Another great factor in sea warfare today is the great reduction of naval bases held-by the Reich overseas, for Germany no longer possesses the sixteen halting-places that she had along the African and American coasts during the last war.
Britain, despite the loss of the battle ships Royal Oak and Courageous, still has a Navy comprising eleven battleships of between 29,000 and 33,000 tons, fifty cruisers, 160 destroyers, 200 minesweepers and a large number of, auxiliaries, Following the loss of the pocket-battleship Admiral Graf Spee and the warship Blucher, as well as a great proportion of her submarines, Germany's Navy has only five battieships of between 14,000 and 26,000 tons, and a correspondingly small number of smaller war vessels. She has only two battleships of 40,000 tons and five heavy cruisers under construction.
The magnetic mine that Germany launched on the world's helpless mercantile marine and which was the cause of most of the Allies' shipping losses, today is no longer an unbeatable enemy. British naval experts have discovered means to combat it and losses due to it are decreasing day by day.
Finally, the British naval experts concluded, British coasts from the Dover Strait to the Shetland Islands now are protected by a veritable underwater Maginot Line of mines and nets.—Havas,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.