Is the Battleship Obsolete?

Hastings Standard, Volume VI, Issue 1640, 1 October 1901, Page 3

Is the Battleship Obsolete?

I "I he Apotheosis of the Torpedo : a bnei lor the .New School," is eontri!:M ted by Mr F. T 4 Jane to the Fortnightly, lie lays stress on the fact that during the recent manoeuvres of the Mediterranean Fleet " The destroyers ware sent out some hours hefore the fleet. They were given two days at sea to find the fleet, which took an unknown course. Thes did find it, and claimed to have sunk everyone of the 11 vessels engaged." Ten out of the 11 battle ships admitted that they " were bagged without loss to the attack." This admission leads Use writer to pronounce the destroyer in the judgment of our principal fleet, "the snip of the future." The gyroscope has lengthened the torpedo range topedo range to a thousand or even two thousand vards. Two thousand yards js the maximum distance at which a destroyer can be sighted at night ; and as she is moving at a thousand yards a minute, the chance of the battleship disabling her before she has sped her fatal bolt is very small. AMaxim to rain death on her personnel is suggested as the battleships possible safeguard. The writer argues:—As things are, the torpedo is accepted by the ship much as the gun shell is accepted by the destroyer, the sole defence the chance of not being hit—just the def'.'nce to which soldiers, once armour clad, were driven. When the man-at- arms was supplied with a gun, he drove the armoured knight to become a species of man-at-arms also. Everything is pointing to the probability that the torpedo is going to do something of same sort of thing with the small craft and the battleship—aided, perhaps, by the big high explosive shell which, " like the torpedo, puts the striken hors de combat with a single blow. In a fight in which such blows are dealt, everything tends to favor the evolution of the cheap craft that can be lost without the loss being a disaster* It is a truly alarming picture the writer gives of the rapidity of future naval battles. The war of the future is bound to become more and more a war of individuals, an affair of initiative, in which doing the best .thing after a pause for reflection mar well be inferior to doing something at once without reflection. If If destroyers fight each other, the combined speed may lie sixty miles an hour, or more than that. There will be no time to think. .Such a battle would be all over inside five minutes. There may be no room for tactics; the fight may be quicker than thought For such work the type of young officer that we rear by our present system is probably the best man going, for he best adapts himself to doing something on the spur of the moment. Those who will do best belong to the type the foreigher calls "mad Englishman.' l Fate has sent us this type. We know it well in the naval ports. It tends to be rowdy. "It may be a throw back to Kli/ahcthaii days. It has a merry life and a short one, and its future is generally limited by a maximum of not more than 1- hours ahead. It is "Drake and his merry men' l over again. ? , t The type exists in no foreign navy* The writer i.s very pronounced on the obsolescence of the battleship and heavier craft. He says: "A thousand Seven .Seas a British Lake. In the making nine hundred might lie lost, but the enemy's iiag would have disappeared for ever, nor would anv hostile battleship float a week. This is not the faith of one man or of two, it, is the sole gospel of the entire new generation of naval otlicers. Vet at the present time the Admiralty hau: all but ceased to build "destroyers."'