SEA RAIDERS

Evening Star, Issue 23666, 28 August 1940, Page 8

SEA RAIDERS

HIT-AND-RUN ATTACKS ON MERCHANTMEN BRITISH PORTS STILL OPEN The loss of the armoured merchant cruiser Transylvania in _ the Atlantic must be considered against the full background of facts relating to this class of vessel (recently wrote the military correspondent of the ‘ Sydney Morning Herald ’). When the war broke out the Admiralty hastily armed and commissioned more than 50 crack liners 4ind put them on to escort and combatant work. , The gallant but unavailing .fight put .up by the first of these vessels to be sunk, the Rawalpindi, showed the world the kind of work such converted liners were doing, and it f says much for the skill of their personnel that less than one-tenth of them has fallen a prey to the enemy, despite the fact that they are comparatively lightly armed and have deliberately ventured into the most dangerous waters week after week. This small percentage of losses clearly shows Britain’s command of the seas. This supremacy has never been better demonstrated than since the tall of France. By all the strategical maxims the loss of the Channel ports, especially when coupled with the loss of the French’Atlantic harbours, should have rendered the sea routes through the waters to the south and south-east of England untenable. But the fact is that those routes remain open to British shipping, and, as was officially stated last week, not a single British port has been closed to ordinary maritime traffic, despite the attacks on Channel shipping by 'aeroplanes jerking from bases only a few miles off and by thfe new E-boats, which, rely on their great speed to effect lightning hit-and-run raids on merchant shipping. In the face of all these threats the losses due to enemy action have not become unmanageable. In the four weeks of June they averaged 94,000 tons a week, counting neutral and Allied, as well as British shipping. The first four weeks of July, showed a reduction in the average to 77,500 tons, while the figures for the week ended August 4 show a further reduction to 75,124 tons. Nobody will deny that losses at the rate of nearly four million tons of shipping a year are serious, but there has not been the catastrophic rise which was expected after Germany obtained mastery of the European coastline from the Pyrenees to the north of Norway. Moreover, Britain has 10,000,000 more tons of shipping than when the war started. The acquisition of much of the mercantile fleet of the enemy-occu-pied territories has meant that Britain now has 31,000,000 tons of shipping at her disposal, the largest amount at any time in her history. It is true that the most economical use of this gross tonnage is out of the question, but its position is an asset not to be gainsaid.