Evening Post. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1935. COST OF SEA POWER

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 140, 10 December 1935, Page 8

Evening Post. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1935. COST OF SEA POWER

Fear of the machine—of the servant that threatens to become master —Crops up in a hundred places, a constant challenge to the new civilisation, which was its creator and may iecome its slave. In industry and social life the world is familiar with this fear complex; in the military sphere, where machinery is candidly destructive, the case is put today by the British Prime Minister in welcoming delegates to one more great conference— the Naval Conference. After expressing the hope that the public will be relieved "of a threat of a general race in naval armaments," Mr. Baldwin proceeded to point out how much worse it would be if, to the naval devils we already know, science were to add new ones:

We must not feel it our duty to go one better than our neighbours in the evolution of new types' and larger ships, which is the most expensive and most dangerous of all types of naval competition.

This remark carries the mind back a generation, to the pre-War Europe. There then appeared for the first time a Power which, while pbssessing the largest and most efficient army in the world, also began to build the biggest navy, an accomplishment which would have made one nation supreme on both land and sea. That Power was Germany. It took a good many years of the comings and goings of Admiral Tirpitz to demonstrate finally thaV apart from mere words, German sea supremacy was definitely aimed at and attainable. Then the race inevitably started, because necessity knows no law. German naval building, un<Jer the Kaiser, started the naval race of 1900-1914, but the character of the capital ship section of this naval construction was determined by British naval science. As usual, the crisis produced a man; the man produced a machine; and the Dreadnought determined the class of capital ship with which major naval battles in that era would be fought. When Mr. Baldwiri-^peaks of the expense, he speaks of & factor which was as evident in Lord Fisher's day as in his own, foif the cost of each Dreadnought, in Germany as in Britain, made earlier battleship costs look tiny; and it was only with the greatest reluctance that the , Liberal Government of Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George capitulated to the new machine, and launched the building programme which, with Germany's, produced the Battle of Jutland. But the misty Jutland afternoon and murky night were only a small part of the result achieved by the Liberal Ministers' reluctant consent to multiplication of the new fighting machines. The greatest result of British naval supremacy was that only on that one occasion of Jutland did the German battleships seriously attempt to seize the command of the sea, and on all the other thousand odd days of the Great War the big Tirpitz naval machine remained ineffective because an island nation planted by geography in the fairway had, by the sweat of taxpayers and scientists and fighters, produced a yet bigger machine. A "welter of naval spending" brought success to the Power, that had followed it as nearly as possible to its dire conclusion—but, be it noted, under the pressure of a challenger whose aim was nothing less than complete supremacy in the only fighting fields known up to that time to military science—^the land and the sea.

What is the position now, a generation later? A Germany rebuilding its navy offered to accept, with some reservations, a limitation of Germany's naval strength to 35 per cent, of Britain's. The offer was taken. Today, a little later, British naval power is found to be transferred in large measure from the North Sea to a new danger sea, the Mediterranean. These -two naval developments of 1935 would have been absolutely unguessed by the boldest guesser at the beginning of the year. Great events are afoot; there is war in Africa; war machines are in the air, and those of the sea are alert. And to this crisis no British naval building can be cited as a contributory cause, because the British Navy has not even been maintained. A British naval reduction intended to be a contribution to peace has, according to Mr. W. M. Hughes and others, actually tended to produce war. Nevertheless, British naval policy continues to be a policy of reduction of armaments. Mr. Baldwin interprets it as less of the devils we know and (he hopes) none of the devils we do not know. His plea is that the people whose business it is, in various countries, to create the most effective naval machines will not feel it to be their duty to invent new ones. It is to be feared that the people directly concerned—the inventive fighting services—regard themselves more as machines than as moralists; but over them are Governments who know the costs and the' dangers emphasised by Mr. Baldwin, and to whom his plea will be by no means of small account. Not on the machine men but on the politicians falls the task of a political appeasement that may prevent further ex[jjperimenl; and construction, in the

sphere of candidly destructive machinery. And the task is one that faith forbids us to regard as hopeless, even though, as Sir James Parr remarks^ this Naval Conference meets "in circumstances far from favourable."