SINGAPORE BASE

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 111, 4 February 1935, Page 9

SINGAPORE BASE

“The Empire’s Costliest White Elephant” WARD PRICE’S ATTACK Better Way of Protecting Australia Suggested JAPANESE RESENTMENT By Telegraph.—Press Assn.—Copyright. (Received February 3, 6.30 p.m.) London, February 2. Mr. Ward Price, in an article in tiie “Daily Mail,” points out that £6,500,000 has been expended on tiie “Empire’s costliest white elephant,” the Singapore naval base, and that £4,000,000 more will go the same way in the next three years. Britain, while tier own unemployed, stand idle, maintains 3000 coolies to transform jungle backwaters into a harbour requiring 8.000,000 cubic yards of excavation. 5,000.000 cubic yards of dredging, and 1.000,000 cubic yards of concrete for a miie-long granite-faced waterfront where the Navy’s three most powerful ships may come 8000 miles for repairs in a £1,200.000 floating dock, while the crews, numbering 1300 apiece, swelter in the barracks. “The only foreign warships within 2500 miles are a few old Dutch gunboats at Java and an occasional American ship at Manila. “The base owes its existence, to fantastic fearfulness such as led Lewis Carroll’s White Knight to keep a rattrap on his horse's back. Even in the event of an Anglo-Japanese war no Government "would send a battle fleet to the other end of Asia, risking a thrust at the Emnire’s heart by European nations on the sudden declaration of an alliance with Japan. “The fleet wouldj not go beyond Singapore. A British naval offensive in Japanese waters would demand a threefold superiority of the fleet, and could not protect Australia because the Japanese route thither would be 4000 miles further east. Australia, for a fraction of the cost of the Singapore basq, could be equipped with an air force capable of destroying hostile warships and transports 500 miles from the coast. “The construction of Singapore was a major blunder which Japan regards with resentment.”