COMMENT AND REFLECTIONS

Evening Star, Issue 24226, 20 June 1942, Page 7

COMMENT AND REFLECTIONS

Even if it did not most detrimentally transform our military prospects and those of our ally (Russia, this week’s chronicle of defeat in Libya would furnish almost the most dispiriting news of the whole war, for the reason that the highest hopes of success had been engendered and quickened by repeated assurance of the imperial Force’s complete adequacy for the enterprise of ousting from Libya anything with which the Axis could confront us. Yet we are patently again on the eve of retirement behind the Egyptian frontier; if, indeed, our Bth Army can extricate itself from a situation that strikingly resembles a trap. The gilded phrases with which this unpleasant debacle is served to us cannot disguise the stark reality that the Libyan Army has had a bad hammering and is sorely beset and imperilled; that the abandonment to the enemy of the covering strong points of Acroma, El Adem, and Sidi Rezegh and retirement to the perimeter of Tobruk’s defences only temporarily relieves the position, and in some degree may actually hasten the tactic of envelopment which the enemy has completed except along the coastal road to the east; that, in short, our chances of holding the oft-embattled and strategically vital point have narrowed almost to vanishing point. These events give the ugliest_ and most dismaying turn to a campaign that opened with such high promise, and small comfort or Reassurance can be gleaned from the circumstances of our defeat. For once again, quoting the guarded communiques and correspondents’ reports, it has been a case of facing better equipment and more ,of it, heavier tanks, and overwhelmingly heavier fire power. These were the chief physical factors that swung the pendulum so violently against us, and another, it cannot be doubted, was the greater propulsive speed and tactical resource that the enemy imparted to the widely-dis-persed attack that has in three short weeks transformed our North African situation from security to extreme gravity. Rommel’s apparently will-o’-the-wisp strokes, here, there, and haphazardly elsewhere, seem to have led Ritchie well and truly “up the garden.” The German panzer expert sewed up the South African and 50th British Division in a dangerous mesh on the Gazala ' line. They extricated themselves by one of those coups that have always ennobled British arms in dire distress, and that in the Peninsular War evoked the epigrammatic tribute from Marshal Soult: “ There is ■no beating these troops in spite of their generals." Then our armoured divisions blundered into an ambush sown with 88 millimetre guns, and suffered a bad mauling; and right through the encounter it would seem that Rommel’s initiative and tank expertise have enabled him to keep just one jump ahead of his British vis-a-vis. It need not be supposed, however, that the Axis has won an easy victory'- There is abundant ‘ evidence of the most desperate fighting, and probably the German general prevailed largely because his long experience of mobile armoured warfare had habituated him to accepting without hesitation the grave risks to which the trend of modern warfare towards wide dispersal of tactical formations exposes any large-scale offensive. He had his bad moments, of which the trapping of his panzers in our ten-mile minefield must have been the worst, but he survived them without relinquishing the initiative, and his victory must be accounted one on the grand scale, whether it was intended merely as a.limited operation to test British strength and tactics and to take Tobruk as a step in the eastward movement, or as an assault to clear at a blow the- Axis way to the Nile, and bring his army within the orbit of the paratroops and airborne troops who are waiting in Crete to overwhelm Egypt. This is a dark picture, and it is made blacker still by the report that Rommel is now reinforced by two fresh panzer divisions and a new air fleet. It has been an exceedingly bad show, and it will be hard to convince an angered empire that every resource was strained to ensure the best equipment and the most vital generalship for a campaign upon which so much depended. A highly critical and acrimonious debate is certain to accompany the Commons’ inquest on the ignominious defeat. The target of criticism, which has so largely excluded _ Churchill on previous occasions of national urgency, may be widened to include him on this disastrous occasion, and at least the possibility of a successful \ challenge to his over-riding authority presents itself. His complete over-lordship is likely to he powerfully, if not. decisively, tested.

The full shape of Germany’s spring offensive in Russia is not yet determinable, but the Kharkov and Crimean drives are so obviously a vital link-up with the campaign against Egypt that they will be prosecuted with the same vigour and disregard of the cost. So far German successes in the Kharkov sector are by no means; so decisive as to imply absolute possession of the initiative. but tbe reports from the Crimea convey the impression that there the enemy is going flat out for the reduction of Sebastopol, and there- is no need to stress the fact that the loss of this, the sole remaining base of adequate equipment to service the Russian fleet, would at a stroke annul the Soviet’s command of the Black Sea. The importance attached by the enemy to undisputed control here may be assessed from the fact that he is using 1,500 war, planes daily in a 24-hour bombardment of Sebastopol and its environs, while already seven infantry divisions have been decimated, withdrawn, and replaced in obstinate attack parried by as obstinate defence. The Russians are opposing once more to apparently irrevocable defeat that core or courage and high steadfastness that thwarted the enemy last year, and may do so again.

Tho Coral Sea and Midway checks to Japan’s amazing career of military success have been followed by a period of quiescence so far as concerns the Southwest Pacific, and the enemy’s only overt activity is in China, where he is making desperate efforts in the Chekiang and Kiangsi provinces to secure the railways and the airfields from which, if Allied aid should come in time, an air offensive against Formosa and Japan could carry the war disastrously to the enmey’s home front. China at the moment is almost completely isolated. With the closing of the Burma road and the enemy also athwart other projected supply routes, present aid is confined to what can be flown, and the trickle of supplies filtering along the international highway from Russia. In the meantime the situation can hardly be amended as regards supply of munitions, but. as expert opinion credits China with the ability to carry on a defensive war indefinitely with such equipment as she herself can produce, this isolation from Allied support will not compromise the situation irredeemably, provided we furnish the one essential that China lacks, and that is within our power to supply—aeroplanes to defend her industries and cities. America has made a beginning with the transport of one bomber unit, and if the Allies can build up a reasonably powerful air force upon this nucleus, there is little doubt that the Chinese can hold off Japan’s attacks in the areas to which

fighting is now restricted, areas where mechanised warfare is impossible. [When these notes were written the news of General Ritchie’s withdrawal of the Bth Army to Egypt had not been announced.] ,