SHIP COMPETITION

Grey River Argus, 27 September 1944, Page 5

SHIP COMPETITION

ELIMINATION OF JAPAN AND GERMANY AN AMERICAN PROPOSAL (Rec. 80) WASHINGTON, Sept. 25. Admiral Emory Land testifying before a Congressional war 'economic policy committee, advocated the reduction of Japan to the status of a pastoral nation. He said: “It would do them a great deal of good to be relieved of all their naval and merchant vessels, and to be only permitted to retain coastwise trading ships, with the balance of their fleet to be divided among the United Nations. Germany should receive the same treatment, because both Japan ai Germany before the war used, unfc . trading practices and trickeries to delay foreign vessels in their ports.” Admiral Land predicted a drastic slump in ship production in the United States after the war. He said thirty or forty of the eighty shipyards which were now buzzing with activity will be compelled to close down. The remainder will be usee, for repair of a merchant marine “small in quantity, but high in quality.” He advocated that United States merchantmen should carry after the war forty or fifty per cent, of America’s own exports. It would be uneconomic to carry Americans goods in American bottoms beyond certain points. Discussing the post-war fate of the Navy he said it was urgent that the United States should dismantle after the war only their unseaworthy craft, retaining all the others for twenty years in a ship sanctuary to which the nation could turn in case of a further threat of aggression.