INVASION GAMBLE

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 184, 5 August 1940, Page 6

INVASION GAMBLE

ITS PROS AND CONS. ATTACK ON MORALE. NAZIS DRIVEN BY TIME LIMIT IjONDON, June 26. All are agreed that the enemy must invade Great Britain fully and successfully or lose all in his gigantic gamble. Whether that gamble could ever be permanently successful, aiming as it does at the destruction of European civilisation with its roots of 2000 years, is another question. For the moment the issue is his victory or defeat in the next few weeks, and such victory or defeat depends upon his attempted invasion here (writes Hilaire Belloc in the "Sunday Times"). Invasion to be successful implies full occupation of the invaded territory. Nothing short of that will give the enemy victory even for the moment. Now what are th© circumstances at present favourable and unfavourable for such a plan? That plan comports certain preliminaries to, or accessories to, invasion. These are of two kinds: First, the throwing of society into confusion. Second, blockade. Throwing our society into confusion would present a disorganised mass to the attack of an organised body. And organisation has immeasurable advantages over disorganisation. All conquest has been a triumph of an organised minority. Blockade, that is interference with supplies from oversea, pushed so far as to exhaust our stocks and cripple our efforts, would, working side by side with internal confusion, lay a secure foundation for the occupation of invaded territory. The Weapon of Fear. To effect this disorganisation of our society the enemy will certainly rely upon fear. To terrorise is (as has been repeated here), and has always been in the past, his wain instrument. Now this part of his offensive is moral, not material, and therefore can only be met by a moral defensive. Such a defensive demands two elements: exact immediate obedience to authority and the fixed determination to avoid the contagion of fear. The packed urban conditions of English life and the tradition centuries old of uninterrupted peace are here to the enemy'e advantage. But, on the other hand, there is a unity of will and a fixity therein which he almost certainly underestimates. A scattered agricultural population may be less liable to contagious panic than an industrial town population. But the latter can be more homogeneous.

The enemy's material resources for provoking confueion are numerous, but apparently all now tested by continental experience, so that the prime element of surprise should be absent. There comes first, of course, bombardment from the air, including incendiarism. The enemy's most active form in this hae been the use of aircraft flying low along the main railways and roads of the invaded country. The attacks from the air on purely civilian centres have played ft much lesser part. He has, as we have said more than once, numerical superiority still in aircraft and their crews. But it is a diminishing superiority, and its quality as compared to our own is diminishing still faster. A possible further instrument is long-range artillery on a scale hitherto unused, even during the attacks on Paris 23 years ago. The enemy's possession of the opposing coasts gives him an obvious advantage. On the other hand, artillery action of thie kind has never proved of decisive effect. Its instruments are necessarily few and soon worn out, and the rate of fire is as necessarily slow; while the attainment of a distant limited objective ie less and less* certain as range increases. This also was clearly seen in the case of Paris and its long-range bombardments of the last Great War. Whether confusion can be seriously increased by the presence of individual selected men dropped by parachute is doubtful, save in the first stages of such an operation, but this must be distinguished of course from invasion proper by large carriers. Blockade. The chief instrument for an attempted blockade of Britain on the part of the enemy would be, again, his air arm. The advantages he has here, apart from his great numerical superiority, are the nature of his targets and his wide choice of entry. His targets, unlike shipping at eea, would in this case be fixed points, the ports of the country and, in particular, the quays and warehouses, together with the ships recently arrived or about to depart, which are especially vulnerable in the period between the two while they are being "turned." On the other hand, this very choice of entry is also an advantage to the defence. The fact that this island, unlike every other, has such a large number of ports makes it the more difficult for the imemy to deal with them in detail.

Wβ must remember that the best authority we have on mechanised warfare in this country, General Fuller, has publicly pronounced his belief that the enemy's main effort will be in this field —blockade; but there is an argument on the other side which must not be forgotten; it is the argument drawn from

the element of time. We know for certain that the enemy ie working to a fixed limit of time, and that he is compelled to do eo through his own action in the past. He has sacrificed such large masses of material for the sake of rapidity that the pace cannot be kept up. His losses in men are probably exaggerated, for there is always a tendency to over-estimate such losses inflicted upon a determined Advance. None the less, they are very large, even if they are not open to any close calculation. Until the later phases of the French battle he threw in fresh troops whosesale, and though the mechanised units represented a loss in material rather than in men, the infantry attacks were, in all the first stages of each offensive ever since early May, dense and exceedingly expensive— but let us not forget that they were never broken.

Early Victory or Complete Failure. This factor of time almost certainly prevents the enemy from having made a calculation of success by blockade alone. He knows that we have very large stores, and though he himself would not suffer as his unfortunate subject populations will, the destruction of agricultural wealth by his own action has been very great. He has half ruined Denmark, he has largely depleted his own agriculture in spite of forced labour, both native and foreign. He has wantonly destroyed cattle and crops, apart from those destroyed inevitably from so rapid and massed an advance, and there is a limit to the rationing lie can impose upon the territories he has occupied abroad, jiut as there is a limit to the area, of country which he can even temporarily hold down. Many have affirmed that the ultimate result of the enormous strain of this spring and early summer will be partial famine throughout Europe later on. It may be eo. Whet is quite certain is that strain of all kind*., not only upon food resources, but upon every sort of material, must compel the enemy to a comparatively early and complete victory or to as complete a failure.

The enemy has himself, it seems, given us a date to which he is working: the date of August 15. Hitherto he has kept to his time-table with remarkable precision. But peace by August 15 means the complete reduction of Great Britain by the same date; and that he should even have attempted to calculate thia with exactitude ie impossible. The enemy's announcement of so early a date is rather en index of hie unavoidable haste than of his confidence.

Unknown Political Factor. There is one last element to be remembered, "the unknown political fi&ctor. The whole aspect of things would change if there were signs of disruption from within the enemy Alliance, or any definite pronouncement of future policy by the United States or by the Soviets, to mention only two quite obvious "indeterminates." There are other indeterminates (including Ireland) upon which, we cannot yet pronounce, yet which might in a moment change the whole picture.