A MODERN ARMADA

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 188, 11 August 1925, Page 9

A MODERN ARMADA

NOT FAST BUT VERY POWERFUL

FLOATING FORTS CROSS THE PACIFIC.

FIGHTERS ON A MISSION OF PEACE.

These American ships have not the long, lean lines of the great racing fighters of Britain's battle-cruiser squadrons; nor have they their speed. In length they are only a few feet more than H.M.s. Australia. Indeed, the new Hawkins class of ten thousand tonners, which Australia has ordered from England, will not be many feet less in length. Then again, they are not capable of enormous speeds. But what they lack in horse-power and in outward size, these ships make up for in strength and defensive power. They are built to resist, not to attack. They are, in a word, enormously powerful floating, movable forts, capable of facing an enemy with the world's biggest guns, and making it unsafe for him to approach within their range of fire. They could not with any degree of safety, cross the Pacific to fight, because they could not carry sufficient supplies to assure their safety, and their great usefulness lies in their abilit} , to provide undefended cities and harbours along the American coast with improvised, but highly modern protection. Staple of Navy, The eight ships which are in Auckland to-day comprise the staple of the American Navy. They are led by the battleship division No. 5, which claims to be the only 16-inch gun battleship division in the world, though it does not carry the largest naval armament ever used. Those —18-inch—*were mounted on some of the British naval monitors during the •war. The ships of this division are the West Virginia, the Maryland, and the Colorado. They t are sister ships in every important respect. They are 000 feet long on the water line, with a beam of just under 100 ft, and a draught of about 30ff, and they were built between 1020 and 1923, and were ' among the main ships to survive out of the five-year "doubling" programme ■which -was to make the American navy ' easily the greatest in the world, but ! which, instead, brought about the Washington Conference, and a rigid ' scrapping programme of all new 6lrips . not regarded as defensive units. Giant Ships. Xow take any of these three ships . and let us look at any one of them. Here forward on her forecastle He chains with links as big as a man's head, and anchors the eize of a hippopotamus. Then your eye travels to the towering storeys of bridges. Each has its separate purpose, so in moments of stress, when the result of a world-shaking battle may turn on instant decision, there shall be no con-. fueion of duty; each connected so that, at every move, each section of the teeming personnel shall have its orders with electric speed right down into the very bottoms of the ship, and right up to the fighting-top 140 feet above £he waterline, on the tall masts which are of lattice that seems fine ribboned steel until you come close to it and realise that its massiveness is dwarfed into slenderness by the mastodon proportions around it. The boat deck and the funnels, which in these ships are smaller than those of the big British battle-cruisers and battleships, are placed farther to the rear, nestling under all the protection they can find, so that from directly fore or aft they cannot be seen. All around them are the boats, the gig r of the captain, the barges and pinnaces; and the ugly little anti-aircraft guns, which wait for the air invader; and the five-inchers, sitting on the deck below, waiting for destroyers or submarines and the fast light cruisers, which are not worth the power of a big gun's while. Lastly, come more turrets, with 60----foot-long stern-guns, pointing out over the quarter-deck, which is the most interesting place in any ship Armour Belt Turns 12-inch Shells. So much for the outward skeleton. But the deeper one probes a modern battleship the more the wonders grow.

Take, now, your eyes from the main structure of the ship, and mark "Out with it a space roughly stretching between the muzzles of the big guns at one end and the muzzles of the big guns at the other, beginning just three or four feet from where the gun-tur-rets sink into the deck, and ending 16 or 17 feet below that again. Four hundred feet by 17, plus the lower formation of the gun-turrets, is that belt, and it is made of nothing more nor less than 14 to 10 inch armourplate. The gun-turrets above are built—or the vital portions of them, at anyratc—of armour up to 18 inches thick. No gun used normally in the navies of the world twelve years ago would have the slightest chance of penetrating that armour even at such close range as 3000 yards. It is practically impervious even to the modern 12-inch 50 cal. gun, which is 50 feet long, weiglis 61 tons, and throws a projectile weighing 11001b with a muzzle velocity of 31,000 foot tons. The only weapons which are of use against it are those of its own ship's type, or the high power 14 and 15----inch guns of the British, American, and Japanese navies, and even they can only be relied upon to work destruction of vital points at medium ranges or by accident. ThXs belt of destruction runs eight and a half feet below the lowest water level on the ship's sides. It covers every vital part of the ship, and makes it the most completely protected vessel—officially at any rate—in the world. But that is not all, for below the waterline there must be protection against torpedoes. This new type of ship is provided with a system of bulkheads, known as the Ferrati system, which implies a honeycomb of bulkheads along the keel, each airtight, which make the ship practically unsinkable through any cause short of the destruction of the hull. Electric Drive. There is another feature which marks the American ships as the most modern which have visited these waters.- It is a system of propulsion scarcely out of its experimental stages, and its installation in battleships, three years ago, called for considerable courage on the part of the designers. Mainly, it has been a success, and all the ships which are here to-day have a wider cruising range through its adoption, and arc better able to, enjoy the comforts of shore,life. Part of the steam generated is used to extend electric systems to every avenue of life on the ships. Every, thing is electric—the anchor gear and the potato-peelers; the ice-cream freezers and mechanism for handling the big guns, and most of the ships gain by the new methods in celerity of action, because they can bo brought to full speed within three or four minutes. Hard-trained Crews. A wonderful machine is any of these battleships. It takes more than 1150 men to man each of them. Their fuel capacity is aboujt 3000 tons of oil apiece. Their cruising range is not very far off 2000 miles. They can steam at the speed of a first-class passenger boat, and fire up to 12 shots per minute from- their big gun batteries. In themuelves they are almost as much floating towns as floating forts, and there is something else about them which makes them unusually interesting, for we see them, not at the beginning of a training cruise, with their men raw, but at the end of 12 months of hard training. Firstly, in January, with many new and untrained crews, they began operations on a large scale* wrapped round the defence of the Panama Canal. They had breakdowns, troubles, even loss of life on one ship, to teach them experience. They were ruthlessly criticised in their own Press and in Congress, and their own eommander-in-chief was most ruthless of all. Then, after another spell of exercises centring round attacks on a West Indian island, they denied into the Pacific again, manoeuvred near San Francisco, and finally participated in the mock warfare on the most gigantic scale ever undertaken in the Pacific Ocean around Hawaii, before undertaking the journey to Australian and New Zealand —probably the longest battle fleet voyage in history.