LIGHTNING WAR.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 165, 13 July 1940, Page 12

LIGHTNING WAR.

THE CRAFTMASTER.

KING GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS.

300-YEAR-OLD LEGACY. (By TT. B. ELLISTON, In the "Christian .Science Monitor.") A platitude is the type of saying which we repeat so often that the words cease to have meaning. In other words, it is a way of speaking. Think, for instance, of the rwt saying, "There's nothing new the sun."' I dure say many of us u>e it. But the use of it docn not. spoil our living inconsistent and indiscriminate tributes to the newness of modern phenomena as they come along. A phenomenon thrown up in high relief by the Herman military success is the lightning stroke in witrfart*. This is the tactic of which the Nazis are commonly thought to be the patentee. Yet the blitzkrieg is well known in military history as far back as Alexander the Great. Perhaps the l>cst exponent of it was Gustavus Adolphus. And there aw so many similarities between Xazi tactics and those of Adolphus that the lessons of Adolphus must have been part of the training of Xazi military, I should ■think. At any rate, Adolphus relied exclusively on the blitzkrieg. Gustavus Adolphus is reputedly the greatest king in Swedish history. He is probably less well known in the AngloSaxon world than his remarkable daughter, Queen Christina, but his ftature was much greater. And there was a. wide gulf fixed between them, for he was the standard bearer of the Protestant cause in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and she turned to Roman Catholicism. Adolphus lived in what we call the age of Cromwell. One might almost call him Cromwell's counterpart, though his own piety had a more cheerful hue than the Protector's.

God Above Everything. The pietism of the King whom the Swedes call the Great sets him up as a person apart from the anti-religious Nazis. The Nazis make the State into a god. Adolphus put God above everything and, like many other warriors in history, hated war. In fact, he could find no words strong enough to apply to war. It was ''not a river, nor a lake, nor a whole ocean of all borts of evil." He considered his wars to be purely defensive—on behalf of Sweden and the [Protestant cause. ! Here we come to the similarities with the German Adolf. Herr Hitler thinks his wars are purely defensive. The approach is the same, though I suppose it is a rare commander who brags, about offensive. wars. And this much can be said for both the Adolphs—that the line separating defensive and offensive wars is so tenuous as to be scarcely distinguishable. The problem is not as easy as some authorities think it is. But" the essence of the blitzkrieg is the tactical offensive, whatever the .mental approach may be. A general 'adhering to the blitzkrieg cannot even stand on ceremony about neutral rights, let alone indulge in quibbling about offensive and defensive operations. At all costs the initiative, as the saying now is, must be kept. And it is in this respect that the t.wo Adolphs are alike in their method of warfare. They aimed at getting there first.

Now an army won't move fast unless they are galvanised in the first place by fast thinking and action by thengeneral. Nobody thought and moved more quickly than Adolphus.. Fortunately he had a wise old counselldr-by ilia name of Axel Oxenstierna, who, as the saying went, nsed his • phlegm to temper .his monarch's ardour. The twain decided everything. And then Gustavus Adolphus was off like the wind. A pedestrian contemporary wrote complainingly, "We try to ascertain his whereabout, we find him almost everywhere, now in one place, now in another. He practises the art of being in several places at once." J Intelligence Service.

Still, in order to get there first, a general requires much more than agility of movement. First and foremost among the prerequirements is an intelligence •ervfce. The world now knows something about 'the efficiency of the Nazi •ervfce. Lord Haw-Haw frequently is firat with the news over the British air of what the British themselves are going to do. Yet no warrior had a better intelligence fservice than Adolphus. His diplomatic feelers had reached to Venice and Constantinople in the preparation for his expedition to Germany. Moreover, Adolphus was the parent of an army organisation, embracing the entire nation. The natidn in arms was a concept which we often think came from the World War. But the seventeenth century Swedish king had the same idea. He dispensed with organisations depending either upon a national militia and upon hired mercenaries in favour of a purely national system. What made me think of Adolphus was the news of the Nazi development of new lightweight guns for the use of a rapidly-moving army. Apparently the Nads have invented a sort of portable machine gun, a tank and light artillery specially devised for swift movement. This reminded me of something I had read in a recent life of Adolphus. I turned it up, "Gustav the Adolf the Great," by Nils Ahnlund, which has been translated from the Swedish. There you will read that what a writer calk the new "trick" warfare had been introduced three hundred years before by Gustavus Adolphus. Ho was constantly trying to develop lighter guns. On one occasion he invited the diplomatic corps to witness him firing a new gun. : He put in a double abof, and the gun barrel burst; whereat he told the Ministers that he would keep on trying to reduce the weight of the gun for his rapidly moving troops. Beading Mr. Ahnlund's fascinating account 61 this. Swedish king, whose life recalls the old Norse sagas I repeated to myself that there is nothing new under the sun, but I had enough evidence in this Ahnlund book to put meaning into the old platitude.