20
With regard to His Excellency's suggestion that the system hould include coramunication with the Head offices in Changhai, there are, to our minds, pertinent arguments against the adoption of this measure. In the first pirce it ia expensive. It is with regret that we are forced once more to raise this argument, but the Commander-in- Chief will appreciate that we are faced with the most intensive Chinese and Japanese competition which necessitates the most drastic economies in every possible direction.
Recognising, however, that if necessary economy
must be subordinated to safety, we would be more prepared to consider incurring this extra outley if we were convinced that it would ensure a greater measure of protection. Our feeling is that although, on the face of it, communication with the lead Offices might appear to be an additional safeguard to the inter-ship scheme in actual practice the tendency would be for the ships to feel that their part in the scheme was subordinated to that under the control of the Head office and, in moments of doubt, they would be apt to rely on the failure or otherwise of the office communication scheme to determine what action should
be taken. Af far as the office in concerned, anti-piracy signals from ships would ad
V
considerably to the already
heevy naso of routine telegrams which are necessitated
by the operation of fleets comprising a considerable
number of unite, and although it can be argued that unremitting
attention to these signals would admit of no failure,
we feel we would be very unwise to ignore the danger of
a signal being overlooked after a long and unbroken sequence of uninteresting routine telegraphy.
There is one further point to which we need hardly call attention and that is the importance of avoiding
delay
Page 20Page 21
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.