VICHY NAVAL BASE

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20602, 1 November 1941, Page 10

VICHY NAVAL BASE

PORT ON IVORY COAST PROBABLE AXIS DEPOT Abidjan, the barely-known island naval base on the Ivory Coast, in Vichy hands, is called Little Dakar because its potential power is increasingly attracting the attention of West Coast naval strategists. The base has been so secretly developed that on most maps it is not even marked. Nevertheless, it will soon offer' a perfectly land-locked harbour 40 miles from the exposed coastline. Abidjan was, a special correspondent of the Daily Telegraph writes, planned as France's most southerly base on the Atlantic even before the collapse of France. It is difficult to say whether German minelaying submarines, which have attempted to break Britain’s Middle East lifeline from the United States by blockading Lagos and Takoradi, are using Abidjan as supply base and anchoring in the adjacent port of Bouet. Allied Blockade Penetrated It has been ascertained beyond doubt that Vichy vessels have penetrated the Allied shipping control. For some months British airmen have been able to observe supply ships anchored at Port Bouet, par-

ticularly during July, when minelaying activities were most noticeable. It is believed that these vessels, which slipped through the British Cargo Control operating from Freetown, Sierra Leone, came from South America across the Atlantic.

What is now Abidjan was until five years ago only a village inland leading to the small trading port of Grand Bassam. The French engineers suggested that the salt creek west of Grand Massam could be dredged, thus making a canal ideal for the protection of submarines.

The old seaport of Grand Bassam has now become a ghost town. ' All plans centre in the new town which has become already the capital of the Ivory Coast. Ail Aviation Centre Abidjan is being studied to-day as an aviation centre as well as a submarine base. Until recently France maintained liaison along the African coast with a fleet of 10 American Sikorsky amphibian planes. To-day, with the Free French holding two of the ports used for landing, and with the British patrolling the coast actively from Bathurst, Gambia, to Lagos, Nigeria, Vichy has been obliged to put an airline into service. From Naimey, American Glenn Martins can drop southward to the Dahomey seaport at Cottonou and from Bamako to Abidjan. Thus Vichy, and so Germany, controls strong inland aviation bases capable of defending its ports in the Gulf of Guinea, and possibly striking laterally at British unloading ports.