LIMITATIONS OF THE TORPEDO.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 219, 9 January 1917, Page 3

LIMITATIONS OF THE TORPEDO.

In a recent article Mr Arthur Pollen lias an interesting reference to the wa experience of the limitations ef the torpedo. He says: In the German account of the 'August sortie, in which the Falmouth and Nottingham were torpedoed, it was asserted by the enemy that it took three torpedoes fired at interval of two hours between the first and the last, before the Falmouth was sunk. It has been rumoured that the Nottingham had to be hit more often (even than this before she was disposed 'of. Last week we learned that the Muenchen had been torpedoed by a submarine and had yet made her way home alone. These incidents are in 'line with a great many more narrated in the Jutland despatch. In that despatch Sir John Jellieoe and Sir David \Beattie gave the details of eleven instances in which destroyers launched torpedoes successfully against the German ships, and in only one instance, namely the attack led by Captain Ansalan Stirling, was it stated as certain that the torpedoed ship blew up. In all the other cases, many of Avhich occurred in the course of the daylight action, it was not even claimed that the injured ship had.to leave the line. In the British Fleet, of course, only the Marlborough was hit, and the excellence of her shooting afterwards, and the ease with which she kept her place in the line, then made her way home under her own steam, were duly emphasised by the commander-in-chief. In August last year, it may be remembered, the German battlc-cr.uiser Moltke wa s torpedoed in the Gulf of Riga, and won back to Kiel, all the way across the Baltic Sea, without difficulty. Now the Admiralty communique tells us that the Nubian, whose sides and bulkheads must have been of .the frailest possible, not only survived torpedo attack, but was in a condition in which she could be towed home. All this stands in sharp (contrast to the older vessels that fell to submarines in the early part of the war. Aboukir,, Cressy, Hogue, Niger, Hermes, Formidable, Triumph, Majestic, and the rest were utterly doomed from the moment they were Int. It seems certain then that during the last ten years naval constructors have provided against under water attacks with very singular success. I am, of course, far from suggesting that a single torpedo could not possibly sink the stoutest battleship in the world. But it 'certainly is startling and, as it seems to me, extremely consoling, that here we have nearly twenty cases of modern ships being torpedoed,, of which only one was known to have proved fatal. (The experience of Jutland,, then, is on all fours before and since, and this may not improbably prove one of the most important lessons of that most instructive engagement.