SEA & AIR POWER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 March 1941, Page 6

SEA & AIR POWER

THE STRENGTH OF BRITAIN. Mr H. C. Ferraby, the well-known naval writer, has an article in “The English-speaking World” on the war at sea. In concluding his survey of naval operations in the first year of war, he says:— “Goering and Mussolini, knowing the weakness of the Axis navies, have been boasting for years past that air power had put an end to sea power. Why people in this country should ever have credited the boasts is difficult to understand, but there is no doubt that many expected, fearfully, that no British warships would be able to operate in the Central Mediterranean, for example. Admiral Cunningham. our Commander-in-Chief out there, soon showed how utterly mistaken was any such idea. Both cast and west of Malta big British contingents have moved freely and without serious hurt. They have been attacked, of course. (Did the fearful ones imagine that warships ought not to run the risk of being attacked?) One Italian air authority kindly told the world that in two days fifty air attacks were delivered against one of Admiral Cunningham’s squadrons. He omitted to mention, however, that only one of the bombs hit a target, and that that ship was so little damaged that at first the Admiral had not thought it necessary to report the fact to London. “Ships have been lost by air attack. So they have been by submarine attack and by gunfire. But those of us who keep tabular records of the news have clear evidence of the very small proportion of air attacks that succeed, of the immense numbers of bombs that are dropped and miss for every one that hits. I have a record of one attack on a convoy in which some industrious person counted up to 283 bombs dropped without a single hit. This is not so remarkable when one realises the small target area that is really offered. A convoy of thirty ships occupies some 20,000,000 square feet of water, but the deck area of the ships is no move than 240.000 square feet. There is eighty times as much water as deck lor the bombs to hit. And the experiences of the German Air Force against convoys in the Straits of Dover and the English Channel have all gone to show how little real effect on sea movement the air arm can exert, while as a final and most devastating exposure of the emptiness of the Nazi boasts we had the withdrawal from Dunkirk, when in an area little more than twenty-one miles square the Luftwaffe had 1186 ships as targets for six consecutive days and proved utterly unable to stop their constant ferrying to and fro as they brought the 'trapped’ armies away from France.

"Today, as two thousand years ago, he who has command of the sea is necessarily master of the situation. We have the mastery. What is needed now is the drive and energy of mind to use that mastery and to enforce our will on the enemy. And we shall not do that by sitting on the beaches of Clacton and Skegness and Whitley Bay wailing to see what the enemy is going to do next,”