H. G. WELLS—SEER.

Gisborne Times, Volume XLVIII, Issue 4475, 16 February 1917, Page 2

H. G. WELLS—SEER.

HIS PROPHECY" OF 1911. Though AJi- FI. G. IVo 11.s', -the gifted .essayist and author, possesses an imagination as picturesque as that of tl)e Into Jules Verne, hero is what he wrote iir 191.1, about the present and future of sea armaments and sea warfare : •‘ln the popular imagination the .Dreadnought is still the one instrument ot war. We count our strength m Dreadnoughts and Super-Dread-noughts, and so long as w<? are spending our national resources upon them i aster than any other country, if we sink at least .-£l6O for every £IOO slink in these obsolescent monsters by t,cm many, have a - reassuring ‘sense of keeping, ahead and being thorougli- ■ sa ‘ e ; 11ns confidence in big, very expensive battleships is. 1 believe and hone shared by the German Government and by Lurope generally, but it is. nevertheless, a .very reasonable confidence, and it may easily lead us into , the most tragic of national dislUusionments. Ve of the general imbhe are led suppose that the next naval war—if ever we engage in another naval war—will begin with a decisive Meet action. The plan of action is presented, with an alluring simplicity. Our adversary will come out to us, in a ratio of 10 to 16, or in some ratio still more advantageous to us. according as our adversary happens to be this Power or that t ower. I here will be some tremendous business with guns and torpedoes, and our Admirals will return victorious to discuss the,'discipline and details of the battle, and each other’s little _ weaknesses in ’the monthly magazines. This is h desirable but improbable anticipation. No hostile Power is the, least likely to send out any battleships at all against our invincible Dreadnoughts. They will promenade the seas, always in the ratio of 16 to 10 or more, looking for fleets that are securely tucked away out of reach. They will not, of course, go too near the enemy’s coast on account of mines, and. meanwhile, our cruisers will hunt the enemy’s commerce into port.

•‘Then other things will happen. ‘'The enemy we shall discover using unsportsmanlike devices against our capital ships. Unless he is a lunatic, he will prove to he much stronger in reality than lie is on paper in the matter of submarines, torpedo boats, water-planes and aeroplanes. These are things cheap to make and easy to conceal. He" will be richly stocked with ingenious devices for getting explosives up to these two-million pound triumphs of naval engineering. On the cloudy and foggy nights so frequent about' those islands lie will have extraordinary chances, and sooner or later, unless we boat him thoroughly in the air above and in the waters beneath, for neither of which proceedings we are prepared, some of these chances will come off. and we shall lose a Dreadnought. “It will be a poor consolation if an ill-advised and stranded Zeppelin or so enlivens the quiet of the English countryside by coming d/eo and capitulating. It will be a • ' coun-ter-shock to wing an aeroplane or so, or blow a torpedo-boat out of the water. Our Dreadnoughts will cease to be a source of unmitigated confidence. A second battleship disaster will excite the Press extremely. A third will probably lead to aeroplanes, or to the West- Coast of Ireland—and the real naval war, a war of destroyers. submarines and hydroplanes, will begin. Incidentally, a commerce destroyer may take advantage of the retirement of our . Fleet to raid our trade routes.” • The above is an extract from an ossa vot \\ el Is's entitled “Ihc Common ,Sense oi "Warfare.”