The Frantklin Times PUBLISHED EVERY MONDAY, WEDNESDAY AND FRIDAY AFTERNOON. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17, 1940. NAVY AGAIN STRIKES

Franklin Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 42, 17 April 1940, Page 4

The Frantklin Times PUBLISHED EVERY MONDAY, WEDNESDAY AND FRIDAY AFTERNOON.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17, 1940. NAVY AGAIN STRIKES

Office and Works: ROULSTON STREET, PUKEKOHE. ’Phone No. 2. P.O. Box 14. “We nothing extenuate nor aught set down, in malice.”

ANOTHER brilliant naval thrust into Narvik waters has completed the destruction of the German destroyers there. The first 1 raid was a destroyer raid; in the second'raid the destroyers have had the help of the heavy guns of one of the Great War dreadnoughts, ihe In the Battle of Jutland,. 191f>, the Warspite figured in a

remarkable naval incident. On one ol' the too few occasions in which the 15-inch guns ol' the British dreadnoughts found a target at Jutland, “the Warspite, with her helm temporarily jammed, fell out of the squadron and made a sweeping circle out of and under intense German fire. The circle carried her round the halfwrecked Warrior (British armoured cruiser smitten by German heavy guns at an earlier stage) and in the confusion the Warrior, blessing her saviour’s involuntary chivalry, struggled into safety.” The chronicler of this event is Mr Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915 /and again today. It is no mean thing that, twenty-five years later, the Warspite is still available to lead the Narvik thrust under Mi Churchill's Admiralty orders, and perhaps to give him something more to write about when for a second time he becomes historian of, as well as participant in, a major war. While using its striking forces in the fiords and wherever water will c; !ry them, the Navy is also pushing its passive defences right round the German coast, laying a belt of mines from Holland to Lithuania. No longei is the Baltic a German lake. ID tier's extending of the war over sea and land have opened the intervening seas to all forms of Allied naval action; and his own naval defences, in the form of all types of warships from battleships downwards, have been disappearing in the past week at a remarkably rapid rate. His Norwegian expedition, resisted on land, and relying on sea and air communications that are threatened by war- , ships, by mines, and by the Allies’ aerial counter-operations, may yet> drive him into a new experiment with unpredictable military and political' results —an experiment of which Sweden may be the victim. The, Leader of the Labour Opposition (Mr At!lee) offers the opinion that Hitler aims to use Norway as the springboard of an intensified air attack on Britain. Mr Attlee anticipates a “more active phase” in which Nazi fury will fall on “British soldiers and people.” Coincidently it will be noted that a German news agency reports “the first British attack on German concentrations” (alleged bombing of a railway station in North Denmark) and adds that repetition will cause “an entirely new situation in the conduct of the aii" war against Britain.” “Unceasing and increasing vigour” is the keynote which Mr Churchill lias sounded for naval action. Each German warship sunk adds to the freedom of British naval units to v.'den their range. In 1914-18 the German High Sea Fleet magnetised all the big units of the Navy to North Sea waters. But Germany started the war in 1939 with only a shadow of her old High Sea Fleet, and the shadow during last week was appreciably reduced. It is suggested in a cablegram that a German attack on Holland would carry the war to the Pacific. In a sense the war is already there, for weeks ago British warships seized German nationals carried on a neutral (Japanese) merchantman. But the remark attributed to a Tokio paper in recent cablegrams concerning Japan’s possible involvement tn a Dutch war, and the fate of the Dutch East Indies, seems to rest on a good many assumptions. It need not cause alarm; but the fact remains that, assuming that Germany is not joined b; another Great Power, the BritishNavy’s power to operate in the remoterOceans is far greater than it was in 1914-18, and this military fact has’ political implications fully realised in every corner of the Pacific.