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By FRKD T. JANEOn account of the name of the writer, the remarks in Sir Percy Scott’s letter are likely to arouse more interest than hundreds of precisely similar remarks which have been made ever since the torpedo was invented. The weak point of the argument is that no such claims have ever been put forward by either torpedo or aerial technical experts, men familiar with the fact that every arm has its limitations. The capital ship has been “ doomed ” many times by protected cruisers, which have theoretically swept it from the seas; but the moment that the test of, war has been applied the capital ship has reverted to its own, and grown larger and more powerful in the process.Now and again, of course, the capital ship has been eclipsed. Fifty years ago our splendid fleet of steam three-deckers disappeared before iron-plated frigates. But the iron-plated frigates immediately became capital ships larger than their predecessors. The germ idea of the modern Dreadnought was ‘Ericsson’s Monitor, conceived as a little thing intended to knock out big ships with a couple* iL_____ ♦__a__jsituation would recur to-moirow in a some-* k — — *Ericsson’s Monitor eventually grew into the super-Dreadnougbt of to-day, simply because the Monitors were too slow to catch other ships and too low in the water to see over the waves. The submarine to-day is in exactly the same predicament. The only remedy is increased size. The Dreadnought, by means of bulk and internal protection, has sought to combat the increasing menace of the torpedo. To the uninitiated the submarine, which can creep up unseen (unless detected and destroyed by aircraft), seems an infinitely greater menace than the fast destroyers, albeit nearly every naval man has long been of opinion that no destroyer will I ever be sunk by gunfire before she has die-1 charged her torpedoes.From the naval officer’s standpoint Sir PercyScott’s argument is somewhat puerile. It displays a strange inability to grasp the cardinal fact that the best defensive is a vigorousOffensive. In the Russo-Japanese war Russian torpedo craft made many attempts to destroy Admiral Togo’s battleships, but none of these attempts came to anything. The battleships were screened by torpedo craft, which, if attacked by something larger, always had theKoHlAcViins fn fn.11 hack linon Prppisftlv thewhat varied form.• * . - • » • • ,VESSELS OF THE FUTURE.
Newspaper Details
London Standard
London, Middlesex, GB
Sat, Jun 06, 1914
Page 11
Full Page
Clipped by
Rosenberg L.
TX, USA 18 May 2020
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