SINGAPORE.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 26 January 1927, Page 7

SINGAPORE.

PROPOSED NAVAL RASE

A U STJtt ALIA N T CRITICISM

Commander A. T. Marsden, wdo retired from the Royal Navy in 1921, and recently visited Sydney to deliver lectures on naval and imperial aitairs, has been astonished to discover _ that people in Australia criticise the Singapore base, and regard it as a gesture of aggression to Japan. \ ‘Mn England,” he told a Sydney Morning Herald representative, “people have long ago accepted what is doing done at Singapore a and irrevocable. 1 have found here that people are not so decided. It seems to me that the person to whom one should turn for a judgment on this matter is the expert. We are inclined, however, to extend too generously the privilege that every man has a right to his own opinion. Surely laymen dp not insist upon urging their view on problems of business engineering or medicine. No, of course, they do not, and I cannot very clearly see what tney can effect here. At any rate, the test of the base is in the future. Meanwhile we must put our trust in those men who have spent their li\es in acquiring the information they are now applying to Singapore. “I do not think people realise clearly that Singapore ha* always been a naval base. The work being carried out there now is merely to provide facilities for dry docking the large battleships, and aircraft carriers. Already Singapore possesses a dock which might do this work, but in times of war it would be fully occupied with mercantile shipping. “Critic* have urged, 1 find, that Singapore may be accepted by Japan a* a gesture of aggression. It remains that Japan has never protested against the base, realising that navies must have bases. Decisions at the Washington Conference caused Britain to remove -her principal base from Hongkong to Singapore, hundreds of mile* further away from Japan. These suggestions annoy the Japanese, for they attribute to them thoughts they never bear themselves. As anyone ol’ information knows, the Japanese respect no naval man on the earth as they respect the English. After the battle of Kagoshima they employed English officers to train their sailors, and generally it was our people who introduced western civilisation into Japan. English was the first Occidental nation to form an alliance with Japan, an alliance terminated only when the two peoples threw in their lot with the League of Nations. Incidentally it is interesting to see that no one ever refers to the deevlopment of Honolulu as an act of offence from America. And one might as well say that Britain was looking at America through Singapore as at Japan. That is too preposterous. It seems to me that our endeavours to obtain peace are proved by the statistics of warship construction. T7p till last summer 345 men-o’-war had been constructed since the war, and of these Britain built, eleven.” _ ( Commander Marsden said that ho, had been surprised to discover how' intensively the Australian navy is trained. The system was fine, he said. He had heard the criticism —not unknown even in England —that instead of expanding money upon new battleships the Government *hould develop the country. He would be the last to sav that the country should be neglected’ but if they were going to have a navy at all they must have a modern navy; they must give their men the safety of the very latest ships. The loss of the Valerian in October should have argued this well enough. She belonged to ,an old *loop class, built hastily and lightly during the war, a class whiph should not be used in heavy service. A s'ailor was not safe if the boat on which he served was not as modern a* those of other nations.