THE PROUD TRADITION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 922, 12 April 1957, Page 12

THE PROUD TRADITION

THE ROYAL NEW ZEALAND NAVY, by S. D. Waters; War History Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, 25/-. FTER a survey of Empire Naval Defence in 1919-20, Lord Jellicoe put forward plans for a Far Eastern Fleet. If they had been accepted, they would have saved us "the horrors in the Pacific, involving the losses of Hong Kong, Borneo, Singapore, Malaya and Burma’-to quote Jellicoe’s one-time Chief-of-Staff, Admiral Sir Frederic Dreyer. One result of Jellicoe’s visit, however, was the Government's decision to give effect to the Naval Defence Act, 1913, and the subsequent reorganisation of the naval force as the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy. Mr Waters gives the history of our naval force from this beginning to the time of the surrender of Japan--and, in appendix, the history of the earlier New Zealand Navy that became defunct at the end of the Maori Wars. The author’s half-century of specialisation in affairs of the sea, together with his access to all the corréspond-’ ence and signals involved, results in a volume that is not only authoritative but immensely readable. Many of the highlights are stories that have been told before: the Achilles at the Plate, Leander’s part in the Battle of Kolombangara, the little Moa and Kiwi destroying a large Japanese submarine off Guadalcanal; but they are the sort of stories that can bear re-telling and need re-tciling in such a context as this. If we forget "that three-quarters of the world’s surface is sea," a naval history is by far the best reminder. Apart from action, there is always the record of things peculiar to war at sea: the monotonous uneventful patrols, the problems of force deployment, the elusiveness of the enemy. Such details build up a complete picture, not only of the scale of naval operations, but of the almost limitless medium they are fought against. This book conveys these details, for though our Navy was small it was par-

ticipating in what the author calls "the greatest maritime struggle in the annals of naval warfare," and without some description of overall strategy the significance of the part our few ships played would have been lost in a too domestic foreground. Thus, when we see our ships we often see them against the backdrop of a hundred others, both friend and enemy; and events and movements are dovetailed to give the dynamic of a world at war. It has been said that the Battle of the Plate marked’ the end of conventional naval warfare, and some prophets even say that battles of the new erasuch as Leyte Gulf-will not occur again. This could well be true. Yet whatever the future brings New Zeaand in the way of a modified navy, Mr Waters’s history of the R.N.Z.N. should go far in helping to build that complex of sentiment and imagination we call

tradition.

R.A.

K.