New Deutschland

A British destroyer, the Exmouth, struck a torpedo or a mine (probably far out in the North Sea) and sank with her entire complement, about 188 men. Thus in the war's 21st week Great Britain lost the fifth of the 185 destroyers she had when the blockade of Germany began last September. During the week German mines and torpedoes sank below-average tonnage: 8,111 Allied, 35,178 neutral. Meanwhile, the sea war did not change in character, but an announcement from Germany suggested how it may change:

The German High Command announced that the pocket battleship Deutschland, sinker of the British armed merchantman Rawalpindi (and little else), reached home "recently." The occasion for giving out this information was the announcement that her name would be taken from her and given to "a bigger ship." Her new name would be the Lutzow, taken from a new 10,000-ton cruiser not yet commissioned. Some hopeful Allied experts hoped the real reason for this name change was that the Deutschland had been sunk by the Salmon or one of the three British submarines lost in action last month.

Aside from the ill omen which sailormen believe follows changing a warship's name, interest centred on the "bigger" Deutschland, which must be one of the four 35,000-ton (perhaps 40,000) battleships which Germany is feverishly putting together. Two of these ships, launched last February and April, were christened Bismarck and Tirpitz. A third, on the ways at Kiel, must now be ready to take the water or already has.* Perhaps all three will be ready for action early next autumn. What will that do to the balance of sea power in World War II?

Leaving out the French Navy, which is needed in the south to keep an eye on Mussolini (who also has four new battleships coming up), the present ratio of German to British capital ships is two to 13 (since the torpedoing of Royal Ock and a Queen Elizabeth). These odds are not so hopeless for Germany as they sound; only three of the British ships, the battle cruisers Hood, Repulse and Renown, can match the 30 knots of Germany's battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The new German battleships will be equally fast, forming a homogeneous line of speedsters which will outweigh the British Fleet's fast division 5-to-3 until Britain can finish five new dreadnaughts of the King George V class--probably about mid-1941. By then the ratio will favor the British, but only 8-to-6, which, with German armor, guns and marksmanship taken into account, may almost be a standoff.

The new Deutschland and her sisters have an extraordinary beam of 118 ft.--about 25 ft. wider than the biggest liners afloat. This indicates enormous armor protection and underwater bulkheading. The German ships mount eight 15-inch guns to the new British ships' ten 14-inchers. Even if they are not, en masse, the British ships' equal, they will constitute a threat which may force the British to base their battlefleet, not at Belfast as at present, but again at Scapa Flow, where Nazi airplanes and submarines can snipe at them more handily.

In the last war, German submarines were ordered not to attack British warships, to save torpedoes for merchantmen. This time this strategy is reversed, with the object of putting such a strain on British naval construction, large and small, that completion of the George Vs may be retarded.

*One Berlin report last week said that a 45,000-ton German flagship has been laid down, to be named, as part of the Frederician revival, Friedrich der Grosse.

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