SINGAPORE BASE

Evening Star, Issue 21945, 4 February 1935, Page 9

SINGAPORE BASE

ITS CONSTRUCTION ” A MAJOR BLUNDER” MR WARD PRICE CONDEMNS PROJECT (British Official Wireless.) Press Association —By Telegraph—Copyright LONDON, February 2. Mr Ward Price, in an article in the ‘ Daily Mail,’ points out that £6,500,000 was expended on “ the Empire’s costliest white elephant,” the Singapore naval base, and that four more millions will go the same way in the next three years. “ Britain,” he writes, “ while her own unemployed stand idle, maintains 3,000 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 mile long granite-faced waterfront where the Navy’s three most powerful ships may come 8,000 miles for repairs in a £1,200,000 floating dock, while crews, numbering 1,300 apiece, swelter in barracks. The only foreign warships within 2,500 miles are a few old Dutch gunboats at Java and an occasional American at Manila. The base owes its existence to fantastic fearfulness such as led Lewis Carroll’s White Knight to keep a rat trap 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 Empire’s heart by European nations. A British naval offensive in Japanese waters would demand a threefold superiority in the fleet, and could not protect Australia because the Japanese route thither would be 4,000 miles farther east. Australia, for a fraction of the cost of Singapore, 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 nuyor blunder which Japan regards with resentment.”