PROBLEMS OF DEFENCE

Evening Star, Issue 22595, 12 March 1937, Page 12

PROBLEMS OF DEFENCE

BRITAIN’S NAVAL PROGRAMME MINISTER'S EXPLANATION (British Official Wireless.) Press Association —By Telegraph —Copyright RUGBY, March 11. (Received March 12, at 1.30 p.m.) In asking the House of Commons to approve of the expenditure of more than £100,000,000, and a naval programme of 80 new ships, the First Lord of the Admiralty said the demand meant that at the end of the year Britain would have under construction the remarkable number of 148 new ships, including five capital ships, four aircraft carriers, and 17 cruisers. The size of the programme was the measure of past deficiencies. Since 1919 there had been a continuous effort, both at the Admiralty and in the fleets, to learn the lessons of the war and keep abreast of subsequent developments, work which was even more important. The ship designs, therefore, had been based upon lesson and experiment, and he instanced the new battleships, for which 18 designs had successively been discarded before a final design was accepted. The year 1914, he argued, had caught the Navy in a dangerous transition stage, before it had had time to organise its defences against the newly-emerged forms of attack. Now they had had 17 years in which to develop counter-action. Without giving details, he could say they included the fullest use of air power itself and the production of anti-aircraft weapons on a scale and of a precision undreamt of in 1918, with the result of making the fleet in general, and the battleship in particular, the least attractive target for an enemy air force. Sir Samuel Hoare stated that repeated investigations carried out by the three services for the protection of the naval bases, which was mainly an air force and army task, showed they could and would make these bases vary formidable objects to attack, whether the fleet was present or not. He regarded the surface raider as still the greatest danger to trade routes, so that an adequate number of warships remained the first essential for their protection. The First Lord dealt in particular with the question—to which the naval and air staffs had given closer attention than to any other—of trade communications through narrow seas. If that threat developed they were ready to meet it, but the Navy still believed that the best form of defence Was bold offensive. He was not prepared to state the desired standard of British naval strength in terms of countries or in terms of numerals. He preferred to say that they must, in order to keep open their trade routes and Imperial communications, have a fleet strong enough to carry out its responsibilities in both the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, for they were an oceanic Empire, with oceanic communicationsSir Samuel recalled that the general argument he had given for naval strength was an essential for any part in collective action which Britain might have taken under the Covenant as for self-defence. He anticipated that if the naval programme was criticised in light of these considerations it would be for its shortcomings rather than its excess, but he replied that in the changing situation the programme must be flexible, and for the present the proposed expansion was as much as was either wise or practicable.

AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND A VISITOR’S IMPRESSIONS. LONDON, March 11. (Received March 12, at 1 p.m.) “ Australians and New Zealanders of all parties unitedly support a defence policy, but at the moment nobody is quite certain what that policy should be,” says Mr Kenneth Lindsay, in a series of articles in the ‘ Kilmarnock Standard ’ on the impressions of his Australian and Now Zealand visit. He adds: “Australia is full of politics, but the parties, as elsewhere, are blurred by economic facts. There is probably too much legislation in Australia and too many professional politicians.’*