NAVAL NOTES.

Evening Star, Issue 15065, 23 December 1912, Page 2

NAVAL NOTES.

[Contributed by the Navy League, Otago Bkakch.] v

Soft lulled in the lap of capricious peace, Full glutted, with, gear and unearned increase, Rewards of the deeds that we have not done. False heirs of'the duty we basely shun, Gold for our god our glory gain, Unmanned, unarmed, and idly vain Wo slumber. Yet, 'the smder's net

Is spreading to snateh what our fathers

won. —' St. James Gazette,' June 17, 1908.

"It is necessary for England from time to time to form a sound judgment as to how far her naval supremacy is threatened by the building programme of any other nation. The effort to do so is not antiGerman, it is not childish, it is not dread of a phantom."—From 'Ait Australian in Germany.' pago 57. " Germany is not for wax, but strong armament is as necessary to a nation as a club is to a policeman. The policeman does not carry his stick to use it upon the heads of innocent people, but he has it in plain sight so that evilinclined persons may know that he is, always prepared for trouble. Let the' policeman walk his beat carrying a feather or a wisp of hay, and see how quickly the bullies will jump upon him and rob him of the little he possesses."—Bismarck's opinion, as recorded in ' Li Hung Chang's Diary.' RELATIVE STRENGTHS.

There is small cause for wonder that the ordinary individual is apt to grow eonfused over the figures of relative naval strengths that are ever and again submitted for his acceptance. If some of these- tables were true, then the day of the British. Empire has passed and gone beyond a doubt and the policy of the Dominion of jS T ew Zealand would be to consider the sort of reception that should be accorded our new masters. A too intense study of statistics of this order is -responsible for such a statement as that made recently at Hull by one.of the joint secretaries of the Imperial Maritime League: "In two years, as affairs new stood, the German fleet would be in a position of overwhelming superiority to ours at the moment of battle impact. Meantime, throughout the seas of the world the food of the people was undefended. The whole nation seemed possessed with the madness of blind indifference to the fate which was visibly impending over it. It would not listen to Lord Roberts. It would not listen to anyone who possessed knowledge of the facts. Ruin, bankruptcy, starvation, and despair were straight ahead, and every student of the affairs"of war knew the danger well. The nation did not listen, and the nation did not care." MR BURGOYNE'S FIGURES. We are concerned only with the first clause in the above quotation—viz., that "two years from now the German Fleet would be in a position of overwhelming superiority." The rest of the statement, with which we are in partial sympathy, is marred and weakened by a too characteristic exaggeration. But the answer to the first can be obtained from more than one source. Of these we prefer that of Mr Alan Burgoyne, M.P., editor of the 'i\avy League Annual,' and a man who writes rationally and dispassionately, and whose figures have been accepted as correct by the First Lord of the Admiralty, who, politically, is on the other side of the House. In the ' Annual,' 1912-13, just to hand, Mr Burgoyne devotes a chapter to the comparative naval strength, of the nations. He there sets forth "the reasons 'far his conclusions and the. principles that have governed him in drawing up liis tables. Of these we give the following: "All effective vessels are included, and that no taint of exaggeration should bo suggested in the British figures, foreign units which our own authorities would, long ago have condemned are paralleled beside superior British vessels, for no other reason than that their owners have not the courage to recognise that they are obsolete." We summarise Mr " Burgoyne's figures:— —Completed Dreadnoughts.— 1912.1913.1914.1915. British Empire ... 15 25 32 36 Germany 9 13 19 23 Germany and United States 15 21 28 35 Triple Alliance ... 10 15 25 33 —Pre-Dreadnoughts.— British Empire ... 55 65 72 76 Germany and U.S.A. 57 63 70 77 Triple Alliance ... 41 47 57 65 Germany 29 33' 39 43 British Empire. Germany. Armored cruisers 34 9 Of and over 23 knots ... 26 2 Protected cruisers ... 97 42 Built or building over 23 knots 42 25 Destroyers ...' 219 132 Submarines (complete) 73 24 Mr Burgoyne qualifies his figures with the following considerations: 1. Aggregate strength in the various classes. 2. The total maintained in effective commission.

3. Individual ship-strength—defence, offence, displacement. 4. Homogeneity of structure, armament, and machinery in classes. 5. Geographical situation of the nations concerned.

6. National or international interests, whether at home or abroad.

On the question of " age-limit" he says : —"The German vessels would be considered effective long after the British ships had been disregarded." Which, also, is satisfactory. The whole of these tables, in fact, strengthen the belief that while there is need for constant vigilance and a vet larger provision of capital ships, there" is no justification for the panic wails to which reference has been made. "IX SIGHT OP MUTINY."

The officials who indignantly denied the existence of "discontent" in the Navy must not only never have read the de"mands of the lower deck, as set forth in their Magna Charta, but have regarded their fellow-countrymen as "mostly fools." It has been stated more than once in this column that so general aim strong was the discontent that the Government were playing with fire in not allaying it in the only possible way. That this view was not an exaggerated one the following extract from an article by Mr Fred T. Jane (an acknowledged authority) in the 'London' for October will make plain. Speaking of the Spithead gathering in July, he says: Spread out, the ships might have reached the moon. A bit more spread out —to Mars. But when the great fleet weighed anchor, in every ship there was at least one man—in many ships more than one—who wondered whether, when the order came, the fleet would refuse duty, and what would happen then? TWO KEELS TO ONE.

Mr Jane reiterates with all the force of his long and first-hand study of the subject the urgent need to maintain the "two keels to one" standard. Whatever else may or may not happen, whatever may or may not be, there is one great fact of modern naval warfare, and that is that there can be no " muddling through." Modern naval warfare is too deadly. Disaster cannot be retrieved. It is a physical impossibility to construct a warship inside a certain period. There is a definite limit to the number of men who can be put to work on her. More important still, however, is the fact that" nothing on earth can accelerate the time that a gun or an armorplate, to be efficient, takes to cool. The utmost that can be done is to speed up the men who put things together, and that is the most trivial item of the whole job. The human element hardly enters. The crux of the matter is a chemical one. The next great war will presumably only last well inside a year. The utmost acceleration which human 1 ingenuity can accomplish in producing warships" is probably at the outside a 1 per cent, advance at the best. The laws of physics are beyond the wildest efforts of human desire. We can only make war with what we have in hand. The question for the man in the street is, not tha statistical arith-

luetic of a problem of which he cannot possibly grasp the full technicalities; it is the far simpler question of whether he will stake his existence on the views of those who demonstrate that a modicum will suffice, or on those who demand a fuller sufficiency. His existence is the stake, liiero is no place in war for "also ran." THE HANDY MAN'S PAY.

Jack has had to waiMve do not like to say how many y..,^* r an advance. Ihe wages in have gono up, and has proceeded by 1- «n b u t the man on whom the to rely in the aay of Armageddon has been drawing ins Is 8d a day with monotonous regularity. It was ever thus. In the olden davs, when the economists roared for retrenchment, it was Jack's wages that were first attacked. A recent volume of House of L . ol 'fs MSS. (1704-06) tells how the author ot Kobmson Crusoe' came before the House of Lords Committee with a great scheme for, reducing the cost of manning the fleet. One of his suggestions was that merchant ships should be compelled bv law to reduce the pay of seamen in order to drive men into the Navy! And the other was that the Navy should pay. for the destitute wives and children of men pressed" for the Navy, as otherwise the overseers of the poor, not caring to bear the expense of these families, would continue to screen men who were wanted for the servico!. Admirals Churchill. Shovell, Jennings, Byng, and Fairborne told a comf 1 - j Ilhafc1 lhafc iu order to S e t me n they first tried bounty money and then pressed, but neither method was successful. A novel explanation of the shortage of men was that the collieries were worked now by Bien, and not by cripples and boys, as formerly. About the same time another economist declared that over £200,000 a year might be saved in the fleet in beer alone every year by giving each man onlv three quarts instead of a gallon a day! So,' whether in coin or beer, it was Jack who had to "carry tha babv."