Weakness in British Navy

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 4 May 1935, Page 11

Weakness in British Navy

THE first concern of Government is the security of the nation. Security means that its industry, its culture, and its eco-

nomic life remain inviolate. This implies that during peace forces adequate for war must be provided; and in war, employed in accordance with the right plan.

It is. then, the first business of tne Government. with the assistance of professional advisers, to discover what dangers threaten, what force is necessary to meet them, and in wliat plan it is to be employed, writes Admiral Sir Reginald Hall in the Daily Telegraph.

The most obvious of national dangers is invasion. Great Britain is an island, and this greatest of threats can be averted at sea.

Between the time of Julius Caesar and William of Normandy we were invaded and completely, or ill part, conquered again and and again. There was no Navy to meet the enemy at sea, no means of knowing where a sea enemy would land. But for nearly 900 years now we have neither been invaded nor conquered. Nor, until 1914, could we have been conquered without being invaded. But between the Battle of Trafalgar and August, 1914, the industrial revolution, by taking so many of the. population off the land and putting them into factories, had made us dependent on sea-borne food. It was at once an economic, and consequently a strategic, revolution. The first task of the British Fleet became, not to keep our coasts inviolate, but to keep our food supply intact.

How complete is the revolution was seen in 1917. Without defeat at sea, there was a time between the beginning of the submarine campaign and the discovery of its counter when the paradox seemed true that while the Grand Fleet was invincible, the enemy’s under-water fleet might make it impossible for us to maintain our armies abroad or to feed our population at home. Until the counter was in action we were faced with surrender without the enemy having achieved a military victory either on land or oil sea.

DEPENDENCE ON OIL. Since 1918 our security has once more been revolutionised, and again by the introduction of economic transformation. The Navy’s task in 1914 was simplified by the fact that, though some of our small craft were designed to use oil as long as it was available, all but a few of our battleships and cruisers, on which the brunt of the fighting would fall, had unrestricted access to our inexhaustible coal supplies. All this is changed to-day. With a few exceptions, which are not important, the British Navy in war can now keep the seas and fight only so long as the oil stores last, and so long as the supply of oil is assured. If the stores are gone and the supply out off, the Fleet is immobilised. Thus before the Navy can keep our sea supplies intact, it must see to its own oil supplies. Here we are faced with the strangest paradox of all. Trinidad and Burma are our only Britishowned sources of oil, and between them provide only a fraction of our needs. For the rest, we are dependent on neutrals forsaking their neutrality to the extent of supplying us with the fh*st necessity of war, or on the enemy’s not cutting off the supply at its sources, or on those sources not being at the mercy of sabotage. The last war taught us what sabotage in neutral countries can do. Unfortunately it is not only the Fleet that is dependent on imported fuel. Our Army is largely mechanised, and mechanised means oilfuelled. Every aeroplane that we possess is useless unless supplied with petrol. And the native supply is small. Thus, all three fighting forces arc wholly, or in a large degree, dependent on stores or continued supplies of sea-borne oil. But this is not all. The economic revolution has gone too far. Nine million tons of our merchant shipping ,a very large part of our inland, civil, and commercial transport, many important industries, and a growing proportion of commercial and domestic heating are now wholly dependent on oil. Obviously, if oil fails, our fighting forces on sea and on land will lie wholly immobilised. NAVY’S DOUBLE TASK. In war there is always one factor that is immeasurable. That is the constancy of the civil population. Let the country suddenly wake up to the fact that wc are dependent on oil. May not the Government at any moment be driven to put an embargo on any non-military use of the fuel on which our ability to fight depends?

How long will it be before the decree is issued that oil and petrol must be devoted solely to Navy. Army and Aircraft service? It may be necessary to do this; tho Government may be driven to do it. Then 9,000,000 tons of olir merchant, shipping will have to lie idle in poi't. We must forgo the use of lorries, buses and cars. All oil-fuelled industries will suspend operations.

This crippling paralysis may come upon us with disconcerting suddenness as a lesser evil than the imperilling of ottr security. It may well be asked: llow is it that we, of all countries, have been beguiled into a position so incredible and so perilous? The answer

Admiral Gives Sane Advice

Ships Should be Dual Fired

involves a long and intricate story. The facts are as we see them. The immediate matter is lo ask how those facts are defended.

The argument is that if the Navy can secure our food it can secure our oil, and if that he so, the strategic position would not be fundamentally altered. Or, again, it is said that oil has been adopted because it confers such military advantages that, given a reasonable provision with which to start a war, our supeiioi oil-fuelled ships are a better guarantee of a quick victory—and a quick victory, it is argued, is the only certain way of ending war successfully. -

Authority is given to this view by a recent Government pronouncement, that so long as foreign ships are oil-fuelled, British ships must follow suit. This is tantamount to saying that oil confers fighting qualities unobtainable by coal, and that foreign ships have made the same sacrifices as we have to obtain them. What, then, precisely are the naval advantages claimed for oil? First, that for any given radius of action it occupies less space than coal. For the same tonnage, an oil-fuelled ship allows a greater margin that can be devoted to speed, armour, or armament than does a coalfuelled ship. There is choice of greater mobility, greater protection, or greater fighting power—other things being equal, and undeniable superiority. There ai*e two additional considerations: that a ship using oil can be refuelled more quickly than can a coal-fuelled ship, and that it needs only a small crew of non-fighting men to manage the oil furnaces, whereas a large crew of non-fighting men is required to act as coal stokers. Clearly there is one thing we must not do. War is fighting, and at sea fighting means the destruction of tire enemy’s ships. If oil-fuelling gives a definite advantage in that task, then-at any cost wc must not send out our sailors handicapped in their main, and indeed their only, business. LOSS TO THE MINES. How far these alleged advantages are, in fact, embodied in the ships wc have been building since coal was abandoned, or, indeed, how far they can be embodied, I will not discuss here. It is enough to say that there is no combination of speed, radius, protection, and fighting power embodied in oil-fuelled ships that cannot be got in a coal-fuelled ship of a slightly larger tonnage. It may cost a little more to build, and more to maintain, because it requires a larger crew. But this is not a military question, neither must it be overlooked that the cost of oil-stor-age tanks, pipe lines and defence measures enormously exceed the slightly added cost of the ship herself.

Quicker fuelling is oil’s solitary boast-—a superiority which can seldom, if over, in war be decisive in any valid sense.

Thus we come down to economy in the ship herself as the only argument in oil’s favour. Against this must be set the disastrous effect on the coal industry which has been the foundation of our foreign trade and shipping, owing to the depreciation of British coal in the eyes of the maritime world, and the dubious advantage of maintaining in idleness those unemployed who might, with great national advantage and to their own salvation, be sent to sea.

It is, then, a summing up of the position that practically nothing o£ lighting value is gained by using oil.

The argument of the foreign ship, other than American, is not even as strong as I have stated it. For the navies of many of the nations whose policies might become hostile to us are not in any way oil-fuelled in the sense in which we are.

RISKS THAT WE TAKE. We have seen that in 1914 a considerable proportion of our ships could use oil as long as it lasted and then coal. This is the case with the foreign navies to which I have referred. They have not, that is to say, handicapped their sea strategy by the risk of immobility if the oil supply fails. If this is so, is there any defence for Great Britain continuing a policy that, in certain circumstances, would relieve our enemies from the task of defeating us, because we have chosen in these circumstances to defeat ourselves? The word “suicidal” is often abused. It is an exact description of the risks we take. But is there not another and even more dreadful form of suicide involved? The British Empire owns a bare 2 per cent, of the world’s oil fuel supply. If we are strategically and to a large extent economically dependent on oil, must not national strategy be hopelessly compromised? Is it not a danger that we simply cannot afford to quarrel with the oilsupplying countries?

To some of us it seems that this situation is intolerable. But it is not ■ iiretHeVflble. Weighed in any true balance, the mohey cost of reverting to our pre-1914 shipbuilding policy should count as nothing. Every future fig’hting ship should be dual-fired. Every fighting ship we have that can be made dual-fired should be converted*

The Washington Treaty binds us no longer. Wc have been made free and should use ohr liberty.