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London, Nov. 8.
The British Navy was quite capable of taking on the whole of the German fleet with the vessels the Germans claimed to have sunk since the beginning of the war,'stated Mr. Winston Churchill, First'Lord of the Admiralty, in a statement on the progress of the war at sea made in the House of Commons this evening. A similar statement was made in the Hovse of Lords by the Minister for Ca-ordination of Defence, Lord P: Chatfield.
Adding force to his comments on the absurdity of the German claims of British losses, Mr, Churchill declared that H.MS. Ark Royal, the aircraft carrier which the Germans claim to have sunk several weeks ago during an air battle in the North Ses, recently returned to port escorting a German vessel which it had captured.
Members of the House of Commons eagerly awaited Mr, Chur-report on the sinking of HM. 'Royal Oak in Scapa Flow. The defences of Scapa Flow, the First Lord explained, were' primarily _two-fold—physical, consisiing of booms, barrages, blockshtps, eic; and By ' patrolling craft, At) the time of the sinking of the Royal Oak the physical defences had not been completed. In fact, the last blockship needed to complete the defence arrived at Scapa Flow the day after the disaster. The harbour was now, however, considered safe from any further U-Boat attacks, While emphasizing that the Admiralty contemplated no judicial inquiry to fix the responsibility for the loss of the Royal Oak, Mr, Churchill said that there had been a too strong sense of security in Scape Flow, as an outcome of the experiences during the last war, This was so much the case that the officers and ren in the Royal Orkje did not at first believe that they had been torpedoed but attributed the first explosion to something internal. It was only after the second salvo of torpedoes that they realized that they had been attacked. Mr. Churchill concluded by paying a tribute to the 900 gallant officers and men who lost their lives in' the disaster, and expressed regret over the sinking of a ship which, though old, possessed un—doubted military value. Every joint in the defence of the fleet had since been strengthened, he declared.
In describing the progress made in the war at sea, Mr. Churchill pointed cut that this was the only sphere in which war was being waged on a full scale. The loss of life in the Royal Navy, he said, had been more than in all the other branches of the Allied services combined. He revealed for the first time that a British submarine, H.M.8. Oxley, had been lost through an accidental explosion some time ago, in circumstances which made it inadvisable to publish the loss at the time.
Mastery over U-Boats "The British are particularly reluctant to interfere in other people's business provided always that other people do not seek to interfere in theirs. But when a challenge in the sphere of international relations is sharpened as today in Germany by the denial to men and women of elementary human rights, that challenge is at once extended to something instinctive and profound in the universal conscience of mankind We are, therefore, fighting to maintain the rule of law and the quality of mercy in dealings between man and man and in the great society of civilized states."
Lord Halifax said they foresaw that a time might well come when they would have to fight "for those saving graces of our commonwealth."
The Foreign Secretary recalled his speech at Chatham House, and said that his hope then that war might be honourably averted was disappointed.
Faced with evil things, there were only two courses open. You must either defy or you must acquiesce. And acquiescence is dishonour. I can feel no doubt in my own conscience that only with supreme dishonour could we in fact have averted war. Now, supreme dishonour as well as supreme folly lie with the aggressor. The supreme dishonour of the German Government is laid open to the world.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.