U-BOAT CAMPAIGN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 October 1940, Page 5

U-BOAT CAMPAIGN

HARD WORK FOR NAVY DURING WINTER EVIDENCE OF NEW BUILDING BY NAZIS. RECENT RISE IN SHIPPING LOSSES. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, October 11. The renewal of the U-boat campaign against British shipping would entail hard work for the Navy and the merchant navy this winter, a commentator making a broadcast on naval affairs observed. He said: “We broke the first German effort to wreck our seaborne trade last autumn. We smashed it to smithereens, and it has taken them months to rebuild the strength of their submarine flotillas. • “Recent figures of merchant shipping losses, however, are all too clear proof that the Nazi shipyards have turned out large numbers of new boats, and that despite the difficulties of hasty training, new crews of Germans have been able to man these craft. “But we must not exaggerate their feat. They have not, for example, built the hundreds and hundreds of new submarines with which Berlin threatened us. It is perhaps rash to guess the exact number they have been able to build, but knowing something of the German ship-building capacity, I doubt that they have yet completed 100. “One hundred new U-boats sounds formidable, but the Germans have had to start again from scratch as far as numbers of ship are concerned. Till they are able to call on the Rome Admiralty to provide a navy, our losses will not be serious. Even now the weekly average tonnage sunk is far below the worst the Kaiser’s U-boats achieved 23 years ago But it is higher than last spring, and the Navy has to start the work of annihilation all over again. “We know by the Admiralty statement a few days ago that seven Üboats have been destroyed in the last few weeks. We know,, too, that others have been damaged. Now a damaged submarine, like a damaged aeroplane, may not get back to its base. But even if it does it may be six to 16 weeks before it is serviceable again. “Moreover Italian flotillas have had their losses. Officially 16 have been sunk and semi-offlcially another six are accepted as almost certain. Others again have been damaged and will have to stop in harbour for a bit. “It is probably fair to say that the enemy submarine service can never throw, more than half its weight into the fighting line at any one time; that, if there are 100 submarines, not more than 50 are at sea. The reason is that crews must be rested between trips, boats must be overhauled, delicate machinery tuned up; and there is the inevitable problem of repairs after heavy depth charging or a duel with a merchant ship's defensive gun. “Another point we do not always remember is that you can mass-pro-duce boats but not the men who work the boats. One man is born a natural fighter; another is cautious, as is the average boxer; another is a born liai who reports that every torpedo he fires has sunk a 10,000-ton ship. That human aspect of U-boat war is important. Not every submarine commander is a menace to us. Actual war experiences show that only one in ten is really dangerous. There were 450 commanding officers of U-boats at sea during- the last war, but when the German officer who directed- the campaign wrote history, he scheduled only 20 aces and another 25 as next-best.”