MANAWATU EVENING STANDARD. POHANGINA GAZETTE. Circulation, 3,000 Copies Daily. THURSDAY, MARCH 17th, 1904. BATTLESHIPS v. TORPEDO BOATS

Manawatu Standard, Volume XL, Issue 7792, 17 March 1904, Page 6

MANAWATU EVENING STANDARD. POHANGINA GAZETTE. Circulation, 3,000 Copies Daily. THURSDAY, MARCH 17th, 1904. BATTLESHIPS v. TORPEDO BOATS

The war which is now in progress in the Far East has special interest for naval experts for the reason that it will, in all probability, settle the vexed question of battleships versus torpedo boats. Some of the Powers have of late years spent enormous sums of money in the construction of destroyers. France aimed at making the torpedo boat the deciding factor in naval warfare, and Britain responded by constructing destroyers whose special points were their high speed and the long range of their chasing guns. So far the battleship is considered to be the only instrument able to cope with destroyers, although the display made by the former at Port Arthur must have proved very disheartening to Russia. The facility with which the Japanese sailors have been able to torpedo several of the most formidable among the Russian warships may well serve to suggest the extreme utility of small craft in the defence of home waters which are very far removed from the enemy's principal naval base. In the shoally waters at the entrance to Port Arthur the torpedo boats which attacked the Russian fleet had an ideal battlefield. They were able to make their assault from quarters into which it was impossibe for yes.els drawing deeper water to follow them, and it would seem that at the time when the greatest amount of execution was being done against the Russians they were defcached from the rest of tbe Japanese fleet. As the result of their tactics the Japanese accomplished, a coup which has crippled the Eussian naval power at the very outset. We are reminded by a contemporary that at the time of the SpanishAmerican war a large proportion of the naval strength of Spain lay in its flotillas of torpedo boats, which, unfortunately for the nation, were rendered practically useless through the lack of provision for coaling them on the passage across the Atlantic. . The fact that a navy relatively strong in this particular department of naval preparation was so easily and so completely annihilated seemed to emphasise the arguments of those who counselled dependence mainly upon battleships and cruisers of .the larger types. But this conclusion should be received with very large reservations. If we accept the dictum of Captain Mahan that the proper frontier of a naval station ia the shoreline of its enemy, we are driven to the conclusion, m the light of recent events, that the kind of weapon to be iised by the enemy on its own littoral is very different from that which is proper to the " offensivedefensive" operations of the more aggressive power. The tojpedo boat is essentially a weapon for home defence. It strikes hard, but it<* range is short Like the magazine rifle and smokeless powder—as used in military work it renders the defence of a country by patriotic men comparatively easy as against an attempt of invasion. Had Cuba been a well-affected coloav of Spain, and had it possessed its own flotillas of torpedo boats, manned by men like those who led in the civil war, most probably the miserable fiasco of Santiago Harbor would never have '

occurred. The moral effectof a mishap such as that which has overtaken the Russian battleships m Port Arthur, is not the least formidable of new elements which the use of high explosives has introduced into naval warfare. Even in the English Channel the dread of the torpedo boat has asserted itself to such an extent that the ; officers and crews of the Channel Fleet no longer consider their ships at all safe without a strong harbor of refuge.. This is the reason why the Admiralty is at present expending a sum of over £_,000,000 in the construction of an enclosed harbor at Dover for the reception of all the battleships and heavy cruisers jof the Channel and North Sea fleets in case of emergency.