ADMIRALTY AND SUBMARINE WARFARE

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume XLV, Issue XLV, 26 October 1917, Page 1

ADMIRALTY AND SUBMARINE WARFARE

CHARACTER OF PROBLEM. JBy Abcuiisald ILurd, in tho London ■ Daily Telegraph.'] It will be a great advuutuge it' tho nation at large gains on accurate conception at tho character of the problem which has to bo salved, . r ar it must and will be solved. Germany hits carried out preparations tor the campaign over a period of ' two years; the, present naval administration has been seriously engaged in the task ' of combating tho peril arising from tho use of submarine and mine without restraint for a period of a little over three months. ' Mark that contrast. It is sometimes suggested that the British Navy was caught unready. Was it? Who foresaw the possibility of such a campaign as is now in progress, unless it be Admiral Sir l'eroy Scott, and he was convinced that humane feeling and fear of intervention by neutrals would check any such manifestation as we are witnessing. . The opinion of Lord Sydenham, a former Secretary of tho Committee of Imperial Defence, may be mentioned, as typical of the general rew of the submarine which was held on the cvo of the war. He was in agreement with Lord Beresford in regarding the submarine as of slight military value. He remarked, on June 6, 1914-: " On the surface the submarine is a most inferior destroyer, slow, supremely vulnerable, and unsuitable for long habitation. When it is submerged it can be navigated only by the periscope. . . . In this position it would be not wholly invisible, and if caught by a destroyer it would be ; seat u> the bottom. ... On the high , seas the chances (of employing submarines , successfully) will be few, and submarines . will require for their existence parent . ihips. J ANTICIPATION AND REALISATION. ] All that easy optimism has been overlaid ( jy the actual performances of German sub- ( narines, which have surprised no one more than tho Germans themselves. Three j-ears ago their opinion of tho value of mder-water craft may be judged from the fact that they possessed only 27, about one- ' ihird the number in our Navy. Indeed, no officers in any lleot sneered so consistently at tho submarine as those of the German Navy, and they meant it. It was only when all their war calculations miscarried an land, and when the submarine as a waa - - weapon, used in accordance with the traditions of the brotherhood of the sea, had failed to reduce our fleet to parity with the German lleot, that they determined to use under-water craft for outrage and piracy. They hav'o met with some success, as they ' did at first when they sent battle cruisers in the night to bombard our coasts, and when Zeppelins cruised over these islands, dropping bombs on peaceful towns and vil- j lages. But the triumph in each case was only temporary, .and, though the submarine, owing to the vast area of water iu which it operates and its invisibility, has raised new and most difficult problems, it is unthinkable that these problems will : not ultimately be solved. As has already ■ been explained, the Admiralty set up seve- j ral months ago an Anti-Submarine Department, which has been studying tho matter J day by day and experimenting in all directions. It includes about a score of the " brightest" officers of the Fleet, to box- < row an Americanism. It is developing ' offensive-defensive measures, which take : time to reach fruition, and the character < of which is necessarily secret; the pubhea- J tion of three recent notices in the ' Lon- • don Gazette' announcing new minefields i off the German coast! is significant of tho : trend of policy, so far as mining can be : made a danger and embarrassment to theso ; '" bacilli of tho sea-" « THE MENACE OF THE SUBMARINE. - The type of submarine employed is not a '' small boat," but a big vessel requiring ' no base for supplies, and operating for i weeks on end in deep water, where nets and other devices, employed earlier in the war, are useless. Each submarine mounts two 4.lin guns, filing a shell of 341b. It also carries a most efficient type of torpedo, which can be used with deadly . accuracy at a range of a mile or more when, the submarine is submerged. That is a point to bear in mind. Our guns have driven the submarine below the surface, | but the Germans have evidently been able to send such an increased number of under-water craft to sea .is to compensate for this disadvantage. The submarine, moreover, has a surface speed as high as 17 knots, about equivalent to that of an ordinary passenger train, and submerged the submarines travel at 10 or more knots. The merchant ship is slowj many of. them do not travel more than five knots, and few exceed 15. Speed means money, and there was no object in the past to exaggerate the rate of steaming of the ocean .tramp. Those.are the conditions which prevail at a moment when the Germans have pushed out to sea the accumulated resources of two years of frantic efforts to build vessels and train crews. Tho merchant ship is always' on the surface —a conepicuous target. The submarine ■ is sometimes on the suxafce, but in the course of a comparatively few seconds it can dive and evade attack. In many cases officers and men never catch a glimpse of the under-water craft, but know of the attack only by the shock of the torpedo's explosion. In these circumstances it can be understood by those who aTe least acquainted with the trackless wastes in winch the merchant navy operates how great are the difficulties which confront the Navy, with many tasks on hand in every sea, in dealing with this menace. The problem of combating the menace lies, then, in the development of the Bubmarine from a small, slow ship, accompanied by a parent ehip, into a large and comparatively awift vessel with all the capabilities of a cruiser—guns as well* as torpedoes—and, in addition, the power of hiding when in danger of attack, leaving on the surface of the sea only one or two periscopes, each about the size of a dinner plate, which enables vision to be maintained of all that is occurring. Those are developments .wliich were not foreseen in any country. The Germans have taken the ' fullest advantage of them by setting aside all law and human feeling; they have seized the triumphs of physical science and harnessed them to the spirit of tho pirates of the dead past. That is a conjunction which w-as not anticipated. SUCCESS AND CONFIDENCE. Confidence in any naval administration depends finally upon success. The present Board of Admiralty, and the large number of officers, fresh from the sea, working under its direction, may justify the hopes of the nation, or they may not. But the time has not come for finel judgments

though the outlook is full of promise. In the main, any judgment passed to-day must be passed on the work, not of the present board, but, of boards which preceded it. But let it be added that former administrations, if they exhibited a lack of prevision in some respects, could at least claim, if put on their defence, that it was not until February 1 of this year that the Germans, defying the United States, determined, after two .years of energetic preparation for the campaign, upon a policy which it was confidently believed no country would ever adopt. At the beginning of February the Admiralty was not caught unprepared, but the preparations which it had made in the course of a few weeks to meet an offensive prepared for over many months had not developed sufficiently. As has been statod, sea power is a plant of slow growth. It takes the best part of a year to build even a small vessel for fighting a submarine; scientific experiments occupy many weeks. In spite of what German submarines and mines have done, we hold the command of the sea in the sense in which that term has always been employed. To-day it is subject to limitations, it is true, but it would be a grave error to overlook the fundamental fact that all our war activities depend upon the maintenance of the constriction which the Grand Fleet has placed upon the High Seas Fleet. If, owing to the pressure of public opinion, the Grand Fleet were risked with untoward results tho war would be over, not only so far as this country is concerned, but so far as the Allies are concorned. Our naval policy reflects the best thought of tho service. Naval officers have been brought to a realisation that the Grand Fleet is the keystone of the allied cause. It would be*a disaster of the first degree if anything were done to weaken the stranglehold which we have obtained upon Germany and her partners. We are confronted with an embarrassing situation, but in due course the work winch is being done will bear its fruit, and the enemy will standdefeated under the sea, as he has been defeated on the,sea. ,