ADMIRALTY DEFENDED.

Taranaki Daily News, 3 December 1919, Page 6

ADMIRALTY DEFENDED.

NOT SO' BLACK AS PAINTED. | . MR. CHURCHILL'S IRONY. London, Nov. 9. Mr. Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War, in an ironical article in the Sunday Herald, intended as a defence of the Admiralty, discusses the recent criticisms of the navy, including statements made by Lord Jellicoe and Sir Percy Scott. "These records," lie says, "produce a sense of being piunged into a night-mare, and would suggest that the most obvious dangers have been disregarded, that the Navy was composed of defective and shamefully ill-supplied ships, in which the guns would not fire, the sights were missing, the shells would not burst, and the torpedoes would not run true." Mr. Churchill, lapsing into caricature, depicts, the consequential defeat of the Navy, the invasion of Great Britain, and the ruin of the Allies' cause. He winds up drily:—"As a matter of faot, it did not turn out quite so badly. Despite our disgraceful neglect, incapacity, and purblind stupidity, the Gerihan fleet at this moment is beneath the waves in a British harbor. "The disparagement of the Navy," Mr. Churchill continues, "recalls that when the public was gloomily inclined in war time, somebody wittily predicted that the British would probably win the war, and say that they lost it, while the Germans would lose, but say that they won. "Lord Jellicoe's detached point of view curiously illustrates the erroneous tendency to distinguish between the responsibilities of the navy and the Admiralty. Both employed the same "professional science, and all commanders of the fleets and flotillas belonged to the claftfi of officers who a few years or months previously served at the Admiralty, or filled high technical posts at Whitehall. "Nobody influenced to a greater extent than Lord Jellicoe the allegedly defective designs of the cruisers of the Invincible and Queen Mary classes which yere sunk at Jutland."