THE SEA STRUGGLE

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 177, 29 July 1939, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE SEA STRUGGLE

It is evident that the choice between war and peace rests with Hitler. He is the senior partner in the Axis. On the other side, it is evident that Great Britain and France and their allies could not take the offensive even if they wisher! to do so. They have no force that could strike quickly and successfully at the heart of Germany. It is probably still safe to assume, also, that Hitler has not yet taken the final decision, and that his decision will be determined by the outcome of the diplomatic manoeuvres that are now in progress on all frontiers of Germany and all the entrances to the Mediterranean, and in the region from Hongkong to Singapore. On the part of the Axis these manoeuvres will have been successful if Germany is able to disintegrate an

|N this world copyright article, Walter Lippman, famous authority on international affairs, and America's most-quoted commentator, takes a bird's-eye view of the strategical conflict on which the issue of "world war or world peace" turns.

Eastern front before it can be consolidated; if Germany and Italy can obtain command of the Mediterranean, severing the British and French communications with northern Africa, and locking up Russia behind the Dardanelles; if Japan, which has already taken Hainan and the Spratly Islands, used them as stepping stones to the seizure of the oil, rubber and tin- of the Dutch Kast Indies and the British possessions of the far Southern Pacific. If this campaign is completed, British sea power will .have been destroyed, not only as an offensive, but also as a defensive weapon. The Axis will not only be able to defy a blockade, but it will hold the strategic control over the main portions of the British Empire. The whole of Northern Africa from Morocco to Kgypt, the whole Middle Kast from Turkey to India, will have been cut off

from the power of the British Navy. Then the situation will have been prepared for vital demands on Great Britain which Britain would be unable to refuse. It is a reasonable assumption still that Hitler is seeking to win by the threat of war rather than by war itself. The whole scries of actions from the conquest of Czechoslovakia in March to the Italian conquest of Albania, and including the Japanese advance through the South China Sea, are consistent with this view. On the part of the Coalition, the , countering moves are best understood as a campaign to preserve the use of sea power as the chief instrument of diplomacy and the decisive weapon in the event of war. Therefore, the British must at all costs defend the t western front, of which the northern end is in Holland and the southern end ' in .Switzerland. They must establish i somewhere in Eastern Europe a military • front, not for the purpose of invading Germany, which is impossible, but to make a blockade effective. They must control the Mediterranean to protect

their own possessions, to be able to get , at Iti.ly, the vulnerable partner in the ' Axis, and to maintain communications with Turkey and Russia. If they are able to do these things they cannot be defeated in a long war. For the blockade would be even more decisive than in 1914-18, and Italy would be even more vulnerable as Germany's ally than w r as Austria-Hungary. There is still a good chance that if the Coalition acts quickly enough at the strategic points, the condition will never exist in which the Axis can challenge successfully the British and French position. We are, therefore, witnessing the effort of the Coalition to defeat by diplomacy the effort of the Axis to prepare a situation in which it can win without a general war a victory such as no European nation has ever won without a war. The object of the preparations of the Axis is to checkmate British sea power; the object of the Coalition is to fortify British sea power. These developments would indicate that since Munich the aeroplane is no longer regarded either in Germany or in Great Britain as the decisive weapon. In both countries sea power is once more recognised as the weapon that really decides the outcome of a great war. Before Munich the aeroplane was sufficient to intimidate London and Paris and to immobolise the British Navy and the French Army. But since Munich the aeroplane has become a tactical weapon, capable of inflicting damage, but net of deciding the issue. There are several reasons for this; they play a determining role in the * present situation. In the first place, the Sritish and French, though still inferior to Germany in the air, are now strong enough to be formidable: tluy

have prepared themselves physically to make a bomhing dangerous and expensive, and they are able to retaliate, particularly against Italy. Secondly, they are morally prepared to withstand the shock of aerial attack. In September they were not prepared. A nation which cannot be demoralised by air raids cannot be conquered by aeroplanes. Thirdly, the Coalition has realised — perhaps the Axis, too—that a massacre of civilians in London and Paris will arouse the fighting spirit of the whole British Empire and would almost certainly, as Mr. Hoover has warned them, have a profound effect on the American people. It is not wholly improbable that the aeroplane as a weapon of intimidation against civilians is now a boomerang, and there are competent observers who believe that, weighing all the consequences, it may not be used for such a seueral massed attack as people believed was imminent in September. Be that as it may, this much at least is clear, that sea power, in the widest ] sense of that term, is now the focus of '. all the calculations in both camps. Sea power, of course, is more than the fleet ' of warships; it is everything —armies, aeroplanes, forts, harbours, bases, mine [ fields, merchant ships and warships , which can control the movement of vital I supplies. , It is this fact that differentiates the present situation so radically from that ; of last summer. Fcr underlying all the » minor aspects of last summer's crisis, , the French disunion, the weakness of 1 Britain's Air Force, and what not, there 7 was the great fact that Czechoslovakia r

was beyond the reach of sea power; that it could have been conquered before a British blockade had begun to take effect. In the present situation, on' the other hand, every member of the potential Coalition, "including Poland, Rumania, Turkey, Greece and Russia, can be reached directly or indirectly by sea power operating through Gibraltar, Suez and the Dardanelles. That goes a Ictag way towards explaining the willingness of Great Britain to offer them guarantees. Supplies can reach these countries. It also explains the eagerness of Great Bri ain to form alliances with them, for each of them enhances the effectiveness of sea power in the event of war and constitutes a new liability. In so far as they fight for their own independence, they close a hole in the blockade; in so far as they fail to fight or are defeated, the line of the blockade has still to be established somewhere behind them. It is dismal but necessary to think in terms of the strategy of war. For those are the terms in which European statesmen are thinking. There is no other way of understanding what is happening except in terms of strategy. But that does not mean that war.is inevitable. There is at least an even chance that the strategical struggle will be worked out to the end without war, that the outcome of the crisis will be the outcome that generals and statesmen believe would be the outcome if there were a war; that they will count their weapons and not use them. It is a dangerous game, this war game now i being played in Europe, but it may still , be the alternative to war itself.