The Press FRIDAY, MAY 2, 1941. The Lessons of Greece

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23318, 2 May 1941, Page 8

The Press FRIDAY, MAY 2, 1941. The Lessons of Greece

Mr Winston Churchill’s provisional statement that 45,000 out of the 60,000 Imperial troops Sent to Greece have been got away safely and that the number of killed and wounded Is about 3000 is perhaps a better outcome than most people had expected. For several days before their re-embarkatlon, these forces had been fighting a rearguard action with little help from the remnants of the Greek armies, without adequate air support, and latterly without sufficient transport. That three-fourths of them were saved says much for their discipline and courage and for the skill of their generals. The loss of all their heavy equipment is a severe blow, since the critical battle now being waged on the Egyptian border is a battle of mechanised power rather than of manpower. It is also possible, if neutral reports can be trusted, that the loss of merchant shipping in Greek ports has been serious. Judging by Mr Churchill’s somewhat meagre statement, the campaign has had two important military lessons, or rather has underlined heavily two lessons which were learnt from the campaign in the Low Countries and France. The first of those lessons is that the German technique of using dive bombing as a partial substitute for artillery bombardment is relatively ineffective against troops whose morale is sound and who have learnt that the noise of the dive-bombing attack Is out of proportion to the material damage it inflicts. One may feel reasonably assured that the factor of tactical surprise, both in movement and in the use of weapons, cannot in future play as large a part in Germany’s victories as it has in the past. The second lesson—and it seems at first sight to conflict with the first—is that in a battle between land forces, the side which has a definite initial superiority In air support has an advantage which will increase in a sort of geometric progression. The British forces in Greece began with ..some air support; they ended with little or none because the German High Command used its initial air superiority to destroy the airfields from which the Royal Air Force was operating. It was the story of the-Flanders campaign over again, in that a relative advantage became by swift stages absolute mastery. And although the dive' bombers, even when they operated unhindered, did hot break the British front line, they did disorganise transport behind the front line and slow down movement in a type of fighting in which ability to move troops swiftly is everything. Local air superiority is, in short, the indispensable condition of military success; and any military venture undertaken without air superiority is, by purely military Standards, a Waste of effort. This being so, it is necessary to face the truth that even if Turkey had gone to war, and even if: the Turkish,!;Jugoslav,' and Greek High Commands had prepared in Advance a,’plari of campaign, air superiority would have given Germany a speedy victory.