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THE CHINA MAIL, JUNE 29, 1989
TO
MYSTERY SHIPS
GUARD THE FLEET
High Speed Vessels Of New Design
Secret Detector Dooms Undersea
Enemy
Twenty ships of an entirely new and secret de- sign have been ordered by the Admiralty to be built at high speed to strengthen our anti-submarine de- fences. Delivery to the Navy will begin next May.
The vessels, of 900 tons displacement, very fast and handy, are to be put in hand in ten yards this month. Never before has so big a flotilla been -ordered at one time.
It is planned to make the Fleet virtually im- pregnable against underwater craft.
Already under construction are considerable distance. thirty-six destroyers, the prime | TESTED IN MEDITERRANEAN hunters of submarines, and the Detectors indicate to within most important element in the fit-a few yards their exact point of ori- tings of all these ships will be de- gin. The gear was used effectively tector gear.
at the time of the 1935 crisis in the Mediterranean, when Italian sub- marines were located as they were patrolling off Malta, and forced to the surface by destroyers.
No other navy has this device: no other navy knows exactly how it
works.
A code word is used by naval -men in all references to this inven- tion, and no one outside the service is allowed to know anything about its construction.
The submarine in future will be completely useless against ships of the fightining fleet-It did not do much damage to them in the last It was evolved by the Anti-Sub-war-and- convoys of freighters marine School at Portland, one of protected by the new escort vessels the most jealously guarded shore are not likely to lose one ship in a stations of the Navy.
hundred.
Anti-submarine specialists work- ing there have been excused the normal periods of general service every officer is expected to do.
Some of them have been allowed to concentrate on anti-submarine gear and tactics for more than ten years without a break.
In one or two cases men have been retained at the school even after they had been compulsorily retired from the active list on reaching the age limit.
DROP BARRAGE
Detection is followed by attack. Here depth charges remain the most effective weapon. The hunting ships drop a barrage of them all round the known position of the enemy. Every destroyer in war-time would carry between forty and fifty-the smaller vessels between twenty and thirty.
There is 800lbs of explosive in EXACT POINT
the charge, and it can be detonat- Submarine detection is done by ed at any prearranged depth. The sound. No one has yet produced a barrage therefore, would burat noiseless engine, and when a boat ahead and astern, above and below ia moving submerged, even at her the submarine, so that she could slowest speed, the noises inside her not successfully dive out of its are carried through the water to a range.
Churchill Warning: Tientsin A Trap
London, To-day. Mr. Winston Churchill brought a speech he deli- vered yesterday in London, in which he warn- ed his listeners that tension in Europe would become most severe in the next three months, to a close with a pointed reference to the situa- tion at Tientsin.
Mr. Churchill said: "I see that Dr. Goebbels, and his Italian counter-part, Signor Gayda, have been jeering us because we have not gone to war with Japan on account of the gross insults to which Englishmen and New Zealanders have been subjected in Tientsin.
"I
am glad the Government has not been provoked
into taking their eye off the target. C
“These studied indults and alliance with the Soviet-Reuter. affronts from the Japanese-a na-
NO RETREAT tion hitherto renowned for
their Mr. Churchill (says British good manners may well have been Wireless) was speaking at the City a trap to lure us away from the Carlton Club, and stressed the seas where any major trouble which necessity of bringing home to Ger- may arise will be decided.
man leaders the unity of the nation behind the policy of meeting the use of force in Europe by force, and, as he expressed it, the impos- sibility of Britain now of retreat from that attitude.
JAPAN'S EBBING STRENGTH "We ought not to send our Fleet to the Far East until we are sure of our position in the Mediter ranern. -
He took a serous view of the Then probably i it will not be situation which faced Europe in necessary, because once our posí- the next three months simply be- tion is sure in the Mediterranean, I cause he doubted If even now the think you will find the Japanese position was properly understood will recover their old long-famed in Germany. courtesy.
DECISIVE EVENT
"I do not believe that Japan, An attack on Poland would be deeply entangled in China nay, a decisive and an irrevocable event. bleeding from every pore in China An act of violence against the
her strength ebbing away in a Polish Republic, whether organis- wrongful and impossible task and ed from within Danzig or from with the whole weight of Russia without, could not fail to raise an upon her in North China, will wish issue of world importance. to make war upon the British Et-The Foreign Secretary had told pire until she sees how matters go the nation that force in such an in Europe.
revent would be met by force, and GOVERNMENTS PATIENCE
he (Mr. Churchill) thought it was "Therefore we should approve a fact the significance of which both the patience and the firmness ought to be pondered abroad, that of the Government towards the not one single voice had been vexatious problems in the Far East." raised In Britain to complain or to
Mr. Churchill concluded with an- contradict Lord Halifax's declara other appeal for conclusion of an tion of where. Britain stood..
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