Over the last three years the output of heavy guns had increased twenty-fold, and of medium and light guns by five and eight times respectively. As regards mines, torpedoes, depth charges, shells and fuses, he assured the House that the Admiralty had organized a supply estimated to suffice for at least the first year of a war. Anti-Submarine Measures. Mr. Shakespeare went on to deal with measures for meeting the special threats of submarine aud aerial attack. As to submarines, he argued that the danger had been exaggerated through neglect to observe that, of some 10,500 vessels sunk by enemy submarine action in the last war, only 102 were sunk while in a convoy.

As a result of two years’ close cooperation between the Admiralty and the leaders of the shipping industry, he could state that they would be in a position to institute a convoy organization soon after the outbreak of war on any route where it was considered necessary. They already had in stock sufficient anti-submarine guns to meet all expected requirements. Mr. Shakespeare then turned to the Immense progress made since the last war in scientific aids to anti-submarine warfare. He said: “I cannot, of course, reveal the nature or the extent of our progress in this respect, but I believe that our methods of detecting, hunting and killing submarines are more advanced than those of any other nation in the world.” Experts’ Claim. He described a hunt for submerged submarines whose position was unknown in which he himself had takeu part, and as a result of which experience he felt he was able to accept the claim of the experts that, in favourable circumstances, in nine cases out of ten the exact position of Hie submarine could be detected without any doubt. Finally he drew attention to the success of the Nyon patrol in the Mediterranean as proof that those in control of submarines did not themselves understate the capacity of British, ships to carry out the threat to sink any submarine found submerged in certain areas.

Regarding attack from Hie air, Mr. Shakespeare said that the Admiralty’s policy had been to concentrate in warships the most modern anti-aircraft guns possible—there had been an increase in the number of such guns of 75 per cent.—and an attack on such a ship bristling with, anti-aircraft guns would be a very different matter from attacks on defenceless merchant shipping, of which they had had recent examples in Spanish waters. Tlie Fleet Air Ann. ’

Moreover, this did not take into account the presence of aircraft of the fleet air arm or of the co-operating Royal Air Force squadrons. In the case of convoys of defensively armed merchant ships there would be the closest co-operation with the Royal Air Force as they came into the narrow seas and approached the home coasts. Generally the Board of Admiralty believed that the British Fleet was so strong today that it could confidently accept a direct challenge in battle by any combination of foes. Other matters touched upon by the Parliamentary Secretary were recruiting and the progress of the fleet air arm, which is now in the process of transfer from the control of the R.A.F. to the Navy. They had just had a record year for recruiting--18,000 officers and men having entered the Navy in 1938. Contracts for aircraft for the six new’ aircraft-carriers which would come into commission from 1940 onward hud been placed and production was in full swing. Several new types would start bulk delivery during the vear. The total personnel qf the fleet air arm had been increased from 3000 in 1937 to 6000 today and would reach 10.-000 in 1942.