NEW WARSHIPS

Hokitika Guardian, 17 November 1932, Page 5

NEW WARSHIPS

FOR EUROPE AND U.S.A.

(United Press Aueociatiori—By Electric

Telegraph- Copyright.)

LONDON, November 15

The “Daily Telegraph’s” naval correspondent says:—“The French Government has ended its battleship holiday by giving orders to lay down the keel of the battle-cruiser, “Dunquerque.” She will be the first capital ship to be built for the French Navy fo- nearly twenty years. Her displacemen will be 26,500 tons, and she will have eight thirteen-inch guns. The Dunquerque is thus the most powerful battleship ever bui’t, except the H.M.S. Hood. Her gun ! range is twentythree miles. It is later proposed to build two more Dunquerques. Italy is also experimenting with battlecruisers with eight fifteen-inch guns. Finally the Dunquerque prejudices the British plan to limit capital ships to twenty-two thousand tons.”

NEW U.S.A. CRUISER. PHILADELPHIA, November 15

The new U.S.A. cruiser, Indianapolis, the first ten thousand ton cruiser to be completed since the London Naval Treaty was ceremoniously commissionel to-day-A communication- from secretary Adams was read which s il id that new tonnage must be laid down to maintain the U.S. Navy at treaty strength.

NAVAL SCRAPPING. LONDON, November 15

Hector By-water, the well-known naval correspondent of the Daily Tclearaph,” urges the scrapping of the lAija-bis class of sloops,, which wr.s '"lilt in wartime, and ol which H.M.S. (Veronica and H.M.S. Laburnum, of the New Zealand Station, ere examples. Their retention, he says, involves the risk of valuable lives, as the s’nkirg of IH.M.S. .Valerian, in 1926, with the joss of 85 lives, proved. He contends that but for the dearth of modern cruisers, sloops of this class wou'd ■undoubtedly long since have been ■scrapped.