Dead Ships, Baby Ships

Clumping into his Ministry of Popular Enlightenment & Propaganda last week, waspish little Paul Joseph Goebbels announced the destruction of more British warships than Adolf Hitler possesses in his entire Navy: four battleships, two battle cruisers, one airplane carrier, four heavy cruisers, ten other cruisers, twelve destroyers, 13 submarines, 15 transport ships--all bagged since the Nazis set out to "protect" Norway.

Bulging with indignation, the British Government announced that His Majesty's losses since April 9 were three destroyers, one submarine and one trawler sunk; one destroyer beached, one cruiser and two destroyers damaged but able to make port; three cruisers and four destroyers slightly damaged, the Renown and Rodney dented by shell and bomb but their fighting efficiency unimpaired.

Hedging, the German News Agency, D. N. B., reduced the Goebbels claims to "57 successful attacks" on Britain's Navy, listing five cruisers, seven destroyers, 14 submarines and three transports as "sunk or set afire."

The British Admiralty retorted that 30 Nazi supply and transport ships had been sunk, scuttled or captured in the Scandinavian campaign, of which the French claimed two.

In full retreat, the German High Command contradicted both Goebbels and D. N. B., claimed officially to have "destroyed" one heavy cruiser, two light cruisers, eight destroyers, ten submarines, one transport. But Grand Admiral Erich Raeder asserted that "German warship .losses as alleged by the Allies are not in accordance with the facts. The reported sinking or beaching of the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, as well as the cruiser Liitzow, is completely invented. The same holds good for the alleged sinking of the Lloyd express steamship Bremen." (The sinking of the Bremen and the pocket battleship Liitzow was never officially claimed. The sinking of the Gneisenau was claimed by the Norwegians in the confusion of the first attack. The British merely claimed that the Scharnhorst was damaged in an engagement with the Renown.) By omission, Admiral Raeder tacitly confirmed the loss of the Emden and four other light cruisers, the destruction of twelve destroyers, the torpedoing of the Admiral Scheer, the damaging of the Scharnhorst and loss of 30 transport vessels.

Result of all this claiming, reclaiming and counter-claiming was to whittle down German and Allied naval losses in the northern campaign to something close to their probable size. The discrepancies that remain are probably due to the reports of air bombers, who, experience has shown, usually overestimate the damage they do. Meantime, at the very moment when German tall-talking was at its height, and when Little Caesar down in Rome was threatening to stop talking and shoot, the British were given a new reassurance. Somewhere off the coast of Britain, with their anti-aircraft guns loaded and alert destroyers screening them against possible submarines, the King George V, Prince of Wales, Duke of York, Jellicoe and Beatty were reported by Britain's foremost naval commentator Hector Bywater to be undergoing their trials before joining the fleet. If all five of these 35,000-ton ships have reached this stage of completion, the British have done some fast work, for on ordinary schedule most of them would not have been completed till 1941.

Known in naval slang as the "Jap Babies" because they were designed and calibred in anticipation of Japan's walkout on the 1936 London Naval Conference, Britain's new battleships are armed with ten 14-in. guns in one two-gun and two four-gun turrets. They shoot 1,560-lb. shells, claim to have greater range and hitting power than earlier British 15-inchers, to be only slightly inferior to foreign 16-inchers. Their speed is over 30 knots, seven more than that of the Nelson and Rodney, completed in 1927 and hitherto Britain's most modern capital ships. Of their displacement weight, 40% is in armor, which is 16 inches thick at the water line, and they are equipped with Degaussing girdles (insulation from magnetic mines). Elated that a direct bomb hit on the 6 1/4-in. deck armor of the Rodney produced only a dent, Admiralty circles pronounced the new ships "almost unsinkable" and Britain's answer to the Nazi air threat.

From France came news that the 35,000-ton Richelieu, mounting eight 15-in. guns, was also ready to enter service and that three sister ships were being rushed to completion. The commissioning of these new ships will eventually give the Allied Fleets 26 capital ships, a 3-to-1 superiority over the Italo-German Navies, an eight-ship advantage even if they are joined by the Japanese.

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