The Sea

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 99, 16 May 1941, Page 4

The Sea

VERY day someone in authority says that the war will be won or lost in the Atlantic; and whoever he is who says it, no one contradicts him. It is accepted as widely in New York as in London, and repeated as often in Capetown as in Sydney and Melbourne. It is an opinion that we must accept not only on the authority of those who know, or on the word of those who, whether they know or not, feel bound to support those who should know, but on the strongest evidence of all-the persistence, violence, and boldness, of the enemy attacks there. And yet we have the extraordinary fact that the Atlantic has become vital because it has never been sufficiently used. The United States has a big and powerful navy -though only half as big as it now thinks necessary-but when its mercantile marine is considered in relation to the number, wealth, energy and variety of its population, it is the fleet, not of a sea-going nation but of a nation of land-lubbers. And land-lubbers in general the Americans now are. The position is discussed at considerable length in a recent issue of Time, which points out that although the United States once had "the best and second-biggest fleet of merchantmen on the high seas," and carried more than three-quarters of its foreign trade in its own bottoms, it dropped out of the race when steam displaced sails. The figures are really astonishing: nearly 242 million tons before the Civil War, and only a little more than three-quarters of a million when the World War broke out in 1914: astonishing even when we look at the simple explanationthat Americans suddenly became too busy on land to go to sea. And now of course the problem is to build warships and merchantmen simultaneously, and both at a faster rate than the yards have ever reached before. It would in fact be a terrifying problem if we did not know that from about the middle of 1918, United States yards were launching one ship every three days, and when they were fully speeded up in 1919 actually turned out more than four million tons. That was what Mr. Churchill referred to in his recent speech, and is one of the reasons why his confidence never falters,