AXIS THWARTED

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 38, 13 August 1941, Page 7

AXIS THWARTED

DESIGNS ON OILFIELDS

YUGOSLAV CONTRIBUTION

THE MARCH REVOLT

RUGBY, August 11. How the heroic Yugoslav decision to resist the Germans on March 27 helped to thwart plans by the Axis to seize the Middle East and Russian oilfields is described in a broadcast from London today by General Simovich, the Yugoslav Prime Minister and Com-mander-in-Chief. In March, he said, the main German army of south-eastern Europe was in the south-east of Bulgaria, ready to move into Greek Thrace and then eastward .to turn the flank of the defence of Turkey. Everything seemed favourable. Russia was on friendly terms, Syria was in Vichy hands, with Axis agents preparing to get possession of strategic points, and the Iraki rebellion was timed to begin simultaneously— April 3—on which date it did actually start. Air-borne troops were to be landed in Syria so that Turkey would

be cut off from British supplies and hindered in making effective resistance. : The German armies were to sweep along north Anatolia and across' the Black Sea from Rumanian and Bulgarian ports, and would be knocking at the doors of the oilfields of Batum and Baku almost before Russia would be aware of the danger. NAZI ATTENTION DIVERTED. Whe operation was planned to begin between March 15 and April 1 and to be completed in six to eight weeks. ' A few days before it could start, how ever, the Belgrade revolution placed on the German flank a hostile army which had to>be removed. The subsequent campaigns in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete, though successful in their immediate purpose, kept the German armies occupied in what had been meant to be a preliminary task till June 1, by which time the British had quelled the Iraki rising. A week later the Allies entered Syria and turned out the Axis advance guards. "Thus," said General Simovich, "apart from the moral blow which affected the prestige of the Reich rulers, Yugoslavia fcustrated the plans of thei German staff, compelled it to lose time, and thereby saved Turkey and the] Near East, and made impossible an envelopment of Russia from the south and an attack on it from the rear over the Caucasus. "Hitler was then forced to limit himself to a frontal attack in order to reach the oil without which his panzer divisions and air fleets would have become useless."—B.O.W.