"Tactically Logical Cruiser"

Experts had written off the heavily armed, undersized "pocket battleship" after the Graf Spee was bagged by cruisers in 1939. Therefore there was considerable grousing in Washington last week when the high-domed United States Naval Institute Proceedings came out with an article advocating a 10,000-ton cruiser of the Brooklyn class which would be armed, not with the 11-in. guns of a Graf Spee, but with the 14-in. weapons of a full-fledged battleship.

The Tactically Logical Cruiser for Modern War was what Author Peter Marsh Stanford called his unorthodox proposal. Besides four 14-in. guns it would carry, as anti-aircraft protection, twenty-four 5-in. and eighteen 40-mm. guns, four multiple pom-poms plus machine guns, six planes with two catapults on the quarterdeck and sixteen 21-in. torpedo tubes. Such a mighty cruiser, said Stanford, would be necessarily shorter, fatter and slower than the Brooklyn, but anyway "no ship can ever be designed fast enough to run away from enemy aircraft."

Said Peter Stanford of his cruiser: "She would outfight the standard cruiser of today in every way, and would restore to the fleet the logical balance of a ship to fulfill a logical duty that has been lacking."

Bureau of Ships men were "amazed at the Institute," snorted: "Impossible!" and "Where would he put all the ammunition?"

Peter Marsh Stanford is no ordinary naval expert. He has been a seadog since the age of two, knows naval history backward and forward, is no mean amateur expert. He has not yet been on a ship bigger than a destroyer, but he knows the sea, "which is more important." A third-year student at Manhattan's progressive Lincoln School, he will be 16 years old come January 16.

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