Battling over battleships and sweating over statistics today is the Senate Naval Affairs Committee in Washington. Whatever else the bicker and banter proves, it is apparent that the ancient American dream of a-navy-second-to-none is to be given dollars-and-cents substance. Justification for the proposed huge naval expenditures is the straw-man of German and Japanese aggression.

Any British tar will tell you that the Nazis have their hands full now, and for a long time to come. English babies are fed on a mixture of milk, pap, and Britannia-rules-the-waves; and the grown babies are not likely to surrender the guiding principle of their life without a struggle. The Empire will fight to the last ship, and with her fleet will go to Davy Jones many a German vessel as well. One may then reasonably wonder how dangerous to American liberty an enervated and depleted Nazi navy will prove, even assuming English defeat.

Then there is the threat from Japan, the traditional bugaboo of the American navy. There are rumors that the Japanese are taking time off from the China incident to build four, eight or even twelve super-battleships, and suggestions that we should do the same and keep up with the Joneses. But the Navy admits it has "no definite information" about Japan's building program, and our fleet still has a marked superiority over Nippon's. So long as we maintain that edge, and so long as we hang on to our iron-clad island defense line in the Pacific, which centers on Oahu, "the most formidable maritime fortress and naval outpost in the world," we are safe from the Land of the Rising Sun. In the words of Major Fielding Eliot, America's prolific number one military critic, "we can, if we have to, direct such an attack against Japan as will be a deadly threat to her security, while Japan cannot do the like by us."

Are the proponents of the $665,000,000 naval bill afraid of a Jap-German coalition attacking us simultaneously in both oceans? The answer to this is, again in the words of Major Eliot, that "considering further the extreme difficulty of coordinating with efficiency the operations of the forces of a great alliance as against a single determined power . . . we may well rest content with a degree of naval strength which enables us to be superior to any one enemy or possible coalition which may menace us on either side." If the Navy is worried about getting from one ocean to the other, money might much better be spent on further fortifying the Panama Canal, or digging another canal through Nicaraugua, rather than on super-battleships which will be obsolete a decade after they are launched.

The signs all point to the conclusion that the battleship boys are playing on current fears to puff out their chests like Aesop's frog who burst trying to look like a bull. Our navy is now adequate for defense, and even Admiral Taussig doesn't claim it should be anything else. Americans love newsreel shots of new battleships, but Ann Sheridan is just as photogenic and not nearly so expensive.