THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1939 SEA AND AIR POWER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23486, 25 October 1939, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1939 SEA AND AIR POWER

Supremacy on the seas and in the skies is likely to prove the determining factor in the war that has been forced on" the world by Hitlerism. So much is apparent even at this early stage, with military operations confined to a narrow strip of territory between two fortified lines, both seemingly impregnable. Britain and France, with the resources of empires behind them and the seas virtually t under their command, can afford to play a waiting game; the Nazi leaders, fully aware of Germany's dependence on outside sources of supply for essential commodities, must succeed with a lightning blow or else resign themselves to a remorseless economic pressure culminating in their inevitable defeat. "There is no longer an island," taged Hitler in one of his recent speeches, obviously designed to weaken the British people in their sense of insular security. Unfortunately for him, the island that is Britain still exists and proof is not lacking of the determination and vigour with which the British people are prepared to defend their ocean frontiers. The menace of air attack loses mo'st of its capacity to intimidate when the people who are to be attacked are an island race, unchallenged and unchallengeable in their maritime power. All this must have been clear to Hitler from ths very outset, but, like many would-be conquerors before, him, he has fallen into the error of believing that mastery of the seas can be easily won. He believed—perhaps he still believes —that an unprecedented use of the air arm can destroy British maritime supremacy, but he has overlooked the fact that Germany's air squadrons must first prove themselves invincible in their own sphere. Nazi strategy for the overthrow of British sea power has always been fairly obvious. The German leaders have realised that lack of economic self-sufficiency makes their country particularly susceptible to the offensive weapon of blockade. But Germany's weakness is also the weakness of Great Britain. It is clear for all the world to see that the island kingdom overlooking Europe depends largely on overseas supplies both of industrial raw materials and foodstuffs. That has been the central point of Nazi strategy—strike a telling blow at Britain's sea communications and Britain herself will be starved into submission! And so the rearmament of the Third Reich has proceeded. Huge armies, formidably equipped and assiduously trained, have been raised to establish German domination on the Continent; a highly specialised navy and a powerful air force have been designed as the means of bringing about the overthrow of Great Britain. Right from the start, however, the time factor has been against Hitler. For that I reason he has been unable to build i a fleet capable of engaging the Royal Navy in open conflict. Thus he has had to plan for a highly specialised form of maritime offensive and, with the lessons of the last war still comparatively fresh in memory, it is not surprising that he should have built up the new German Navy primarily for the task of commerce raiding. His objective all along has been a combination of sea and air attack to undermine Britain's naval strength. His battleships, "pocket battleships" and cruisers have all been built with' heavy armament and wide cruising range to enable them to destroy British convoys on the high seas, thus facilitating submarine attacks on merchant shipping, while it has always been his fond hope that the German Air Force could succeed in harrying the British Navy to such an extent that the task of commerce protection would be beyond its powers.

As a plan on paper, all this was very plausible, but so far it has not worked out in practice. This can be attributed to a number of reasons. In the first place, Germany has failed to realise that Britain's naval strength and latterly her air strength have* been developed primarily for defensive purposes and developed so meticulously that a specialised form of offensive cannot hope to succeed! A blow at Britain's maritime supremacy could only be struck successfully by an overwhelming defeat of the British Navy at sea, and that is an enterprise which the German Navy dare not-under-take. Secondly, and arising in part out of this prior argument, commerce raiding against convoyed merchantmen can only be entrusted to warships that are faster and more powerful than the vessels escorting the convoys. Germany has such vessels in limited numbers, but all of them, with the hypothetical exception of the "pocket battleship" Admiral Scheer, are effectively bottled up inside the Kiel Canal, with an immeasurably superior force standing guard in the North Sea. An occasional raider may perhaps slip through the British cordon, but, if she does so, she is certain to be relentlessly hunted until she is fo\ind and destroyed. Finally, there is the indirect factor of a diplomacy which has overreached itself. Earlier this year it seemed that, in the event of war, ships of the Royal Navy would be engaged in a life and death struggle not only in the North Sea and the Atlantic, but also in the Mediterranean and the Far East, while there was the further prospect that German warships would be operating from bases on the Spanish coast. All those dangers, as far as Britain was concerned, were removed, at least temporarily, when von Hibbentrop negotiated his Moscow pact. Now Germany is left with no naval allies and no outside naval bases in her hopeless struggle against the greatest naval Power in the world.