The New Zealand Tablet. THURSDAY, MARCH 25, 1909. THE NAVAL SCARE

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 12, 25 March 1909, Page 461

The New Zealand Tablet. THURSDAY, MARCH 25, 1909. THE NAVAL SCARE

T should be possible to be duly impressed with the gravity of the situation created by the revelations made during the naval debate in. the House of Commons without losing' one's mental balance or slopping over into hysterics. Wtion. an editor solemnly assures his readers that the fact of New Zealand'B offering a battleship is the one -thing which ' will check a German- combination,' and ' will persuade the greatest military Power in Europe that the sea is English and English must remain,' he shows that his patriotism is of the shallow, effervescing order. And when a politician wires frantically to his Premier ' urging him to call Parliament together to consider the matter,' he simply advertises the fact that he has lost his head. 'Fear,' said Dr. Johnson, 'is implanted in' us as a preservative from evil ; but its duty, like that of other passions, is not ,to overbear reason," but to assist it ; nor .should it be suffered to tyrannise in the imagination; to raise phantoms of horror, or to beset life with supernumerary distresses.' There has been no declaration of war, no outbreak of hostilities ; . there is no actual crisis ; and there is no need therefore at this stage to ' beset life with supernumerary distresses.' * At the same time it may be freely admitted that there is solid ground for the general attitude taken by the House Commons on this question, and that there is real need for England to wake up in this matter of naval defence. It is the sober truth to say that, in this matter, England has been living in a fool's paTadisej and her naval position to-day is such that if she received from Germany a sudden declaration of war, followed by immediate action, the situation would be one of grave peril.' There are two respects in which the nayy — the first, second, and third line of the Empire's defence — exhibits weakness: (1) It is not up to the. requisite standard of power; and (2) as at present constituted and arranged, it is in itself seriously inefficient. With regard to the first point, it has been generally agreed that, in order to maintain her supremacy -at sea, England must keep her navy up to what is known as the two-power standaTd. And this 'has been defined by Mr. Asquith as meaning that England must have a pre-

ponderanoe of 10 per cent, over the combined strength in capital ships of the two, next strongest Powers. Theoretically this standard is accepted by both political parties . in the House of Commons, but in practice the present Government has to some extent disregarded it; a,nd tliis, coupled with the enormous and unexpected acceleration of the German programme of ship-building, has left Great Britain distinctly behind. In the course of the recent debate, Mr. Balfour was able to submit figures which showed that — assuming that both nations maintained their present rate of increase — in December, 1910, Great Britain would have ten Dreadnoughts and Germany thirteen; in July, 1911, Great N Britaiu would have fourteen Dreadnoughts and Germany seventeen,- And he demonstrated that the Government's present programme was utterly insufficient, not only to secure the two-Power standard, but even to maintain the one-Power standard in ships of the first class. *

With regard to the inefficiency of the existing navy, the limits of our space prevent us from doing more tlian merely to ontline the chief points of weakness, though confirmatory details, supplied to English papers by undoubted naval experts, are in abundance before us. The present condition of the navy is unsatisfactory: (I) Because the Admiralty have, as regards a considerable portion of the ships in home waters, substituted the ideal of a ' practically ready ' fleet for that of a fleet instantly ready for war. By ' practically ready ' ships are meant thoso which are kept ' in commission in reserve,' with nucleus crews, equal to about two-fifths of the ordinary complement. When the plan of keeping ships ' in commission in reserve ' was originally adopted (i.e., in December, 1904), it took the form of bringing ships out -of complete reserve and giving them a partial mobility. And that, of course, was sound policy. In the autumn of 1906, however — as first revealed by the Standard — this plan was reversed, and since then it has taken the opposite form of retiring ships from full commission and reducing their full mobility to half mobility. That is ' a horse of a very different color,' and is a line of policy that is fraught with danger, The command of the sea might easily be destroyed in the three or four days which would admittedly be required to convert a ship 'in commission in reserve,' with a nucleus crew, into an actual fighting unit of the first class. In other words, the 'practically ready ' fleet means in reality a practically unready fleet. (2) The existing-navy is ineffective, because the ships are not kept concentrated in such a way that they could assemble before the enemy could arrive and obtain contact with them. They are so distributed over the Channel, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean that, before the whole fleet could assemble, it would be possible for a relatively smaller but more highly concentrated naval force to attaclr and defeat them in detail. A significant contrast is afforded by the German policy in this respect. The entire fighting force of the German navy is kepi as far as possible in home waters, concentrated in one large fleet. It was expressly stated in the Navy Act of 1900 that the German navy hoped to compensate for any inferiority on its part in numbers -by ' tactical training by evolutions in large bodies of ships.'

(3) In the third place, the present Board of Admiralty have allowed the efficiency of the navy to be endangered through getting steadily and seriously into arrears in the execution of necessary repairs. During the past year the Channel Fleet was constantly below its nominal strength, owing to the absence of ships repairing and refitting. At one stage its battleship strength was reduced from fotirteen ships to six from this cause. The precise significance of this is admirably indicated by a naval writer by means of a simple illustration. He supposes the case of a man who boasts that he has thirty pairs of horses and thirty carriages in his stables and coach houses ready to meet any call that can be made upon him. Suppose, on hearing that boast, a patron, went through his stables and found that only fifteen pairs were really ready for work. That is, he found that in one pair of horses the off horse was lame, that another pair wanted shoeing so badly that they could not go on the road in their present condition, that in the case of a third pair the essential parts of the harness were broken and would require some days to mend, that in a fourth case _pne of the wheels was off the carriage, "that in a fifth the .pole was broken, and so on. In such circumstances one would say that, instead of having thirty car-riages-and-pairs ready for work, the owner had only fifteen, and that this was the limit of his efficiency. It would be admitted, no doubt, that if he chose to spend a great of money and time he might eventually be able to turn out thirty pairs. But until this was done he was only deluding himself, and those who relied upon his stable, by talking abotit thirty pairs. The writer referred to maintains that this is a by no means an unfair illustration of the present state of the British navy. It seems obvious to the common-sense lay mind that ships should either be kept" in repair or else struck out of the effective list altogether. An unrepaired ship^ is, after all, little better than a dummy, and where repairs are allowed to accumulate, a navy tends to become not even a ready ' navy, but a paper nayy — a matter of empty statistics rather than a solid fighting force.

It wiir be seen, therefore, that, wliilo there is no ground for panic or hysteria, there are very good grounds indeed why every aspect of what is undoubtedly a grave situation should be calmly and fairly faced. There must be, of course, an immediate increase in the ship-building programme, and there should be, we hold, a careful and/ exhaustive investigation into the present management and administration of naval affairs. Judging by the evidence available, all is nob well with that force f upon which, under God [to use the words of the Preamble to", the Naval Discipline Act] the safety and welfare of the Realm doth depend.' " And when the present situation becomes a little less tense, the Imperial Parliament will be discharging a plain duty if it appoints a representative Cominis« sion for the purpose of taking stock of the navy and the Admiralty, of seeing whether things are or are not satisfactory, and of considering whether the administrative policy of the future is being shaped on sound lines. We deeply regret the situation which has arisen, because it means that the reduction of armaments all round, which the friends of humanity had fondly dreamed was within hope of realisation,- is indefinitely put back. . The trulh is, we suppose, that to achieve this end forms of secular policy will always be found wanting;" and that nothing but' the humanising and melloAving influence of religion — the universal recognition of an authoritative Christianity — will prove potent to bring the hearts of all nations into trust and toleration of one another. In tho meantime, the multiplication of the German Dreadnoughts is a reminder to us that blood and iron are as much realities as ever ; that Aye live in a world where not only Nature, but man, the child of Nature, is still red in tooth and claw ; and that the ' law of facts ' still is that national security can be • maintained only by vigilance and 'readiness in arms. Life is practical; the passions of human nature make stern alternatives necessary; and the nation which is content to rely on sentiment for national safety is doomed.