Britain's Huge Naval Programme

Northern Advocate, 17 March 1939, Page 3

Britain's Huge Naval Programme

(Received 3 p.m.) LONDON, March 16

Introducing the Navy Estimates for £149,000.000, an increase of £23,000,000 on last year's Estimates, which were themselves a record for peace time, the Parliamentary Secretary of the Admiralty, Mr G. Shakespeare, said members would be gratified that no less than £61,000,000 of that great total was in respect, of shipbuilding and engineering work on vessels or on new ccntruction programmes of 1939 and previous years, and the repair of the existing fleet.

During the financial year now ending, 43 warships had been added to the navy, and in the course of 1939 another 60 would have joined the fleet.

He thought the House would bo impressed with the magnitude and balance of the 1939 building programme, which included two fast battleships of 40,000 tons, with IG-inch gun armaments, four trade protection cruisers, a large aircraft carrier, two flotillas of

destroyers, and 20 escort vessels of a new type, and of high speed, with armaments designed to meet submar-; ine and aircraft attacks.

.The fact that dockyards and shipbuilding yards would, in the course of the year, be engaged on the building of some 200 vessels of a total of 870.000 tons, was a measure of national productive efforts for national defence which had never been approached in peacetime. This output would exceed, by nearly 30 per cent., the annual tonnage completed in the years just before the Great War.