It is against-the background of this assurance, and of the decisive rôle the pocket-battleships were designed to play in the German naval plan of campaign, that the failure of this new and formidable type assumes its full significance. The pocket-battleships have failed no less completely as raiders than as fighters. As raiders, though not wholly unsuccessful—the 'Graf Spee's' 50,000 tons do not compare too badly with the 70,000 apiece that fell to the 'Emden' and 'Karlsruhe' 25 years ago—they have completely failed to bring off that wholesale destruction of convoys which naval experts in both camps had hoped (or feared as the case may be) from them. Incomparably more important, however, is the fact that their vaunted superiority has been so signally disproved in last Wednesday's fight off the mouth of the La Plata. Not the fact that the 'Graf Spee' has been run to earth at last is the outstanding feature of that action, but that it has been successfully. vanquished. in an open and fair fight by three of those small cruisers so disdainfully dismissed by Admiral Meurer as utterly unable to stand up to it, Thus is shattered at one blow the fundamental assumption in the whole German plan of attack, the superiority of their chief raiders over practically all vessels which they were likely to meet behind the British "front line at sea."
The chief credit for this must un. doubtedly go to the remarkable pluck and skill of the British commander-in-chief and of his captains and to the marksmanship of the crews, which was great beyond all praise. Beyond that, however, the defeat of the 'Graf Spee' seems to have confirmed conspicuously certain defects criticized in Germany at the time of the Parliamentary struggle for the construction of the pocket-battleship class, and subsequently reaffirmed by rumours when the ships were first put into commission. The remarkably strong armament had been bought at the cost of such a wholly impermissible weakening of the protection, that, as was shown on this occasion, not even the strongest points—for example, the control-tower—were able to stand up to medium calibre (6-inch) gun-fire. Similiarly, the placing of the lighter guns behind open shields on the deck, pointed out to me as long ago as 1928 as a source of weakness by a German naval expert, apparently enabled a British plane to silence them during the action by machinegunning them from' above. Above all, one cannot help wondering how far the extensive use of electric welding, employed throughout the pocket-battleships instead of solid riveting, to economise weight may have contributed to the 'Graf Spee's' surprising lack of resisting power.
Beyond these defects in the pocket-battleship class itself two general facts seem to have emerged from the fight before Montevideo. One is the frankness than in an article om British escort vessels published about a year ago by Admiral Meurerin the "Militar Wochenblatt." Commenting on the fact that the British Admiralty was obviously preparing inst an attack upon British shipping not merely by submarine but by surface raiders as well, he pointed out that the forces so far available (15 large and 60 odd small cruisers) rightly to have followed the line that his main task was to disturb the Allied commerce, and not to fight naval battles. If his speed had WEDNESDAY,
JANUARY
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.