We must withhold till next week a review of Lord
Jellicoe's book, which was published on Wednesday, but some of the statements in the book are startling enough to be put on record without delay. Lord Jellicoe says that at the beginning of the war our margin of superiority in capital ships was small. In destroyers and sea-going submarines we were inferior to Germany. The bases of our Fleet were undefended, curd the repairing docks were all on the South Coast. We were deficient in armour-piercing shells., mines, wireless apparatus, search- lights, and in the case of many of these things the material was inferior in quality as well as scanty. In the first three months of the war five ships, including the flagship of the Grand Fleet, were more or less out of action owing to defects. We gather from Lord Jellicoe'e book that if the enemy had had sufficient enterprise his submarines might have entered our bases almost at any time in the early part of the war and sunk a large part of the Grand Fleet.
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