The Achievements of the Navy
Mr. Churchill's speech on the Navy Estimates was a survey of the whole field of operations which the Navy is engaged in night and day, and of its ceaseless enterprise in blockading the enemy and frustrating his attempts to stop our sea-borne trade. He showed that its handling of the U-boats had been even more successful than had been sup- posed, and that by. the end of the year the enemy's total strength in submarines, after allowing for new building, had probably been reduced from 70 to 45. The means of countering the magnetic mine has been discovered, and the stage has now been reached when the task is that of ex- panding the equipment for dealing with it. The net loss of merchant shipping in the first six months of war is less than one-half of the net loss in the single month of April in 1917. But two kinds of methods are being adopted to deal with losses, first, a great expansion of the fleet of naval vessels specially designed for destroying U-boats, and, secondly, a big drive in merchant ship-building to replace losses—a task for which the First Lord has made himself responsible at the request of the Cabinet. One interesting point in his speech was his defence of the great battleship, whose existence he justified on the ground that it was the only kind of vessel which could prevent the German heavy cruisers from coming out into the Atlantic and preying upon our shipping. Since most of our battleships are of the period of the last war, we shall need the five modern battle- ships which will shortly be ready, against which the enemy can bring only two. Mt. Churchill never omits to warn us of the possibilities of grave incidents, but he was confident of the Navy's preparedness for any emergency.
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