CONFERENCE: Submersible Squabbles

For five weeks diplomats and statesmen have been making amiable sounds at the London Naval Conference. Last week, compliments over, the Admirals were heard.* Not one spoke directly. At a conference whose avowed purpose is world peace and the reduction of naval armaments, Admirals have had to take back seats, but the Admirals spoke to the Statesmen, and the Statesmen, Admiralty-primed, brought forward the technical demands, the technical objections of their various navies. The real battles of the conference began.

Submarines. Ever since 1898 when U. S. inventor John P. Holland followed the research of countless other experimenters and built the first practicable modern submarine, submarines and submarine-warfare have been an important international problem. Last week U. S. Secretary of State Henry Lewis Stimson, representing the country which owns the greatest fleet of effective submarines in commission (76), the country most opposed to their use, led the conference's half-hearted attempt to abolish them. Said he:

"The argument that the submarine is a purely defensive weapon seems to us difficult to reconcile with the offensive use which has been made of it at great distances from its home ports. The contention that it is a less costly weapon which affords a maximum of strategic value for a minimum of outlay must be considered in the light of the knowledge that the submarine is three or four times as costly, ton for ton, as the largest type of surface craft and approximately twice as costly as the largest ships of war. . . .

"The essential objection to the submarine is that it is a weapon particularly susceptible to abuse; that it is susceptible of use against merchant ships in a way that violates alike the laws of war and the dictates of humanity. . . .

"We cannot but feel that for this conference . . .to sanction an instrument of war, the abuses of which were directly responsible for calling the western world into the greatest European war of history, would be a contradiction of the purposes for which we have met."

Eager to second him was Albert Victor Alexander, longtime Baptist lay preacher and British First Lord of the Admiralty. Going over all the usual reasons for the abolition of submarines: humanity, their use as offensive weapons, cost, he added yet another:

"I imagine almost all of us have been in a submarine," said he in his best Baptist-meeting voice, "We admire its ingenuity and its wonderful technique but we are bound to observe that the lack of space, involving long periods of being unable to stand upright, with vitiated atmosphere very often when submerged, are hardly in keeping with the improved conditions for industrial workers which we now all of us consistently urge at Geneva.

. . . Think for a brief moment of the toll of submarine disasters even since the War.

"Gentlemen, seamen are not cowards. But is it not true to say that every time there is a submarine disaster the public conscience is shocked at our own flesh and blood being required by national policy . . . to face death in conditions in which they have no more chance than a rat in a trap? And there is not a power here today . . . which has not experienced such disasters."