It used to be said that an army marched on its stomach. That's still true, of course. An army has got to be fed if it is to fight and fed well, too, if it is to fight successfully. This is why a country's consumption of food, specially of things like meat, always goes up when war breaks out, But armies need very much more nowadays than just food. Modern fighting forces cannot keep going for a single day without enormous supplies of rifles, machine-guns, artillery, tanks, shells, ammunition, ships, aircraft and so on. That's why the really crucial things in war today are raw materials things like coal, iron, copper, oil and petrol—things that can be made into weapons and machines or fed to lorries and aeroplanes and tanks. It's easy to see from this how important control of the seas arid freedom, to trade abroad are in wartime—simply because no country produces all the strategic raw materials it wants at home. In Britain the only vital raw material we have enough of is coal. We should be in a very bad way if we couldn't use our ships to bring in the materials we must have. The point is that we can—because of the British Navy.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.