ONLY BEGINNING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 September 1939, Page 6

ONLY BEGINNING

BRITISH ATTACK ON U BOATS

IMPRESSIVE STATEMENT BY FIRST LORD.

FALL IN SHIPPING LOSSES,

(British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, September 25. A great impression was made in the House of Commons by a statement by Mr Winston Churchill in which he disclosed an accumulation of measures being taken to meet the U-boat menace and a significant decline in the success attending German efforts. Both the Opposition leaders, Mr C. R. Attlee and Sir Archibald Sinclair) welcomed the First Lord’s encouraging survey, which was the more telling for his insistence on the need for caution in ,over-sanguine deductions from the figures he gave the House, of which the most notable was a fall of British shipping losses due to enemy action from 65,000 tons in the first seven days of the war to 9,000 tons in the last six days. The war, he reminded the House, was full of unpleasant surprises and they must expect further losses. But members seized upon the candid disclosure of great improvements in methods of submarine’ hunting since the last war, so that work which required fifteen or twenty destroyers then could now be done by two, and his affirmation that the British attack on the Üboats was only beginning. By the end of October the Navy would have three times the hunting force which was op’crating at the outbreak of war. “The U-boats now seem to prefer neutrals,” Mr Churchill said. He explained that when the Courageous turned into the wind at dusk, to enable aircraft to land on her deck, by a ten to one chance the vessel was attacked by a U-boat on an unpredictable course.

“One U-boat commander who sent me a personal message is now in our hands,” Mr Churchill stated. “I feel at the end of three weeks’ warfare, that the Admiralty’s pre-war judgment does not need revision. It will take a long time to starve us out.” .A third of the damage in the last war was done by twenty-five experienced U-boat commanders,” the First Lord observed. “It will be easier for Germany to build more boats than to replace skilled officers and crews now captured or destroyed.”