A NAVAL PAGEANT: ITS MORAL

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 64, 13 September 1943, Page 4

A NAVAL PAGEANT: ITS MORAL

The surrender of a great navy presents a pageantry that has no parallel on land. Armies, when they stirfender, come over in droves and dribs and drabs, melancholy precessions of crestfallen pedestrians; the operation, as photographed, looks something like the yarding of cattle. But a full battle fleet, voyaging under its own power to an armistice rendezvous, retains its composite individuality, and has-for its fitting background the silent but eloquent sea. Italy's fleet moving with dignity to Malta presents a clear-cut picture against the canvas' of the blue Mediterranean, and it is a picture of proud but thwarted power unequalled save on the occasion of the surrender of the German High Sea Fleet in 1918. The pageantry of this extraordinary naval occasion is easy to visualise on the grand scale. Here is a naval force of immense coordinated striking power, undestroyed yet entirely defeated, proceeding perforce, yet with pride, to captivity not in the manner of chains and leg-irons, but in the manner of a tableau. This century has seen two such tableaux. Will it see more? Will there be capitulation occasions when other great fleets steam to some future victor's appointed rendezvous, while surrendering air armadas, bent on similar missions, fly overhead? With warfare in three elements, no limit to Capitulation pageantry can be set, except in one way—by the abolition of war.

Badoglio made a much better job of surrendering and transferring the Italian navy than Darlan made in his effort to yield and deliver the French fleet at Toulon.' So far as Spezia is concerned, the Italian ships there were evidently in a condition to steam off iWithout considering the alternative of scuttling; and the German aircraft were able .to sink only one heavy ship before the south-bound Italians came under an Allied air umbrella. Admiral Cunningham is reported as saying of the Italian units: "These ships which are now added,to our strength are first class. The battleships are very good. The cruisers are all good, too, especially the two new ones." A strategic footnote to this Mediterranean pageant is that "it will release many ships for use against the Japanese and elsewhere/ Last year Hitler saw a good many French ships sink to the bottom of Toulon harbour to elude him—at any rate for a time—and he now sees a whole fleet slip through his fingers— with the loss of one big unit—for all time. This ominous event, and the German military calamities in Russia, are a poor setting for Hitler's longdelayed broadcast, in which he extols Mussolini but condemns Mussolini's Italy to all the horrors of a Germanmade battlefield. When Hitler pleads Mussolini's case he is simply pleading his own, for what Mussolini is Hitier presently will be. Meanwhile, relent-

less history, no longer decided in the Munich beer-house, continues to write itself in blood in Russia and spectacularly in the naval pilgrimage to Malta.

There has not been a Battle of Jutland in the European war. And now there never can be. Germany could stage a Bismarck raid—ending at the bottom of the Atlantic—and Italy could stage a Battle of Matapan, but it has not been Admiral Cunningham's lot to answer such a challenge as the Kaiser's High Sea Fleet offered to Admiral Jellicoe. What has happened to enemy sea power in the Mediterranean ends any German or Japanese dream of a naval junction with it. For over three years Cunningham has kept the Mediterranean in a manner worthy of Nelson, without any Trafalgar, and he is well rewarded in being able to watch this great pageant of Italian surrender, which ends his Mediterranean task, portends the complete destruction of the European enemy on land as well as sea, and opens the way for new naval victories in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.