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Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16361, 5 November 1918, Page 6

It is mentioned in the news to-day that the possibility of a great naval effort by Germany is being seriously discussed at Home, and a high significance is attached to the concentration of the submarines at their main bases. In many minds the belief that the German Fleet will come out will be strengthened by the report that the terms of an armistice with Germany will include the surrender of her navy and submarines. It is a reasonable pojnt for discussion whether Germany, .thus faced with the complete loss of her fighting ships, may not prefer to send them out to a hopeless last battle, rather than keep them as pawns to bargain with at the Peace Conference. And as a prominent English naval writer pointed out some time ago, another reason for thinking that the German Fleet may come out and fight is to be fouud in the fact that in previous wars tho fleets of the belligerents have almost always met at last. Apart from the consideration that it would be the nobler part for the German Fleet to go down fighting at sea than to be handed over to the enemy intact at its moorings—ana that consideration may not weigh greatly with tha German High Command—it has been said that there are two reasons which might induce such action. One is, that by engaging the British and American Fleets a way might be cleared for the transport of an army of invasion to England, a development which has always been one of the possibilities of tho war, and one for which the plans have, no doubt, been fully worked out in Berlin. Such an attempt at invasion would have no effect on the inevitable defeat of Germany, but it might cause considerable temporary confusion at Home. It would mean that the enemy which Germany has most cause to detest had at last experienced hostile action on her own soil, and as long as it did us mischief, the "mad dog of Europo" would not care what became of the invading force. The second impelling reason for a naval attack, it was thought, was to clear a way for fast cruisers, which would interfere with the passage of the American troops across the Atlantic. That rea-

son, however potent it might hare Been six or eight months ago, has lost a good deal of its force, owing to the fact that more than two million Americans have already crossed the Atlantic. Germany could be thrashed now, even if not another American landed in France. To seek to prevent any more crossing ■would be akin to locking the stable after the horse was stolen. There was a third reason, also rendered somewhat out of dato by the recent sensational developments, why an outbreak of naval activity in the North Sea might be looked for. This was the appointment of a now Grief of the German Admiralty Staff, and a new Naval Secretary of State. The new men were supposed j not to approve of von Tiipitz's submarine policy, on the ground of its impotence to effect the desired object, and by inference they were assumed to favour an active naval policy. The younger school of German naval officers was said to be intensely dissatisfied with the inactive and inglorious role that the High Seas Fleet had played, practically that of a coast defence force, and their support would have gone wholeheartedly for a naval offensive. ♦ Bnt though, as we have said, both in England and America such an offensive has been regarded as a possibility, no one has ever expressed the slightest doubt as to the result. Some three months ago the First Lord of the Admiralty quoted figures showing that the British Navy at that moment consisted of vessels of a total displacement of six and a half million tons against a total of two and a half millions when war broke out, an increase of 160 per cent. During the war the personnel of the Navy has grown from 146,000 officers and men to 394,000. • Wo know that since tho war began the Germans have added to their Navy three new battleships and thre'o new battlecruisers, which represent the completion of their pre-war building programme. Whether any other vessels of any consequence have been built is doubtful, but at the best the increase in Germany's naval strength must be be very small compared with that of Great Britain, roinforced as that also is by the major part of the American Navy. ♦ Among the numerous published descriptions of the great Fleet that awaits in the North Sea, the hardly expected but longed-for sally of the Germans from Kiel, a vivid little picture by an American Congressman, who had been inspecting American naval activities abroad, is worth quoting. He and his party had been particularly anxious, he says, to get some idea of the reception that had been prepared for the German Navy should it happen to come out. "We saw the armotlr-plat-ed reception committee from the deck i of a destroyer . . . stretched j about the point whence the German Fleet must emerge was a 78-mile cordon of Allied warships—British, French, Italian, and American —their men on their toes, steam up, aiid guns ready. It took us seven hours to pass this huge fleet, and for lis it was the most magnificent spectacle in the world." It might well be that to any man capable of realising what it meant, though it is doubtful whether any of us has ever quite reoognißed the immeasurable service that our Sea-power has been to us throughout the war.