What the Allies Must Do.

Levin Daily Chronicle, 23 October 1917, Page 1

What the Allies Must Do.

"Unless the Allies win the war on land before February, 19.19, the. Gerninns with their U-boats will be victorious. '' Mr Arthur 11. Pollen, the English naval critic, who is regarded as the foremost authority in the world, sounded this warning at a luncheon given him at the Hotel M'Alpin, New York, by 200 members of the Rotary Club. He described as "fatuous" any hope that some dcvice would be invented in America or anywhere else which would stop the U-boat menace. "Yet," he he said, "I cannot believe that the end of the war will not come before the end of the year. I believe that it will end with the renunciation, by the German people of all purposes they started out to achieve. It will mean hard work for the Allies. We in England know that. It is one reason why Sir Eric Geddes has been made First Lord of the Admiralty. He is a man of sound business sense. He received part of his efficicncv education in America. I um confident that lie will bring the English fleet as near as possible to 100 per cent, efficiency, whereas now it is 60 per cent. Britain lias made good; no mistake about that. Now we look for you in America to do your part. You, too, must prepare for hard work. I should like to sec the American navy show a little more originality in dealing with the naval situation, not as inventors of specific devices, but as participants in naval warfare. I should like to see a General Staff go to London, to be with us as brothers in brains as well as in arms. It is foolish, it is fatuous, to have any hope that an invention will be forthcoming to deal effectively with the U-boats. It has been suggested that a great fleet of aeroplanes might destroy them. This is not feasible, because such a fleet could be of service only a fewhours a woek. Germany must be beaten on land. That means she must bo beaten before February, 1919, or she will beat us by her U-boats. That is the time limit to which, under the present rate of loss of tonnage, the Allies can hold out. Mr Pollen said that tlie statement made bv the special correspondent of the 'New York Times,' to the effect that Germanv was sinking 1,600,000 tons of Allied shipping a month, was a palpable error. If this were true, he remarked, Germany could end the war in six or eight weeks, for in that time she would have wiped out all the allied shipping. "In April last it was generally stated that the tonnage loss was 600,000. It was also said that the nonBritish tonnage loss was less than 50 per cent, of the British. In a period then, when ships were being lost at the rate of 30 a week, the Tate of loss per month was less than one-half that given in the London report."