TRADE DEFENCE IN WAR

Evening Star, Issue 22804, 12 November 1937, Page 3

TRADE DEFENCE IN WAR

FORECAST BY NAVAL AUTHOR Startling statements about the Navy’s plans for defence of merchant ships in wartime are made by Captain Bernard Acworth, 8.N., in ‘ Britain in Danger,’ published recently. Captain Acworth declares that the Admiralty does not intend to institute convoy, at any rate in the early days of a war. Trade defence, he says, will be solely carried out by aircraft, an assertion based on an alleged conversation with “ one of the highest authorities in the Admiralty.” He declares that the ■ official plan will be for all merchant ships to be advised by wireless of the route to follow, while an aircraft carrier, accompanied if possible by a battle cruiser, will patrol the trade route. When an SOS is received from an attacked merchantman, distant anything up to 250 miles away, a flight of torpedo planes will leave the earner and proceed to the scene of the attack. The raider if located will then be torpedoed and the planes will return to the carrier. “ Can such a plan be called trade nefenco when it is remembered that the unfortunate merchant ship has been captured or sunk long before this ingenious aerial plan, weather and visibility permitting, has developed?” he asks. “It seems more akin to using merchant ships as bait than to defending them.” CONVOY INSTRUCTION. The Admiralty had no comment to make on this “disclosure.” Indeed, it would be contrary to the public interest to announce exactly what are our defence plans. Actually a scheme similar to that described by Captain Acworth was oerried out as an experiment in a trade defence exercise in the Channel this summer. Lessons learned from it have since been studied by the naval staff and the Fleet Air Arm leaders. Moreover, instruction in convoy work forms an important section of the Merchant Navy Defence courses for merchant service officers which have just started. Statements in public by members of the Board of Admiralty in the last few months have indicated that convoy is very much in their minds. Captain Acworth, though lie is a former submarine specialist, would like to see tho torpedo abolished in big ships. He advocates replacing our present destroyers with gunboats heavily armed to copo with torpedo-carrying ships of a hostile force, an idea which was tried out successfully in pre-war days.

He also proposes that the size and speed of battleships and cruisers should be reduced. To point this argument, he presents drawings and photographs of models built according to his idea. His battleship would be of about 12,000 tans and 174 knots speed,, as against the 35,000 tons and 30 knots of the new King George V. class; while for cruisers he advocates a heavily armoured ship of 6,000 tons and 234 knots speed, in place of the existing types.