BOOKS OF THE DAY
The Air Crisis
ONCE more in its age-long history the Middle East has proved itself the master key of the three united continents. Thothmes, Xerxes, Miltiades, Alexander, Muhammad, the Osmanli, Napoleon, Abd al-Hamid and Kaiser Wilhelm II found each in his turn that the control of this antique /vital war-bridge involved the triumph or the eclipse of far more than local destinies ; nor can it be doubted that Hitler had been able to reach the Suez Canal from the East or (through Mussolini) from the West, world history for the next thousand years would have been written, and forcibly read, in German and Japanese characters. The British Empire's honourable and decisive prevention of that calamity could not have been effected but for the incredible exertions of the R.A.F., whose achievement inspires the lucid last work of the brilliant and fertile pen now for ever laid down.
There is a welcome remoteness from Whitehall in Philip Guedalla's easy sardonic prose, in whose compression and grasp of technicalities one may detect the tang of a more literary—and some- times more slangy—Rudyard Kipling: " Cairo, with its -strong per- vading sense that Lord Kitchener is always somewhere close at hand." This Air-author, who " had never been off the ground except on a bicycle," who " had never spent a night outside a house," enriches his admirably assimilated narrative of military operations with apposite quotations from Kinglake and Doughty, with maps and diagrams illustrating bomber and fighter regional ranges, with end-papers covering the tremendous "Board " from Biserta to the Caspian Sea—and with a model reminder of month and year at the top of each inner margin. His swift summary—the Board, the Game, the Players—is a course of Air Strategy without tears, pointed and developed by the campaigns (the more crucial because so often simultaneous) in the Desert, East Africa, Greece, Crete, Iraq, Syria, Persia, Malta and, recurring and final, the Desert, releasing on its way varied springs of memory, criticism, surmise. How many of us remembered that the first air-bombing was of Venice by the Austrians—in 1849 ; that our War Office was, to say the least, dis- couraging to Air Power, which came not into its own until the amalgamation by General Smuts in 1917 of the R.F.C. and the R.N.A.S. (and who today will expound these initials?) into the R.A.F.; that (with sickening futility) " the R.A.F., which had been the largest Air Force in the world, controlling more than 20,000 aircraft on 700 aerodromes and consisting in 1918 of 188 squadrons, was reduced in less than 18 months to a bare 22 "? That after the French defection in 1940 the total Allied airfleet that was R.A.F. Command— in defence from the Libyan frontier to Kenya, Aden and the Persian Gulf—amounted to 179 mostly obsolescent bombers and 85 fighters, with a -few more from Rhodesia and South Africa ; pitted against an Italian Regia Aeronautica of 2,600 first-line aircraft, of which the North African fleet of 200 modern fighters and zoo modern bombers was supported by strong reinforcing contingents held in Sardinia and Sicily? (Why, then, did the Italians fail to use the Dodecanese as a springboard against Cyprus and to the whole Eastern corner
the Mediterranean?) •
Some of our early difficulties in Greece, then unavoidable, throw fresh and needed light on that disastrous (but far from useless) mpaign.
" There was not a single all-weather aerodrome in existence on the mainland of Greece ; and the possibilities of airfield construction were restricted by an unhappy combination• of weather and high politics."
When in April, 1941, the Germans' blow became due, it had to be aced with one-fifth of their air strength: "A situation summarised 'by one participant as 'all the Wops in the world and half the ferries versus two men, a boy, and a flying hearse.'" ith the German attacks cunningly synchronised in the North, the st and the West of the vast battlefield,
"British strategy continued its eternal juggle: and the deft transfer of its inadequate resources from one theatre of war to the next corner of the world where they were badly needed resembled nothing so much Its the sleight of hand with which bystanders are left in doubt as to the thimble under which the pea reposes." at it could not be under the Cretan thimble was but too clear the Nazi bystander in the rapidly overwhelmed Grecian archi-
pelago ; and his Order " Fliegerkorpi XI, supported by Fliegerkorps VIII, will capture the island of Crete " was confidently complete— down to the German-English phrase-sheet with " the singularly handy sentence, ' If yu lei yu will be schott.' " The loss of air command lost Crete, as it would have lost Iraq if the quisling Rashid Ali's putsch (timed with Greece and Cyrenaica, but a shade too soon for Syria) had succeeded in occupying the heroi- cally held Habbaniya aerodrome.
" As the sun went down that night, about 2.5oo men with 64 air- craft, 18 armoured cars, 2 ancient howitzers and a few trench-mortars and machine-guns, some corrugated iron roofs and an iron fence stood between the British Frnpire and defeat."
Syria, under a Vichy suitably represented by the ignoble Dentz, provides the next excitement ; from which the reader is conducted (as over the ground) through the epic of Malta to the fateful pendu- lum of advance, retreat and advance in North Africa.
Over all, throughout, broods the sense of the momentous. Prosaic " Maintenance and Repair " sends more than 800 machines, recon- structed in caverns of the hills from the battered metal of injury and wreckage, back to the fighting front. That war-befouled word, " collaborate," " is first restored to honour between air and ground, when " the interval between a call from the land forces and the arrival of the bombers was frequently reduced to 35 minutes ; and disappears altogether when Army and Air passed beyond that stage into a unit or team which automatically helps the other." War is shown to have become, ultimately, war for aerodromes: Malta was preserved by their retention ; their denial lost Crete.
Readers of this notable historian and essayist, too soon taken from them, will remember with consoling pride that his last (and post- humous) publication was good war-service to his country.
RONALD STORRS.
Previous page
