Mr. Speers's Navy

A friend and confidant of Big-Navy men in Washington is the New York Times's Correspondent Leland C. ("Lem") Speers. One morning last week the Times headlined a dispatch from Mr. Speers: VAST SECRET FLEET IN JA PAN REPORTED. The story reported what has long been on public record: that Japan is building three to four big battleships, somewhere between 7,000 and 12,000 tons heavier than the biggest (33,400 tons) in the U. S. Navy. The news in Lem Speers's yarn was that Japan had speeded up construction of its giants, that "the Japanese battleship program may include eight and possibly twelve such craft." Trusting the British to police the Atlantic for them, the U. S. Navy plans and builds to be ready for Japan in the Pacific. Since Japan, with eight to twelve new 45,000 tonners added to its present ten modern battleships, could beat the U. S. Navy's 14, Lem Speers's story was a shock. Some wiseacres tried to explain it all on the grounds that: 1) the U. S. Senate was about to take up a $963,799,478 Naval Appropriation Bill, a further authorization for $655,000,000 in future appropriations; 2) that Mr. Speers's story did Navy friends' cause no harm in Congress. Chief of Naval Operations Harold R. Stark knocked this comforting belief to smithereens. He solemnly announced that the U. S. has "practically no reliable information" about secretive Japan's naval program, then informed a Senate committee that Japan reportedly is building not four but eight new battleships. His moral: the U. S. had best hurry along its eight battleships now under construction, including two 45,000 tonners, boost pending naval appropriations.

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