HIDE-AND-SEEK IN THE ATLANTIC

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 100, 30 April 1941, Page 8

HIDE-AND-SEEK IN THE ATLANTIC

Operating under American naval surveillance, Hitler's predatory craft (air, sea, and undersea) will find it hard to elude the observing eye by day and the searchlight by night. For two thousand miles out into the Atlantic from the American coast the German flyers, surface raiders, and periscope artists, engaged in their daily task of seeing without being seen, will have their tempers sorely tried. The indignation of the burglar who accidentally set off the burglar alarm will be nothing to the wrath of the raider who is seen and reported by a non-belligerent, and who finds his purely personal business and whereabouts advertised on the air up and down the Atlantic Ocean. The area of possible friction between the neutrality patrol and the patrolled enemy craft is so great that a German paper sees only one result —"the sinking of American ships." The corollary of that method of Nazi retaliation would be war, either open or undeclared. Sinking tactics, mutual and relentless, might develop overnight as between the sea forces of the Great Republic and those of the Great Dictatorship, without any of the usual paraphernalia of declared war. Already the difference between the indirect war which they wage with each other and a direct war is as thin as a piece of tissue paper. Moscow comment suggests that the patrolling of 2000 miles-of the Atlantic by American warships will enable the British Navy to concentrate to a greater extent on the eastern Atlantic approaches to Europe and Africa, so that the British war on German predatory craft and the British blockade will both be intensified. This virtual Reinforcement of our naval forces on the eastern side of the Atlantic comes at a time when Spain possibly may place her coastline at Hitler's disposal, enabling Hitler to extend southward his sally ports and refuge ports. Brest is rather a long way off for British bombing operations against the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau; obviously, then, the German raiders would feel still safer in a refitting port farther south. Spain and Spanish Africa thus can make the Navy's task harder, just as the United States patrols can make it. easier. As a counter to the United States action, a Rome newspaper suggests that "Japan is ready to help Italy and Germany to prevent supplies reaching Britain." In what way? By a telltale naval patrol reporting the whereabouts of supply ships? Or by some; other method? The American fleet would regard Japanese imitation as the siheerest flattery, but it would be a kind of flattery that would not mix well with the idea (publicised in Tokio) of a Matsuoka good-will mission to Washington.