This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.
The Times comments on the first peacetime parliamentary discussion of the Navy estimates yesterday in Parliament, led by the First Lord of the Admiralty A.V. Alexander:
Mr. Alexander revealed that the construction of four of the battleships which were in hand in 1939, though little progress had been made with them, had been abandoned early in the war and would not be resumed: in all some £190 million had been saved since V-E Day by cancellation of warship building. One battleship only, HMS Vanguard, the design of which embodies many lessons drawn from recent experience, is to be completed ... the world is probably on the eve of great changes in the design of warships and, pending the trials with atomic bombs to be undertaken by the United States Navy this year, none can say today exactly what those changes will prove to be ... Mr. Alexander scouted the assertion that the appearance of the atomic bomb had destroyed the need for navies in the years ahead, and he wisely reminded the House that the standard of life in these islands depends today more than ever on the maintenance of free communication by seapower operating above, on, and beneath the water ...
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