BATTLESHIP OR SUBMARINE?

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2237, 10 February 1921, Page 4

BATTLESHIP OR SUBMARINE?

THE TWO , VIEWS STATED.

The ease for. the. .submarine against the battleship was trenchantly , stated by Vice-Admiral Sir Percy Scott, in a recent interview in the Daily Mail “The aeroplane and the submarine,” he said, “have revolutionised war. What is the use of battleships? I asked that in 1913 and. in 1914. 1 have been asking it ever since. I have never had an answer. Great Britain is the merchant ship centre of the world. We are dependent on our food and raw material supply from oversea; and we are also a sort of clearinghouse for other countries as regards food and raw material. Consequently we are more vulnerable than any other country to submarine attack. This undoubted fact should be taken into consideration when the composition of our new Navy is being determined. “In the war we kept our battleships for four years in port, and the Germans kept their battleships for four years in the Kigl Canal. When they were taken out they had to be guarded with whole flotillas of destroyers and to be treated as if they were made of glass. If it is said that battleships can now be built which can defy the torpedo, I ask: Does not the projectile always beat tlie defence? Can any sMp be designed or built which can stand the explosion of half a ton of T.N.T. with, a delayed-action fuse in the head of a .strongly-built Torpedo? CHANCES GERMANY MISSED. “It may be said that torpedoes in the war did not..sink many battleships. But I reply thaj, if the Germans had known their business, or if they had submarine officers as good as ours, they would have gone into Sen pa and ‘sunk the lot oi our battleships. Our submarines went everywhere; they were in the Bight of Heligoland and off Iho German liases all the time. If the Haim had shown the same activity and skill they could have won the wav at sea in the til’st few mouths of DU4. Perhaps they imagined that wc -honk! never have been such fool> as In pul a fleet of battleships into n defenceless harbour. It. our submarines did not sink many Gorman battleships, ii must be remembered that they were supplied with ‘dud’ torpedoes. They had many shots at ‘sitters," and the torpedoes dived under the targets, so that the Hun ships got away. Or if the torpedoes hit, they failed to explode. We had ‘dmV torpedoes, and the Germans had ‘dud’ submarine officers. That was the position." In answer to Sir Percy Scott,- the case for the battleship was staled by Captain Alfred Dewar, who served oil the Navy Wav Staff during the war. “Sir Percy Cecil,” he said, “wants all battleships, scrapped because they can be sunk by submarines. The submarine is to be the one and only weapon. But now let us count the exact number of'modern baflie-.hips that the submarine sank during the war. The exact number is nil. ft never sank any. In four years of war it sank half-a-dozen old battleships. .Submarines certainly sank a great number of merchant vessels. They tried to do slowly and painfully wlial half a dozen cruisers with command of the sea could have done in a month. And then they did not do it. i hey never drove our merchant ships off the sea, THE PROTECTION OK COMMERCE. “Submarine warfare is merely a stratagem to circumvent the surface cruft, and lhe , real answer to Sir Percy Scott is to imagine ourselves. with nothing but submarines at the' beginning of the war. Our commerce would have been swept from the sea in a month, just as our cruisers swept all German commerce off the sea in a single week. If you have nothing but submarines, your opponent builds a swarm of destroyers, aircraft, and mine-lay-ers, and demolishes your submarines, or mines them in. In reply you must build cruisers to demolish his deslroyers, and there you are on the same old road which leads to the snpcr-Dreadno'.iglit of whatever represents the fullest development of battle power iji surface craft.

“The value of all vessels is relative, just as the value x of the tank and heavy howitzer is relative. Our shores and commerce were defended'not by the submarine alone, but by all sorts of craft, with the battleships of the Grand Fleet standing ns a great bulwark'behind them. Much of the success of the submarine was due to our lack of preparation for it. We had neglected mines. We had not husbanded our mercantile marine,. We used great merchant vessels as piers, or we fitted them out to masquerade as a dummy licet. Whether we can afford battleships'is one thing. Whether the battleship can be replaced by the submarine is another and quite a different thing. Sir Percy tries to confuse the two issues, but the' public must not confuse the issues. Battleships are a nuisance and expensive to build and maintain, but they are an integral part'of naval warfare, and will remain so for many years to come.”