Steel Walls Of England

Southland Times, Issue 23308, 18 September 1937, Page 13

Steel Walls Of England

Britain Moves to Protect Herself

And the Peace of the World

By a Strong Defence

By

M. H. HALTON

LONDON. SSAT on a gun turret on that mighty battleship, H.M.S. Ramillies, and watched King George and Queen Elizabeth, standing on the bridge of the Royal yacht, Victoria and Albert, pass down the lines of the mightiest navy the world has ever seen, to review the ships of the fleet. It was at Spithead in the Solent, just outside Portsmouth harbour. The sun shone bright that day and far as the eye could see we could discern these blue-grey bastions of steel. It was the greatest display of sea power in history. Nothing has ever compared to it except on that day when Georve V reviewed his fleet only two years before the war. That fleet saved the very life of the British Empire in the war. The British Government has now announced that the navy is still the first line of Britain’s defence; that the battleship is still more important than the bombing aeroplane; and that Britain must still rule the waves, no matter what the cost.

So they are building over four hundred million pounds’- worth of new ships to add to the navy. The Washington naval agreements have passed into history without being renewed. There were over 170 British warships at the naval review this year as well as some 20 visiting battleships from foreign countries. Side by side just across the lane of water from us on the Ramillies were the Graf Spee, Germany’s crack pocket battleship, and the Maris, a Soviet ship which was built during the Russo-Japanese war. There was an American battle cruispr, looking strangely cumbersome and unwieldy. There was the Dunkerque, the great new French battleship with armour plating a foot thick over her gun turrets. Opposite from us on another lane was the Queen Elizabeth, the name of which thrilled us all when her 15inch guns were battering away at the Dardanelles during the war. And about 300 yards away was Britain’s Hood, the greatest battleship ever put to sea. After the Royal yacht had passed there came roaring down the skies 104 seaplanes belonging to the fleet air arm.

As they dipped in salute I wondered what modern anti-aircraft guns could do against them. When you ask that you are asking one of the most important questions in the world.

I climbed down from the turret covering one of Ramillies’s nine great 15inch guns and walked over to look at a deck gun which may one day answer that fateful question. To my surprise I was allowed to go close to it; for it was one of the new British multiplefire pompom guns which has eight barrels firing simultaneously a barrage of three-pound shells.

“How many shells a minute?” I asked. The young naval reserve officer who was my guide answered. And the figure would have been in this article if I hadn’t happened to ask the Admiralty for verification. They were positively aghast when I asked them if the figure I had was correct. “Where did you learn that?” they demanded. “On board H.M.S. Ramillies,” I replied. They then informed me that publication of the number of shots a- minute fired by the multiple-fire pompom would involve a breach of the Official Secrets Act. The number is almost beyond belief. The thing is a machine-gun, not a cannon—except that it fires threepound shells, not cartridges.

Could this gun, with other antiaircraft guns carried on battleships, plus the extra heavy armour plating which the world’s navies are going in for, ensure the supremacy of battleships against bombing aeroplanes in the next war? On that question the fate of the British Empire may be fairly said to depend.

The Admiralty says yes. The British Admiralty has spent no less than

£3,000,000 experimenting, somewhere in the North Sea, with battleships and bombers. What they learned there was enough to decide them to launch the biggest building programme in British naval history.

But in April this year they got a very severe shock. The Spanish battleship Espana, belonging to Franco’s navy, was sunk outside the harbour of Bilbao. The first news said it had been sunk by loyalist bombing aeroplanes, and the Basque Government confirmed the report. The Espana, they said, had been bombed for over half an. hour by Government aeroplanes. SHIVER OF DISMAY What can only be described as a shiver of dismay ran through England at that news. The Admiralty refused to say anything about it for over a week. Then, with a tremendous sigh of relief, they announced that according to the best information they could get, the Espana was sunk by a mine, I asked the Admiralty if they had proof of this. “Well,” they told me, “our information comes from British warships which weren’t far away at the time. We rely implicitly on our naval intelligence.”

“In any case,” said the Admiralty to me, “the Espana settle the battleship versus bomb controversy even if she had been sunk by aeroplanes. She was an ancient, out-of-date ship. She didn’t even have steel protection on her decks. She didn’t even have ordinary anti-aircraft guns, let alone multiple-fire guns. . . . Imagine for yourself what one of our ships could do against aircraft with these guns that fire three-pound shells with the

speed and accuracy of machine-guns!” They told me then about the expansion taking place in the British navy today. The Government has decided to spend £1,500,000,000 on arming Britain to the teeth in the next five years; and more than half of this sum will go to the fleet. They can build a bombing aeroplane for £lO,OOO. But it takes the colossal sum of £10,000.000 to build a ship.

That is actually the amount that Britain is spending on each of five new battleships now being built. Two of them, the King George V and the Prince of Wales, were laid down in the dockyards a year ago. The other three, the Anson, the Beatty and the Jellicoe, were laid down on January 1 this year. The King George V and the Prince of Wales will be completed a year from now. The total cost of each ship will probably prove to be nearer 12 than 10 million pounds, owing to the sharp increase in the cost of materials. A battleship started today would cost 40 per cent, more to complete than one started three years ago.

Britain has six aircraft carriers. She is building five more at a cost of £8,000,000 each. She now has 35 cruisers'and is building 21 more. She has 80 destroyers; the keels have been laid of 47 new ones. She has 38 submarines and is building another 17. She is building nearly 200 armoured trawlers, coastal sloops, minesweepers, convoy escorts, gunboats and other small craft. In addition, many of the existing battleships and cruisers have been reconditioned and in some cases partially rebuilt during the last ten years.

The five new battleships will each be

35,000 tons. The Hood is over 42,000 tons. “It is doubtful if another battleship as big as the Hood will ever be built again,” said the Admiralty. “The Hood was built to incorporate lessons learned at Jutland—high speed and the biggest guns. She has nine 16-inch guns and can do over 31 knots. “But the bombing aeroplane has altered design. Today we must have battleships which are adequately armoured against both torpedoes and aircraft. We can’t mount 16-inch guns in a 35,000-ton shell without sacrificing armour-plate protection. So the five new ships will have 14-inch guns, the heaviest protective armour in the world, and a speed of 30 knots at least.” Imagine a 35,000-ton fortress of steel that can move through the seas at over 30 knots an hour and fire shells that weigh a ton as she goes!

I thought when I was on board the Ramillies what a shattering experience it must be to be on a great battleship during a modern naval battle. There was a time during the Spithead naval review when the Royal yacht was acknowledged by a salute of scores of guns firing over a period of three minutes. The noise seemed to fill the whole world; yet the guns used for firing salutes are mere pop-guns in comparison to the 14-inchers. THE OLD AND THE NEW In Portsmouth Harbour lies the old Victory on which Nelson was killed at Trafalgar. The difference between the Victory and modern battleships is fantastic. The Victory looks like a large, square, curiously-carved frame house full of portholes—with a gun peering out of each porthole. She carried 80

guns! You wonder how that frail shell held them all. . . . Then you pass across the harbour to a ship like the Ramillies, a leviathan of blue steel, 50 times as heavy as the Victory, but with only six 15-inch guns and eight 8-inch guns. One shell from one of her 8-inch guns would blow the Victory to splinters. In fact, her anti-aircraft pompom would blow the Victory to pieces in five minutes.

Well, these are great days for the navy. The ship-building yards at Glasgow and Furness, at Birkenhead and Tyneside and Chatham are active as never before. The Admiralty, which already has 115,000 men on its lists, is taking on new recruits at the rate of a thousand a month. “Lack of recruits?” said the Admiralty. “There is no lack of recruits. The navy appeals to the young men of this country as much as it ever did. But we simply can’t get all the trained artisans we want, so big is the demand. We have had to establish new schools of our own to train new mechanics and artisans for the fleet.”

It is obvious that tens of thousands of the young men of this country still prefer adventure and the sea to making money. Wages in the navy, as in the armed forces of any country except Russia, are extremely low. “Why is it,” I asked, “that a nation’s fighting men are paid less than any other workers in the community?” “We often wonder that ourselves,” laughed the Admiralty. “You would think their pay would be doubled in wartime, at any rate.” •

I asked about the expansion of the air arm of the fleet. “We’re expanding like the devil,” said the Admiralty. “We have 272 first-line aircraft and intend to have more than twice as many. All the new battleships will carry a catapult and three aeroplanes of then- own.”

The steel riveters and hammers are clanging at Chatham and unemployed men are trooping back to work on the Clyde. There’s gaiety and cocked hats and gold braid at Portsmouth again. The money that is going into one battleship would, if given to medical research, conquer some of the plagues of mankind. But there’s a new stir and bustle round the coasts of this ancient kingdom as out of the dockyards come the mighty new leviathans of war.