THURSDAY, MAY 26, 1904. TWO TERRORS OF NAVAL WAR

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 21, 26 May 1904, Page 17

THURSDAY, MAY 26, 1904. TWO TERRORS OF NAVAL WAR

I do not know how it may fare with Port J^J^yJJ/f Arthur if it should ever be subjected to jAW/Wj/^ high -angle fire from the powerful siege iaJJI( <**>-^j* ftins of to-day. The comparatne blood- <^ 'wh lct>bues.s of the siege of Pans perhaps iz:a\e nsc *° * llc cn^ it takes a ton of fc-Sv jJv^j-k lead to kill a man in war. It really took about two hundied weight of good Geiman metal for every person struck in Paiis during the siege' At Fort Vanvres the besiegers volleyed off four and a quarter tons of lead for every defender that they sent to t;he world beyond the veil of death. The full

possibilities of war are never realised cm land by the followers of 4 That noble trade That demi-gods and heroes made— Slaughter, and knocking on the head.'

We must seek it among the men that go down to the sea in ships of war. According to Bloch, the nerves of modern soldiers are weaker than those of the hardened veterans of the olden time, and this defect is aggravated by the sy»stem of short service and the increased dangers of war The nerves of men in war-ships must be in something like a continuous state of high tension when traversing seas that, like those which wash the shores around Port Arthur, shelter the two great anarchists of naval conflict— the torpedo and the sunken mine. Evidence of the swift and fearsome power of destructivcness of these engines of war is amply furnished by the battered Russian and Japanese fighting craft that lie sheer hulks with their keels in the mud of Korea Bay.

The day seems still far-ofi when (as Admiral Werner predicts) aluminium will be so plentiful and cheap that war-slups will be built of that wondrooisly light metal, and vvhen it will form a casing of armor against which the impact of exploding mines and torpedoes will be no more than the rattling of stones against a fortress wall. But the advent of aluminium fighting ships arould be by no means likely to put an end to the war of wits between the iron-master and the chemist— between the manufacturer of armor and the inventor of ever newer and more racking explosive combinations. Naval constructors long fancied that they had baffled torpedo attack when they invented the cumbrous thing called a torpedo-net. With their nets down o' nights they lay them down in peace to sleep, rocked in the cradle of the deep, till one fine day_the flying submarine death sharpened its nose and cut through the frail obstacle as a rapier would through a lady's gossamer veil. They felt that they could sail a battle-ship worth £1,500,000 over a sunken mine, so long as her water-tight compartments were in working order and her boilers and engines were protected above and below water by special armor, and comfortably packed round about with sheltering layers of coal. But the fate of the ' Petropavlosk ' and the ' Hatsuse ' has proved that an emphatic modern mine, well and truly laid, is no respecter of water-tight doors or protected boiler-plates, and that it can send the biggest war-vessel afloat to the bottom, in ten minutes;, with its full complement of twice four hundred men What with sunken mines, swarms of swift torpedoers, and submarines, the prospect of big armor-dads in iuture wars is by no means a cheerful one And by reason of its large crew and enormous cost, the destruction of a single battle-ship— so easily accomplished— is a serious blow to any nation., The present wai. may, perhaps, strengthen the hands of those specialists who advocate the construction of swift, light cruUers with powerful armaments, and of torpedo boats that cleave through the water, loaded with sudden death, at the rate of the Sydney express.

Butler says of the ' English Merlin ' that

' Of warlike engines he was author, Devised for quick despatch of slaughter.'

But the duels of nations, as of French editors, js a matter of thrust and parry. In naval warfare, every new warlike engine ' devised for quick despatch of slaughter ' was met by the invention of fresh means of defence. From the days of the ' Monitor ' till now there has been an unbroken tug-oT-war between the thrust of projectile and the parry of armor. When Great Britain placed upon the seas a formidable navy armed with heavy guns afid clad in a thiok flrierce-coat of steel, some of her rivals cudgelled their brains to devise means of tickling the weak spots of wax-ships with heavy inineexplosions. The result was 'the invention of a crude

torpe4o that was, we think, first used in the RussoTur4ush war of 1877. One of its chief characteristics was the serene impartiality with which it blew friends as well as foes into eternity. It was rigged on the end of a twenty-foot pole, placed on a dark night in a boat constructed in such a way that its approach would not be noticed, held seven feet under water beneath the iron sides of a hostile vessel, and then fired by the pressure of an electric button. This rude weapon was used nine times by the Russians during the war. It sent one Turkish iron-clad and two steamers to the bottom and damaged three other battle-ships. Russian and TurKish torpedoes also did, during the same war, Lome minor and promiscuous damage to the fleet of the Czar. With the aid of a similar out-rigger torpedo, the French, in the Tonkin war of 1885, sank a Chinese frigate of 3500 tons. By, the time the Chilian civil war broke out in 1891, the torpedo was able to • walk the water like a thing of life,' driven by its own self-contained motive power. One morning the two Government gunboats 1 Lynch ' and ' Conidell ' had ' a little affair of honor ' with the Congressionalist iron-clad, the ' Blanco Kncalada'.' 'Twas all in Caldera Bay. Several Whitehead torpedoes were fired at the ' Blanco ' at a range of little more than a hundred yards. Each carried sixty pounds of gun-cotton— mere Tom-Thumb affairs compared with the business-like wreckers filled with two hundred pounds of high explosives that are wreaking destruction at long range in the Korean Sea. Aflter seven minutes' fighting one of the Wtiiteheads struck the ' Blanco ' amidships, tore a hole in its ribs o.bout twenty feet by twelve— big enough for a loaded omnibus to pass through — and sent it and a hundred and twenty human lives to the bottom in nine minutes. Two years later, during the revolt of the Brazilian navy, tte armor-clad turret-ship ' Aquidaban ' was sent head foremost to the floor of the sea by the bang of a Whiteheaid torpedo. The ' Chen Yuen,' a Chinese battle-ship, was, we believe, the last victim of the torpedo until the dance of death began around Port Arthur. All manner of war-vessels, as well as torpedoers, are armed with this deadly engine of death. And to this moment there is no effective defence against its secret approach arid its giant blow. For the time, the chemist scores easily over the iron-master in naval war.