SIR J. JELLICOE.

Hokitika Guardian, 6 July 1917, Page 4

SIR J. JELLICOE.

LARGE NUMBERS OF SMALL CRAFT TO FIGHT U-BOATS.

Sir John Jellicoe said : The Navy cannot win the war; the war has to be won on shore. We cannot get at the Germans. Their ships stop inside their ports, and if they come out to fight they will not go back again, I hope. To win the war we must have, as Sir William Robertson says, men for the Army. Some directions' in which the Navy exerts its power are to defeat the High Sea Fleet whenever it appears ; to sink enemy submarines whenever they are found (as difficult a task, I suppose, as was ever put before any Navy); to keep open communications for our food supplies and munitions, and to stop supplies getting into the enemy’s country and to see that any enemy ship which gets afloat has a very short life. The enemy is now forcec] to attack under water, and although that has limited very much the activity of the submarine the counter to that attack is much more difficult. To . give security we want not men but large numbers of small craft. We want every man who takes part in the building of ships to do his utmost, because a fleet of smallhraft prevents losses and the building of merchant ships j replaces those lost. i The gravity of the submarine menace should not be minimised by anybody in this country. There is no one sovereign remedy. The methods for dealing with submarines are a combination of devices and fresh schemes are daily introduced.. Enemy submarine losses are not published because of the difficulty of being quite certain when a submarine has gone down. You know that 'the submarine’s dive has been involuntary when some survivors are picked up. But the cases of that sort are not many, because when a submarine is attacked she gets all hands inside as soon as possible ready to dive. ; At the same time, while the submarines are by no means getting

off scot tree, there is undoubtedly a serious tinier,before the country, and economy'in fo/5d consumption should be the order of the day. It is due to those who are fighting so gallantly in the Army to see that no negligence on our part ashore shall nullify their efforts, it is also due to those gallant fellows in the mercantile marine—(applause) whose ships are sometimes sunk 300 or 400 miles out in the Atlantic, to see that w r e put forth every possible effort to combat successfully the menace.

We can do this by keeping our consumption down to real necessities aud by working hard each in his own sphere with one encl in view—to carry the war to a successful ending at the earliest possible moment.