TWO LOSSES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 March 1941, Page 5

TWO LOSSES

ITALIAN NAVAL CRAFT WARSHIP AND SUBMARINE. SUNK IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, March 8. An Admiralty communique announces: “On March 6, the Italian submarine Anfitrite attempted to attack a British convoy in the Aegean Sea. She was immediately sunk by our escort craft.” A Rome communique announces that a warship of medium tonnage (presumably Italian) sank in the Mediterranean. The cause of her loss is unknown. Most of, the-crew was saved. A Berlin communique says that a U-boat reports that it sank five enemy merchantmen, totalling 33,000 tons. A recent Admiralty statement that the enemy had so far claimed to have sunk or seriously damaged 34 battleships and battle-cruisers provides an interesting contrast to the opinion of a German, Rear-Admiral Gado, who recently admitted, according to th.e Berlin correspondent of the Norwegian “Aften Avis,” “that only one English battleship, the Royal Oak, has been, sunk and this would not have happened if the torpedo had not struck the ammunition chambers below a gun' turret.” In the same statement he declared that battleships had a great task to fulfil in the ocean and were in no way superseded, though needing improvement to assert themselves as a decisive weapon.