Blockade and famine remained last week the only weapons with which Great Britain remotely threatened her overwhelming enemy, Germany. An official British statement surveyed the famine possibilities, found the chances good if the war and blockade could be made to last until winter. Meantime, blockade was in the balance. Its continuance and extension off Germany's long new Atlantic coastline depended primarily on the fate of the French Navy.
This week that fate was sealed, so far as France's new Government was concerned (see p. 20). But how many officers would obey orders issued under Axis duress and surrender their ships remained a major question. Bulk of the French Navy was believed to be in the Eastern Mediterranean. When the commandant of the naval base at Toulon announced that he and his men would fight on regardless of the armistices, that seemed a clue to the temper of French naval forces in the West. The French had been operating since September under direction of the British Admiralty. Presumably most of their ships were within Britain's power to hold and reman, if the personnel withdrew to save their relatives at home from punishment. If the ships were only kept out of Axis hands, even though not used by Britain, a slim balance of sea power would still remain with Britain, especially since the Royal Navy claimed to have again damaged the Scharnhorst at Trondheim. Stories conflicted about what ships the Germans had been able, to seize at Brest and St. Nazaire.
"We are ... told that the Italian Navy is coming to gain sea superiority in these waters. If that is seriously intended, I can only say we shall be delighted to offer Mussolini free, safeguarded passage through the Strait of Gibraltar. . . . There is general curiosity in the British Fleet to find out whether the Italians are up to the level they were in the last war or whether they have fallen off. . . ."
Thus, sarcastically, did Prime Minister Winston Churchill last week touch on the second decisive issue in Great Britain's war of blockade: keeping the Italian Navy bottled in the Mediterranean. Like a rude punctuation mark after Mr. Churchill's speech came a mine explosion 12,700 miles from Gibraltar, in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. Down went the Canadian-Australasian liner Niagara (13,415 tons) a few hours out of Auckland for Vancouver. All 203 crew and 146 passengers were rescued. This week an Italian submarine was reported sunk by British fire off the East Indies.
Counter-Blockade. Even with the French Navy still at its side, the Royal British Navy would be hard pressed to fight off counter-blockade (and starvation) by the Axis. For apart from any surface raiders it may be able to turn loose, the Italian Navy contains not less than 130 submarines, many of them minelayers. With new construction, plus a dozen seized in Denmark and several more last week in France, Germany may now have enough submarines to bring the Axis total up to 200. The total of Allied destroyers, including French, was not much more than 250, or a destroyer-submarine ratio of 1¼-to-1. The air arm now supplements destroyers and the convoy system makes their work easier, but during World War I a grand total of 781 Allied destroyers (in ratio more than 3-to-1) was none too many to ride herd on a total of 221 Austro-German submarines.