OLD SHIPMATES

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 21619, 23 January 1945, Page 2

OLD SHIPMATES

PLEASANT REUNIONS |>' : r GALLIPOLI MEMORIES ADMIRAL ON”AIR POWER ‘‘When one has served for 59 years in the Royal Navy, in all the various classes of ships, one makes many acquaintances. I have been happy to meet many old shipmates in my tour of New Zealand, brief as it has been, and have welcomed the opportunity to recall incidents of a few decades ago. It has been a great pleasure, too, to meet again a number of people who share my memories of incidents ashore in various places,” said Ad-( miral of the Fleet Lord Keyes, in an interview in Gisborne last evening. Lord and Lady Keyes reached Gisborne shortly before dinner, after an uneventful motor journey from Napier, and are to continue their tour northward to-morrow, calling at Rotorua en route to Auckland, when .they will lake a Tasman Airways plane to Sydney on the first stage of .their return journey to the United Kingdom. In less than five weeks they have seen a great deal Of New Zealand, and in many places have made contacts with men who served coincidentally with Lord Keyes in various campaigns. Some of the most interesting of these recalled the Gallipoli campaign, of the earlier days of the last war, in which Lord Keyes served as chief of staff to Admiral de Robeck, commander of the Allied Fleet. In passing reference to those days, he mentioned a number of those with whom .he spent time ashore on the peninsula when arranging for naval support to the land operations. His mention of General Sir Alexander Godley, with whom he spent hours at various , times moving through the maze of earthworks on Gallipoli, recalled the. soldiers' recipe for trenchdigging: “Wide enough for Paddy Glynn and deep enough for Godley The Paddy Glynn mentioned was an Australian staff officer of exceptional girth, while General Godley was one of the tallest of officers. In reply to a question, Lord Keyes smilingly admitted that he was the staff officer of —at that time —little experience in command to whom Mr. Winston Churchill gives credit in his ".World Crisis” for urging upon Admiral de Robeck a determined continuance of the attack on the Dardanelles by the combined Allied Fleet, despite the heavy loss of three ships sunk by mines at the approach to the Narrows. The loss had staggered the fleet’s commander, and

when Whitehall left the decision as to continuance or suspension of the naval attack, a council of senior officers; found only one somewhat junioi officer supporting the attack policy. Mr. Churchill wrote that had this officer been able to lay the laurels of Zeebrugge on the council-table, the whole course of the war would have been changed. But Zeebrugge was still in the future. Training Trops For Invasion

Talk of Gallipoli and the loss of the great opportunity presented there, when the Turkish forts guarding the Narrows and the approach to Constantinople were almost entirely out of ammunition, led Lord Keyes to mention his long association with Mr. Churchill and tlie latter’s keen interest in his —Lord Keyes’—own authorship of a book upon the Gallipoli campaign. This association had borne fruit in the appointment as first director of combined operations, given to Lord Keyes when after the Dunkirk evacuation the British faced the problem of once more getting a foothold on the European mainland. This in turn led, eventually, to Lord Keyes’ participation as an observer in the first of the United States battles for the Philippines, aboard a United States naval vessel.

Many of the American officers who interested themselves in the methods, of training and equipping the British commando forces for raids on the Continent were subsequently given posts of importance when the United -States came into the War and had to train its own forces for combined operations, said Lord Keyes. When he was invited to visit the traininggrounds of the U.S. Marine Corps, he found the methods employed there very similar to those evolved in Britain. Moreover, much of the equipment developed by the Americans had some relation to what the British ihad tried out in a smaller .way. The scale on Which the United States preparations were made was astounding, to one accustomed to the more modest resources of Britain, and he had been particularly impressed by the results-of the naval air arm in the American fleet. Combination of Sea and Air

He had always maintained that the British Navy should develop its own air arm, and though the development was at length permitted, only very late in the day—in 1937 —the value of that air arm had been thoroughly exemplified throughout this war. In the Pacific, where the Americans were able to develop to a high degree a navy air arm which they had always exercised, sea-air power had come thoroughly into its own. In this connection, he was interested, Lord Keyes said, to find that his own speeches and writings on the subject had been carefully filed in the United States service archives.

The history of the Philippines campaign would show that planes from the navy’s carriers had cleared the skies over Leyte and blasted the Japanese airfields, enabling the passage of the convoys, while the nearest land-based -planes were hundreds of miles away. It was not until the convoys put the troops and equipment ashore, and the troops had prepared airstrips, that land-based planes were able to take part in the battles. In the meantime, the carrier-based planes had Taken on everything the Japanese could produce, up to and including their finest fighter craft. The powerful land-based fighters had been a great help later, but they could not have got into the fight but for the navy paving the way. But the world did not have to wait for the Philippines campaign to prove the need for an air arm as an adjunct to sea-power, wielded by the naval commanders, Lord Keyes added. That proof had been given on many previous occasions in the North Sea, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean,