COMMENT and REFLECTIONS

Evening Star, Issue 23864, 19 April 1941, Page 9

COMMENT and REFLECTIONS

In the brief compass of 12 fateful days our situation in the Middle East and Balkans has declined from comparative security to extreme gravity. Implementing Napoleon’s maxim of “ force multiplied by velocity ” as the basis of successful tear, and employing all the formidable and terrifying modern weapons of slaughter to add to the validity of that maxim, the Germans have changed the whole complexion of the Mediterranean campaign, have wrested the initiative from us, and manoeuvred us into such disadvantageous tactical position as ivill strain every resource of energy, courage, equipment, and organisation ive can muster to redress. The extreme disaccord of what is happening with what we had expected to happen imposes upon the most optimistic a load of doubt and uneasiness, of incertitude and, indeed, apprehension. In Libya and Egypt a Margin of safely still exists, though it is very much smaller than we had good reason to reckon upon a fortnight ago, but in the Balkans, the equilibrium between AngloGreek defence and the steadily-increasing, relentless pressure of the enemy is so perilously balanced that there is some chance of defeat of our arms; even (why deny what is so obvious ?) a possibility of having to cede the battlefield of Greece in the same haste as toe did that of Flanders. This is not to imply mistrust of the weapon Britain has forged to resist the formidable aggressor, or of the sufficiency of those wielding it. Ihe weapon is tough enough, but its wielders have not the room, in the present predicament, to use it offensively, being relegated by immensely-superior strength and thunderbolt tactics to the role of parrying thrusts. With the geographical advantage of operating on interior lines, connoting speedy disposability of his forces at any selected point, the enemy has, and will continue to have, the tactical power to compel battle when and where he wills, opposing to the hasty improvisations and hour-to-hour adjustments that the situation thrusts upon us a unified command, a unified plan, and all the resources of the greatest mechanised army machine the tvorld has known. He has left behind him the Yugoslav armies scattered and broken into mere guerrilla units, and he is now threatening the eastern sector of the bastion that the British and Greeks have erected from the JEgean in Greece to the Adriatic in Albania, a defensive line selected because its salient features of mountain and gorge offer a likely check to profitable use of the immense preponderance of the armoured iveapons of war at his disposal. The reputed commander of the German armies is General List, who made such short work of the Carpathians obstacle in Poland, and of the difficulties of the Vardar and Struma gaps, so that too great reliance cannot be placed upon physiographical aids. What we must largely rely upon is the crippling capacity of the Royal Air Force and the stubborn courage of British infantry to redress an unpleasant situation more favourably to us. At all events, on this chosen line ice must stand or fall, and here all the preliminaries of a bloody encounter are being enacted, though it may be some days before full-scale battle develops. Here the Allies must withstand the ferocious attacks of the enemy, since withdrawal could only be to less defensible positions and would imperil the whole of Southern Greece. It cannot be said that the guarded reports coming through are wholly reassuring. The possibility of complete Greek evacuation of Albania, to remedy a threat against the Allied Left Wing, is given weight in the admission that Klisura has already been evacuated.

At the moment, however, the spearhead of the German thunderbolt attack is directed upon the eastern (Olympus) sector, where, using 15 divisions of mechanised troops, thousands of tanks and hundreds of Sluka bombers, the enemy is sacrificing men prodigally in a so-far vain effort to breach the line held by British and Anzac divisions. It is estimated that he left 50,000 dead before these positions in yesterday’s battle alone, and his claim to have penetrated the line and occupied the town of Servia, lacks valid confirmation. If he can continue to throw in reinforcements, and sustain the weight of his thrust, it is probable that the Allies will have to yield ground, but it would be quite ivrong to assume, as some pessimists appear to do, that the issue of the tvar depends upon this battle. Nevertheless, complete defeat in Greece would react very detrimentally upon Britain’s strategy in the Mediterranean, since Nazi control of Southern Greece and the whole of the JEgean coastline would hamper our sea communications in the eastern Mediterranean and imperil the Suez artery. So that this battle is at least a critical round in the war, and the determination ivith which the Germans are pursuing their aim reveals the importance they place upon its attainment . Their avowed objectives are a clearance of British arms from the Balkans and from Egypt before tackling Britain herself in her island fortress. The second objective, the reduction of Egypt tvill not be easy of attainment. The situation of Wavell’s Army of the Nile is embarrassed rather than critical, and it is a situation that could never have arisen had that army been free to consolidate its Lib--yan gains. We know now that Wdvell’s splendid feat, which eliminated 200,000 Italian soldiers from the ranks of the Axis, was accomplished with an army absurdly small in proportion to the number of defenders, and that the army of occupation was even smaller, since large drafts were taken to satisfy the requirements of the strenuous East Africa campaign, and to meet the Balkans threat, which had developed even prior to the British occupation of Benghazi. Wavell’s real job was to keep safe Egypt and the canal, and this seemed quite assured till the unpleasant surprise was sprung of 'the presence of some divisions of German mechanised troops in Tripolitania. The landing of any considerable Axis reinforcements had been deemed impossible while the British Navy kept watch and tvard in the Mediterranean. How the transport teas accomplished we do not know —whether by sea, air, or through connivance of the French in Tunisia; at any rate it teas accomplished, with the result that we have lost the whole of our Cyrenaican gains, and have again on our hands the job of defending Egypt, It is our good luck that the fortunate issue of the East Africa and Abyssinian campaigns releases large bodies of note veteran desert fighters, whose availability should make Egypt safe enough.

Space denies consideration of the unresolved attitude of Turkey in the Balkans itnbroglio; it is pertinent to remark, however, that no neutral country could, in the present situation, consider intervention a safe proposition; and that Turkey's defensive flank is under threat of a German landing from the Black Sea. The concentration of Nazi traps at Constanza means nothing less. Thursday's ferocious air raid on London furnished as ruthless a footnote as history has recorded of the wanton cruelty of man. Compassion, it is evident, has been erased from the Nazi dictionary. Britain's less heavy raid on Berlin was once more directed against military objectives, and the question arises whether the hour has not arrived to extend our concentration upon such objectives to a more indiscriminate attack upon German civil morale. America's aircraft production is largely devoted to the output of great wide-range bombers, capable of plastering all Germany; British airmen have demonstrated again and again their superior daring and marksmanship, and it were strange if they could not give Berlin a hammering that, in its effect upon civilian morale, might open the first wide crack in Germany's imposing military edifice.