NOTES ON THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 7, 9 July 1945, Page 4

NOTES ON THE WAR

INDIAN OCEAN

EMPIRE SEAWAY TO JAPAN

For the special effort of the British Commonwealth and Empire against Japan the main base will be India, with Australia as a subsidiary base, covering the contribution Australian and New Zealand forces, naval, air, and land, with the British Pacific Fleet, have made and are making" to the combined onslaught on the conquests Japan still holds. For India and, to a lesser degree, Australia command by sea and air of the Indian Ocean is absolutely vital to protect the enormous amount of transport that will be passing by the shortest sea routes to the South-east Asia theatre of war. The Indian Ocean has not in this war been the scene of so much intense naval and air conflicts as the larger sister oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, but it has not escaped the intrusion of active warfare., any more than it did in the last war. In fact at one critical period—at the fall of Singapore—Britain, and with her the Allies, might have lost'command of the Indian -Ocean and with that India herself. How vital is "freedom of the seas" in the Indian Ocean is clearly demonstrated in a most illuminating little book, recently published and to hand, "INDIA AND THE INDIAN OCEAN," by K. M. Panikkar, an Indian author. (London: George Allan and Unwin, Ltd.). Open To Sea Attack. The Indian Ocean, as the author points out, has been neglected by the historiographer and the geopolitician, perhaps, because it diiiers from the Atlantic and Pacific in being enclosed, on three sides —north, west, and east— instead of being just flanked like the other two on the east and west and extending through the Arctic and Antarctic to the two Poles. Yet the sea and sea-routes have been far more to India than the land. It is true that the Indian Peninsula, like Italy, is protected on the north by a range of almost impassable mountains, and that these have not stopped land invasions, but in the few instances through the centuries these have been either abortive, like Alexander the Great's invasion of India and Hannibal's, a century later, of Italy, or else the invaders have been absorbed by the invaded, like the Goths m Italy and the Moslems in India. The only real conquest of India by a foreign nation, which has remained foreign, was by the sea power of Britain, a conquest which has lasted nearly 200 years. For more than a century before that Britain challenged the sea Ppwer first of the Portuguese, then of the Dutch, and last of the French, and swept them all out of the Indian Ocean, leaving them possession, as it were, by courtesy, in the case of the Portuguese and French of a tew trading posts, and of the Dutch a great and fabulously rich colonial empire in the islands of the East IndiesNetherlands East Indies or Indonesia. "In the nineteneth century," says Mr. Panikkar, in a chapter entitled me British Lake," after the French fleet was annihilated at Trafalgar in 1805, Great Britain was the only naval Power in the world. It was the century in which it could legitimately be said that Britannia ruled the waves. The mere presence of a British gunboat anywhere in the seven seas had decisive effects both for the maintenance of peace and enforcement of policy. ... So far as the Indian Ocean was concerned, it was, even more than all other oceanic areas, a British lake. No European nation had any interest in that vast oceanic surface, nor in the lands adjacent to it." Rivals In The Ocean. But in the last quarter of the nineteenth century a new situation began to develop. In the Far East, America, by defeating Spain, occupied the Philippines in 1898, thus entering the Pacific Ocean as at least a potentially major naval Power. A few years earlier Japan, having defeated China took the first step of her southward march by annexing Formosa. In the Indian Ocean itself the French, having completed the occupation of Madagascar, perceived the natural advantages of Diego Suarez as a major naval base covering their lines of communication with Indo-China conquered in previous decades. Almost simultaneously Germany entered the Indian Ocean with the occupation of langanyika (German East Africa). Italy built up Eritrea with Massawa as its port on the Red Sea, and occupied Somaliland with a coastline on the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. France established herself at Jibuti in. Abyssinia, opposite Aden. Thus at the outbreak of World War I Britain had both friends and enemies on the Indian OCean and its approaches, for the Germans were striking, with the aid of their allies, the Turks, by the Berlin-Bagdad railway at the command of the Persian Gulf. Germany and Turkey were ousted as a result of the last war, but Japan gamed strategic territory of vast importance in her mandated islands of the Western Pacific. . India played as great a part in the last war as In this, but was never threatened then. It was very different at the outset in this war. The Italians had conquered Abyssinia m 1935-3o and were on the way to establish a formidable base, threatening the approaches on the Indian-Europe seaway, via the Suez Canal, at the approaches to the Gulf of Aden. The collapse of France in June, 1940, left the French colonies of Madagascar and Indo-China "in the air," with a Government at Vichy hostile to Britain after the crippling of the French fleet at Oran and Dakkar. Japan took her first step south of China, already occupied along the coast, by a peaceful penetration, with the consent of the Vichy Governor of Indo-China. That was in 1940-41. India In Danger. Such was the situation when Japan struck in December, 1941, Panikkar sums up in a paragraph: The destruction of the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbour, and the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse effected a revolutionary change in the whole aspect of the Eastern Oceans. . . . With the surrender of Singapore the safety and security of the Indian Ocean, for 150 years a British lake, had vanished at one stroke. The entry of Japan into the Indian Ocean demonstrated clearly the entire dependence of India on the mastery of the seas. The Andamans and Nicobars passed mto enemy hands. That sealed the doom of Burma. ... Units of the British Fleet were attacked and destroyed at Trincomalee and, as the Com-mander-in-Chief in India openly confessed, there was nothing to stop Japan at that time from landing anywhere she pleased on the Indian coastline. , . . In the critical days of April, 1942, the fate of Ceylon hung in the balance. A Japanese fleet appeared in the Bay of Bengal and units of the British Fleet went down to an enemy attack from car-rier-based planes. The timely appearance of the American fleet in the Coral Sea forced Japan to withdraw her fleet from Indian waters, and thus Ceylon was saved from a sea-borne invasion. Plea For Indian Navy. In view of the foregoing, Mr. Panikkar's plea for a strong Indian Navy, based on India, coupled with naval forces from Australia, South Africa, and Britain, for the protection of shipping in the Indian Ocean and the vital interest of the nations mentioned. "Only in co-operation with Britain," he concludes, "is oceanic defence based- on India possible in the circumstances of today, when those who are in a position to make a bid for mastery are among the greatest naval powers of the world. The control of the Indian Ocean must, therefore, be a co-operative effort of India and Britain and the other Commonwealth units having interest in the ocean, with the primary responsibility lying in the, Indian Navy to guard the steel ring created by Singapore, Ceylon, Mauritius,,and Socotia."