THE WAR SURVEYED: THE AFRICAN FACTOR
By STRATEG1CUS
IT is inevitable that the present phase of the war should be difficult to evaluate. We are in the midst of things. We cannot stand off and view the drama coolly. Every movement of it is heralded by volumes of German comment, boastful, threatening, deliberate, but arely having the meaning which normal men would attach to it The air attack upon London, for instance, began sharply with all the impressiveness of a decisive campaign. Marshal Goering moved to France to take charge of it. The bewildering feature of the situation is this : we know Marshal Goering. He built up in almost com- plete secrecy an immense air force and trained it in tactics which have achieved on the field of battle impressive succe:./s. We know that he was personally a very brave and skilful air- man. His taking charge of this campaign would seem to mean superlative weight, or superlative skill—something, at all events, of outstanding importance. What, in fact, has it meant? Apparently it means no more that a perfectly ruth- less attack upon civilians. He seems to have achieved his greatest successes with hospitals. He has been extremely nice in his choice of churches ; and, of course, he has reduced numbers of houses to rubble and the humble people who inhabited them to mangled corpses.
It is most difficult to take such a campaign seriously ; and yet it is beyond doubt that there is a completely serious motive behind his brutality, even if it seems to most of us a mani- festation of arrested development. The Prime Minister has warned us that Hitler hoped to bring pressure on the Govern- ment by attacking the common people and making their lives difficult. The only pressure the people are likely to bring upon the Government is the increasing demand that no effort should be spared to bring these mad leaders of Germany to book. The one direction in which they seemed to have a shadow of success was in the momentary failure to realise that every simple man and woman has at present the honour to be in the front line, with an immensely changed value attached to his disciplined behaviour under fire. The moment has passed, and with it Marshal Goering's greatest success. He will probably experiment in other methods of terrorising, us ; but, once the position is appreciated, the chance of success has gone. Germany may still invade us. The multitude of ships lies ready, probably with their nucleus crews and the bulk of material already aboard. But the ships have offered good targets for the Royal Air Force, and they have taken a heavy toll of arms and men.
The measure of these things we cannot see ; we cannot cast up the accounts. This, at least, we are entitled to infer : the enemy's plans are all awry. No single part of the plan has gone as was expected. Like a host of unwearied ants the Germans will set themselves to patch up the ruined plans. New barges will be accumulated. More men will be trained and embarked. More artillery and tanks will be loaded. But will the result be essentially different? It hardly seems possible ; but, while this riddle is being read, ours is the difficult task—to stand on guard, suffer if we must, but at all costs to carry out our allotted tasks. We should not allow the air campaign to dominate our minds. The Germans have suffered the threat longer, since, breaking every international law themselves, they can never be certain that we shall not retaliate. They have suffered worse in what in the final casting up matters most—in purely military damage.
If we can review the situation dispassionately we shall be struck at once with the interesting fact that on the centenary of the birth of Mahan (tin whom a special article appears elsewhere in this issue) the present phase of the war is writing so emphatic an endorsement of his doctrine of sea-power. It is nearly fifty years since he drew attention to the fact that the "isthmian canal," while it would bring great commercial gain to the United States, would also "present an element of much weakness from the military point of view." In his writings are to be found, in singular detail, suggestions about the role of the "West Indian islands circling the Caribbean" and settlements on the adjacent mainland, suggestions which the United States have followed in their leases. This would have interested him less, however, than the present situation between Britain and Germany. Herr Hitler might well have said to us what Napoleon said to Lord Whitworth: "I shall take from you every Ally on the Continent ; I shall cut you off from all access to it, from the Baltic to the Gulf of Taranto. You will blockade us, but I will blockade you in my turn." But it was in the same. quarter where the enemy is at present attacking that he sought and failed to break the blockade.
Italy's attack upon Egypt is, of course, part of the price she has to pay for joining Hitler in his attempt to redraw the map of Europe. It is the main direct assault, upon the British Empire ; but it is, more immediately, Mussolini's attempt to break the blockade. He has called the Mediterranean mare nostrum ; and in c way he never contemplated it is indeed the Italian sea, since the British hold upon Gibraltar and Aden prevents him leaving it or having any other. Italy is cut off completely from all but the MediterraneaA world; and a con- tinuance of that condition would mean defeat. The European blockade depends upon these gates of the Mediterranean, and, whatever Italy's desires, she must weaken our hold upon them. Her actions show how clearly she has realised the position. Germany has discovered that her submarines and aircraft can- not neutralise our sea-power. Neither she nor Italy cares to abandon the hope altogether. Presumably they feel that in some modified sense it may still be realised, otherwise it is not easy to see what the occupation of British Somaliland is sup- posed to achieve. Italy is nearer the island of Perim, in the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, in Eritrea. She is as near Aden in that colony as in British Somaliland. Jibuti is a better port than any in either colony, and presumably she can have the use of that. All that stands in the way of her using these points of vantage is the very sea-power which she wishes to destroy by their means.
The occupation of Somahland has, then, solved no problem which would not disappear with the defeat of British sea-power. The campaign against Egypt would, if successful, deprive us of our main bases m the Eastern Mediterranean ; but it also depends upon the existence and effective functioning of the Navy from those bases. If, as seems certain, neither sub- marines nor aeroplanes, nor both together, can cripple the Navy, the enemy is prevented from sending reinforcements across the seas and we are able to reinforce at will. The latter is obvious to all the world. Not only have the Navy and the armed forces been strengthened consideRbly in the last few weeks, but Hurricanes are now appearing in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Italian advance upon the canal has begun, but it has made no great headway up to the present. The possession of Sidi Barrani means nothing except as a jumping- off ground. Otherwise it is, like Kassala and Gallibat, merely a piece of prestige bought rather expensively. A month of the second year of the war has passed. Italy must have had ample time to consider her plans. It is now some two months since the French surrender and ten weeks since Italy's entrance into the war, and yet the threat has barely begun to materialise.
This is not only attributable to the heat ; and it cannot be wholly explained by Graziani's tactics of accumulating stores at each step. That is a wise proceeding ; but it smacks of supercaution. While he is delaying at Sidi Barrani he is offering a longer line of communications to the light harrying troops of the British Command It is not over-cynical to suggest that he is waiting for Hitler to make quite certain that the British lion is fully engaged otherwise before he stakes all upon his advance in force. Is time fighting upon his side rather than on ours? That seems to be impossible. As the weeks pass, more and more must the effect of the American destroyers be felt ; more and more will reinforcements be sent to the eastern Mediterranean ; more and more will the Royal Air Force assert its ascendancy. Apart from the weather, in no direction can Italy profit by delay. The profit is all to the other side.
For it suits us admirably that she should delay. We are steadily growing stronger in the Egyptian theatre ; and such reinforcements as have been sent out have not weakened us in Britain so much as removed the danger of keeping large bodies of troops immobilised and idle. If the enemy could send heavy reinforcements, we might be faced with a task of quite different dimensions. But this seems impossible under present circumstances. The war is conditioned by our sea- power. The operations in Africa mainly compel us to face a few minor readjustments in our daily habits by forcing us to keep a very considerable part of our fleet in the Mediter- ranean. It is this and not any increased effect of the German blockade from her great Atlantic coast that has led to the shrinkage of the amount of shipping allocated to luxury imports. It is a small price to pay for prospect of a Mediter- ranean victory which might well make an immense and immediate change in the war outlook.
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