If, then, despite this evidence from the last war, the Japanese Government does decide to build bigger cruisers, we are faced with the practical question, must we build them toc?
British cruisers in the Far East would have two duties in case of a wer with Japah—to attack Japanese merchant vessels and to British vessels from Japanese attack 'A force which attacks an escorted convoy must be -a superior it is to succeed. Superiorit; achieved either by size or by numbers.
The lesson both of the old French wars and of the German attacks on our convoys in the North Sea is that it is numbers that count, The Germans made three attempts on our convoy route. The one by battle-cruisers never came off. The one by two light cruisers was successful. The most successful was one by four destroyer For defence of trade, numbers are even more important. Cruiser escorts.are required according te volume of trade to be convoy Even it we wefé to build a few 13,000-ton cruisers to match the Japanese 12,000-tonners, it would be long odds against their being with the particular convoy that the 12,000 Japanese ships attacked. ' Extra numbers of smaller ships might well afford better protection.
Whatever the argument may be for countering bigger with still bigger battleships, I hope that the Admiralty will ponder hard and long before they. commit themselves to the policy of size rather than numbers where cruisers are concerned.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.