May 15, 1936
Bewilderment, not unmingled with dismay, has been caused by the announcement of the Government that, in order to comply with the Treaty of London, no fewer than seven 'C' class cruisers[1] are to be scrapped before the end of this year; that one of the Hawkins class is to be demilitarised at a cost of over ￡270,000; that the other three are to be reduced from 7.5-in. guns to 6-in. guns. We have been told by the Government that the Admiralty require a minimum of 70 cruisers to protect our food supply. We now have only 56, and the first step taken to raise them to 70 is to reduce them to 48, or even lower if the period when the Hawkins class are being reduced to smaller guns is taken into account. While, on the one hand, the taxpayer will have to pay an immense sum to construct new vessels, he is to watch these quite serviceable ships being destroyed or demilitarised. We are thus disarming and rearming at the same time. To this glaring and irrational climax have we been led by Mr. Ramsay MacDonald's 1931 Treaty of London.
One would have thought, considering that Japan has quitted the Treaty area and that our relations with the United States in naval matters are so good, it would have been possible at the recent Naval Conference to have invoked the Escalator clause by agreement upon all sides. No such steps were taken, and of course if the Government persist in their view that no excessive cruiser building has taken place by other Powers, we must keep our word. What an object lesson this is of the injury done to the Royal Navy and to the taxpayer by the Treaty of London!
It is not the only treaty from which we suffer. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 constituted a condonation of German treaty-breaking which to foreign eyes seemed largely to stultify our insistence on the sanctity of international agreements and our main position upon the League of Nations. By it we authorised Germany to build a submarine fleet equal to our own. By it we put it out of our power to retain in Material Reserve old ships, without at the same time authorising Germany to build one-third of their tonnage in new construction. Germany is now building a powerful navy as fast as possible. It will naturally take her several years to build even one-third of our total tonnage, after which we may be told that the weather has changed and that the limitation to one-third is no longer applicable.[2] The Hitler regime therefore gained at our expense considerable prestige, and German naval activities were not in the slightest degree impeded.
It is certain that Germany has developed, to a pitch unprecedented, the process of constructing submarines in components and assembling them with extraordinary rapidity, almost by drill. There is no means of checking the construction of these components. In the war German submarine building reached a point where a new U-boat was completed on the average every five days. There is no reason why a similar speed of construction, or even a greater speed, should not manifest itself on the rivers and in the arsenals of Germany in the near future.
The Admiralty are now resolved to rebuild the Battle Fleet. The inquiry instituted under the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence is not even to be completed, as it might have been in a few weeks, before this important decision is taken. The capacity of Germany in armour, great gun-plants and gun-mountings of the largest kind, is probably at the present moment greatly in excess of ours. No one can tell what use they will make of it in the future. The same kind of awkward surprises may be met with in the rebuilding of the German Navy, and especially the German U-boats, as have proved so disconcerting in the case of their air programme. It will be rejoined that, 'Treaty or no Treaty, nothing can stop them doing whatever they choose.' We ought, then, to have used every breach of Naval clauses of the Peace Treaty as another means of uniting together for purposes of mutual defence those nations which lie in fear of the immense Teutonic rearmament.
The latest of the naval agreements certainly seems to impose disabilities only on those Powers who are parties to it. It restricts in essential ways our freedom of design, the recovery of which is one of the most important aims of British naval policy. In the trammels of the treaties we have been forced to build at great expense unsuitable types of ships not based on any true conception of naval warfare. Both Great Britain and the United States have large numbers of these ten-thousand-ton Treaty cruisers, the bulk of which are thoroughly bad specimens of naval architecture. Japan or Germany, lying outside the new Treaty, enjoy perfect liberty and can easily call into being types which will decisively surpass the best vessels in our existing cruiser fleet. It is of the utmost consequence that the plainest assurances should be given to Parliament that we can escape from this position if at any time such steps are taken by States not parties to the new agreement. But even so it is very likely that a couple of years would elapse before any such danger became apparent. A stern chase is a long chase.
What a story of folly is unfolded in the efforts of the United States and Britain to tie each other down in naval matters! We have deferred out of goodwill to American wishes. The two great peaceful sea-Powers have hobbled each other, tied each other's hands, cramped each other's style, with the result that warlike Powers have gained enormous advantages against them both in the Far East and in Europe. Probably no conscious act of those who seek peace, and who have everything to lose by war, has brought war nearer and rendered aggression more possible than the naval limitations which the two English-speaking nations have imposed upon each other. There is no naval rivalry between us and the United States. No one in this island feels endangered by any additions which America may make to her Fleet. If she liked to build a bigger fleet than ours, most people would feel the safer. But we ought to be free to deal with our own special dangers, which are far more serious than those of the United States and far more near.
The only safe and sensible agreement between our two countries would be one enforcing not a maximum but a minimum of sea-power. And it may be that a day will come when such a principle will be accepted.
