"ORGANISER OF VICTORY"

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23339, 6 May 1939, Page 11 (Supplement)

"ORGANISER OF VICTORY"

.DMIRAL LORD CHATFIELD, /\ the Minister in charge of re- £ X armament, comes into the British Cabinet with a whiff of Kitchener about him, writes Clair Price, London correspondent of The New York Times. -The resemblance is not a'personal one, but it is there nevertheless. In person, indeed, there is no likeness at all. Compared to the legendary Kitchener of the roaring years before the war, Lord Chatfield is a mere name without personality. Yet he has been as truly an "organiser of victory" in the navy'of 1939 as Kitchener was in the army of 1914, The navy is Eupposed to be the Silent Service, and Lord Chatfield has been successful in avoiding publicity.

To-day's gigantic programme of naval armament was drafted and carried into effect by Lord Chatfield, and its first fruits are already visible. The complete programme is timed to restore to Britain a well-balanced modern navy by 1941 and is the greatest project of its kind which has ever been carried out in peace time. Last September Lord ' Chatfield reached the age limit of 65 and went on the retired list with the rank of Admiral of the Fleet, the topmost rung of the naval ladder. From the. time of his nromotion to captain in 1909 down to the day he walked out of the Admiralty in 1938, a period of just under thirtj' years, he had never had a day's unemployment'—a service record which has no parallel in the British Navy. Physically and mentally, he is much younger than his years. Nevertheless, when he retix;ed last September he was ready for a nice long rest. Lord Chatfield is to-day an indispensable of imperial defence. Within a month he was sent to India as chairman of the Committee on Indian Defence; and while he was still in India Mr. Chamberlain brought him into the Cabinet at Homo as Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, a post' in which he has to co-ordinate the administration of the navy, the air force and the army. Now that he has returned from India and taken up his new duties, far and away the greatest problem which . confronts him is that of coordinating arms production for the three services. In effect he is now Minister for Rearmament—and at a time when the peace of Europe may

Powerful Navy

When he became First Sea Lord at the Admiralty in 1933 he found the British Navy far below the safety point in strength. Ever since the war it had undergone a steady decline, owing partly to the drastic surgery of dis- ;• armament treaties, partly to financial starvation. It was Lord Chatfield who " reversed tiie process. During his five ■years ajs First Sea Lord the naval estimates ' rose from £50,000,000 to - ? £127;000,000.

He First Restored to Supreme

NOW LORD CHATFIELD "CO-ORDINATES" ALL SERVICES

well depend on the speed with which Britain's massive and belated rearmament is hurried' to completion. Lord Chutfield's title of Co-ordination Minister is a cumbersome but deliberate title. The duties of administering the three fighting services and advising the Cabinet bn technical and military questions remain in the hands of the military chiefs. The Cabinet remains responsible for the broad lines of military policy and the military chiefs for carrying the policy into effect —in other words, for strategy Three Services This is true of all Governments, but in Britain's case policy and strategy—those indispensable but frequently fractious twins—have to roam a large part of the inhabited globe, for Britain may lie attacked either in the air over London or in the wide wastes of the Pacific off Singapore. The Co-ordination Minister is a member of the Cabinet, which formulates policy and is in daily contact with military. chiefs who are responsible for strategy, and it is his duty to see that policy and strategy do their roaming hand in hand. But nowadays strategy is pretty well settled. The one angle of military policy that matters to-day is rearmament. To expand and re-equip her armed forces Britain in 1937 adopted a five-year armament programme to cost £1,500,000,000; of this £1,173,000,000 has been spent and the expenditure curve is still rising steeply.

Lord Chatfield has none of the, flashing eye, the imperious tone and the overpowering personality which some of the great admirals have had. He is far from the popular idea of a sailor. There is no breezy brainlessness about Him, He has never raged through the navy with a pet reform. On the contrary, one of his outstanding achievements as First Lord was the healing of all the old sores which broke out during Lord Fisher's volcanic reign at the Admiralty and which still existed, though in a milder form, during the Beatty regime immediately after the war.

When ho was brought Home to become First Sea Lord in 1933, Britain had just been shocked by the rumpus known as the Invergordon mutiny; and no chief at the Admiralty lias over had a more whole-hearted support from the lleet.

well have been wrapped in. a cloak of invisibility. The same aversion to publicity has remained with him since 1933, when he himself became the Admiralty's chief. He has never swerved an inch from his appointed path to let. the limelight fall on himself. As First Sea Lord From Washington in 1921 to the Nyon conference in 1937, he has had a larger share of diplomacy than normally falls to the Sea Lords. When lie became First Sea Lord the London Naval "Treaty of 1930 still iiad three years to run. The Cabinet had accepted it on political grounds agaiust the Admiralty's advice, and by 1933 the inadequacy of the navy had weakened the whole European structure.

Before long that structure was sot rocking by" one blow after another—the rise of the new German Navy, the naval tension in the Mediterranean arising out of the conouest of Ethiopia and in the Far East the expansion of Japan.

Connecting Link One-eighth of Britain's national income is now going into ships, guns, aeroplanes and munitions, which are pouring from yards and factories all over the country. Again it is the Cabinet which lays down the broad lines of policy and the Co-ordina.tion Minister who gives effect to the policy. In rearmament lie is the man who links up Britain's heavy industrial resources and the separate needs of the three fighting servjees. Both in strategy and supply all this is ground Lord Chatfield learned to know well at the Admiralty. It is one of his duties as Co-ordination Minister to preside at meetings of the Committee of Defence at which the three Chiefs of Staff pool their information and their wants. (He was himself Chief of -Staff at the Admiralty.) He is thus >' to be regarded as an "organiser of victory" for all three services.

Ho bade farewell to the combined Atlantic and Mediterranean Fleets at Gibraltar in March of last year, and when the barge took him from the squat, steel-grey flagship Nelson out to tho P. and 0. liner Rajputana, which was waiting for him in the bay, the entire combined fleets manned ship and cheered him. He was the most popular man in the navy, but his popularity was never of the easy-come-easy-go kind. Very Like Jellicoe it was a slowly gained confidence built up by his great abilities and his even-handed justice. There is a strength of character and a serenity of tempcraniont about him, a quietude of voice and a steadiness of eye, which make him very like Jellicoe. Yet, during tho war, his lot was cast with Beatty and even now he is best known to many civilians by reason of Beatty's order to him at 4 o'clock on the afternoon of Jutland, when the Indefatigable had disappeared in a rending explosion and the Lion itself was half-blinded by the smoke of its burnt-out midship turret: "Chatfield, there seems something wrong with our bloody ships to-day. Steer two points nearer the enemy." When Beatty went to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord in 1919 to demobilise the swollen war navy, Chatfield went with him as Fourth Sea Lord. When Beatty went to the original Washington Naval Conference in 1921 as chief adviser to the British delegation, Chatfield was with him again. He was Beatty's right-hand man from 1913 to 1922; and, as far as the world outside the navy was concerned, he might as

Two tasks confronted him. One was to prepare a building programme which would underpin the shaken world with a new and modern British Navy. The other was to draft for the Cabinet a naval policy for the' crucial London conference of 1935, and men who know him say that that conference was the most difficult task in the whole of his work as First Sea Lord. It established him in the line of the great naval diplomats. As a senior naval delegate he presided over some of the conference committees, but his real work was not done in the limelight. It was done behind the scenes. Man of Many Parts If all this sounds pretty remote from the sea. the fact is that Lord Chatfield has held the greatest sea commands that the navy knows, those of the Atlantic and Mediterranean Fleets. He has served practically all his time in big ships—cruisers, battle cruisers and battleships; and in the new navy which his building programme is calling into existence the battle fleet remains the fullback of the navv.

The navy's Kitchener is thus a manysided little admiral, a-prime fighting seaman with the confidence and affection of the entire service, an able administrator and statesman, and in spite of his hnbitiial'quiet and reserve, a man of great forcefulness and an excellent speaker. But the point of outstanding interest about him, now that lie has been brought into the Cabinet as Co-ordina-tion Minister, is that he has an intimate acquaintance on the one hand with the. problems and the needs of the three fighting services, and on the other hand with industrialists and the industrial problems that affect arms production.