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On Active Service: a range of books about the 3 Services in W W 2. A Digger History site. |
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HMAS Mk 2 (1943). The Royal Australian Navy at war |
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Sub category index
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WRITTEN AND PREPARED BY |
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DEDICATED TO ALL THOSE, |
| Set up, printed and bound in Australia by Halstead Press Pty Limited, 9-19 Nickson Street, Sydney, 1951. Registered in Australia for transmission through the post as a book. |
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END PAPERS |
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End papers (front and rear identical) |
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FOREWORD |
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| H.M.A.S. Mk.
II is the continuation of the story, begun in H.M.A.S., of the Royal Australian Navy in this war. It is a story which, in this volume, reaches an important point in its telling. During the period which it records, the tide of battle for the Allies turned from the defensive to the offensive, and, in more than one theatre of war, the Royal Australian Navy has been in the forefront
of the rising flood. The sole function of sea power is the maintenance of one's own lines of trans-sea communications, and the destruction of the enemy's. All other naval activities, the fighting of fleet actions as much as the isolated engagement with the enemy, are directly related to that one function. It is through her correct appreciation and her proper application of sea power that Britain, with her Allies, has been enabled to maintain Allied lines of communication across the great oceans of the world, enabling blows to be struck against the enemy where desired. The period under review has seen such blows struck, and ships of the Royal Australian Navy participating in the striking. At Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomons, at Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, at North Africa, Sicily and Italy in the Mediterranean, and at New Guinea, sea power has enabled the transportation by ship, and the landing in the face of opposition by land, by air and by sea, of great armies. Sea power has supported these armies, and supplied them and maintained them in their victorious advance. H.M.A.S. Mk. II endeavours to give something of a picture of this world-wide fabric of sea power, and the threads therein woven by the Royal Australian Navy, threads which are coloured by experience and tradition of the centuries of naval history which are the British inheritance. As Admiral of the Fleet Lord Chatfield has written in his autobiography, "Strategy needs a 'geographical' mind in the sailor. It also needs a study of the old masters and of history. The basic principles can alone be so learnt, as Admiral Richmond and others have rightly stressed. Faulty tactics may lose an opportunity of victory. Faulty strategy may more certainly lose an empire." Fortunately, our naval strategy has been sound. It has throughout adhered to that proper concept of sea power which has enabled that power so to assist our great sister Services, the Army and the Air Force, that the tide of victory is now gathering way under our united efforts. We of the Royal Australian Navy have been associated throughout, under the White Ensign, with our brothers of the Royal Navy. We have worked, and are working, in happy cooperation with our gallant Allies, the United States Navy, and the Navies of the Dutch and the Fighting French. We are proud to be with them, and glad in the knowledge that we have during the past year voyaged so far together on, the road to our ultimate and inevitable success.
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HMAS Australia at Guadalcanal, 8th August 1942 by B2/67 |
