Nelson Evening Mail. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 2, 1916. NAVAL CONSTRUCTION.

Nelson Evening Mail, 2 August 1916, Page 4

Nelson Evening Mail. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 2, 1916. NAVAL CONSTRUCTION.

"GIVE us sufficient speed, give us the guns, and give us a floating platform—the enemy can 'have armour and all the rest." Thiis is an extract from- the report of the Hamilton Committee on shipbuilding in 1890, and it has been said that this embodies the lessons to be learned' fromi ithe latest naval engagements. For the outstanding feature of all the naval fights that have occurred is the victory of the gun over defensive armour. When ships of the German (Kaiser class, -carrying the heaviest side armour ever borne 'byi ships, are known to havei collapsed and sunk under the merciless salvoes of British 13.5 and 15iaich gujris; then, indeed, says a naval correspondent in the Telegraph, is the naval constructor given cause to think. On the other hand, it is also pointed out. the so-called unarmoured cruisers and the destroyer type of vessel have emerged from many a fight, not indeed ii'ii'hutft, but riddled wiit'h shot and shell, but yet able to float and be towed back for repairs and to fight again another day. And) again, there is the enormous loss of personnel when one of these mammoths of the sea sink® to the bottom. The light cruisers, on the other band, have allowed', shot and shell to pass through their hull,' and the casualties and loss of life have been comparatively light. In cases where light cruisers have been destroyed it has been invariably owinig to the superior weight of gunfire opposed to them'. All these facts, the correspond'ent 'points out, will be carefully .weighed by the Royal 'Corps of Naval Constractors, who are responsible for the design and building of the ships of the British Navy. They have a momentous task to perform. Certain lessons are to-'be learnt from the naval engagements that have taken placed, and if our Constructors were hopelessly outclassed byi tfhe Germans a naval victory might be .secured by them through some invention giving them superiority over our greater numerical strength. But it has said by those in a position to judge that outside the members of this great corps, "there is no man in all the. wide world who can rbning 'to bear such an ' intimate knowledge of construction and engineering!" And they have not been idle, as the following from a state-; .ment by the First \Lord of the Admiralty made in the House, of Commons in February last clearly shows:—"l can only say that successive Boards of Admiralty have most anxiously considered the mode in which the building resources of the country can be employed. These resources are how used l to their very utmost. -Speaking broadly., it may be asserted that every dockyard, public and private, here and in the Mediterranean, is being used to its utmost capacity, either for new cost'ruction or for repairs required by ourselves, and by our Allies. This bein< T so, it is manifestly (impossible to add to°the: ■magnitude of our preparations. . The most we can do is to alter their character. Nothing has, however, yet occurred' which, would- justify the Admiralty in thinking that any serious error of judgment had 'been so far committed! in connection with the various types of ships which are under construction." The advent of the submarine has been widely discussed, and apparently equally, prominent naval men have held conflicting views. The naval correspondent sums tip the submarine argument by .stating that it would appear that we shall always have them with ut: in the future, and the most that can be said is that they will probably absorb a larger amount of shipbuilding vote than heretofore, but the contention that the command of the sea has passed to the underwater, ship is idle. , Another contingent of experts contend that there will be no immediate revolution in ■warship building, and that the leviathan battleship has proved 1 herself to 'be perfectly adaptable to all conditions of modern warfare. The most recently launched ships are all,

more or less, provided with anti-sub-marine defence, and unless the battle of Jutland tells a different tale, no modern ship of the line has succumbed to underwater attack. The Queen Elizabeth is alleged to have been hit during the Oallipoli campaign several times, but -without material damage. Seaplanes* and balloons have in a great degree done away with the invisibility of submarines, which is certainly the strongest point that can be claimed for the under-water ship. The correspond'enfe 'goes on to point out that perhaps one of the greatest factors in marine warfare is speed. Curiously enough, this is the one lesson that all constructors are agreed upon. In the past, the divergence on this point has been most marked. It has influenced the design and engining of British destroyers in a very up and down fashion in the last decade. At one time, he points out, Britain built destroyers of 32 knot speed, only to go back the next year to a 25knot design, to be followed the next year by a 33-knot vessel. The speed of battle units, however, steadily' progressed and the advent of tJhe battle-cruiser, of course, brought the limit, for *the time being, although, curiously enough, after building the Queen Elizabeth, the Admiralty went back three knots in speed in the Royal Sovereigns. All this brings us back to the quotation given at the head of this article. Much opinion, the correspondent ooints out, is in the direction of abandoning armour and increasing armament and speed. Lord Armstrong's dictum is that gun-power will always beat side protection, and inadequate armour is only a death trap which confines shot and shell instead of it pas-sing through the ship with only a minimum of damage. ,