BIG WARSHIPS, AND BIG WATERWAYS

Evening Post, Volume CI, Issue 102, 30 April 1921, Page 4

BIG WARSHIPS, AND BIG WATERWAYS

The late Lord Fisher's confident postwar announcement of the end of the capital ship interests Budget-makers in more ways than. one. The financial question does not turn solely on the millions involved in the construction of the capital ship itself. Money must b« found not only for the big ships of war, but for docks and harbours capable of accommodating them; and any nation possessing a strategic control must " look to it." Germany's experience on this point is instructive. She could not fight a naval war unless her capital ships •wore able to pass between the Baltic and North Seas via the Kiel Canal j and about fifteen years ago Lord Fisher, then. the"apoetle of the capital ship, put Germany in a tight place by evolving the Dreadnought, with its subsequent train of super-Dreadnoughts. Germany was thereupon forced to expend millions of money and year* of labour in deepening and widening the Kiel canal so that it could carryCDreadnoughts. This necessity almost certainly postponed the world-war.

To-day the United States is in a somo- v what similar position. It is true that the closing of the Panama canal would not leave her locked in, in the way that Germany -was locked in by the British Isles. Canal or no canal, the American Eastern fleet could ride the Atlantic. But the Panama canal is an immense strategic factor in that no transfer of an American fleet from Atlantic to Pacific or vice versa caD be quickly made without ite aid, In a war with Japan, naval passage through the canal might be the means of winning"the, war; yet already the American super-Dreadnought is drawing abreast of the canal's minimum width. The United States ex-Secretary for War has pointed out that programmed American battleships will be 105 ft wide, while the breadth of the lock-gates is only 110 ft, If Lord Fieher should prove to be wrong, and if the Great Powers become committed to bigger and. wider and deeper capital ships, the United States will either have to submit to a. crippling delay in its concentrations from ocean to ocean, or it will have to spend an immense sum of money in either reconstructing tho Panama canal locks or. (what may be cheaper, and certainly less interruptive to traffic) constructing a second canal. The question of the capital ship is a difficult one, and a Japanese replica of the Fasher of fifteen, years ago might cause in Washington come consternation.,

Australasia is keenly interested in the Panama canal, strategically as well oa 'commercially. To have tho American Atlantic fleet Hearer for more distant) by so many days or weeks is of grave importance. Australasia cannot be indifferent to the question whether the future lies with the big ship or with the small ship, and whether the issue can be shelved by means of some Anglo-American-Japanese agreement to limit arm»mentß,