DANGER ZONE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 78, 1 July 1943, Page 3

DANGER ZONE

THE GIBRALTAR STRAITS REPORT OF NAZI GUN EMPLACEMENTS Excerpts from an account of the German Army plan for cutting the Gibraltar Straits, broadcast by “The Christian Science Monitor” news analyst. The Germans have worked out a simple plan to neutralise Gibraltar and by-pass it. There is an arc of mountains which sweeps around the whole north side of Gibraltar, dominating the naval base and pinning the Rock back against the sea. They rise 2,000 or 2,500 feet, and their peaks are not more than 4 or 5 miles from the naval base Itself. Not many people know how dangerous those mountains are to the defenders of the Rock. And still fewer people know that the British once had a treaty with Spain which specifically forbade fortifying those mountains, because it would be so easy to lob shells from comparative safety, there, into Gibraltar harbour. Well, the Germans already have their siege guns in position on those mountains. They could make the naval base useless to ships of the United Nations at once, immediately on entering Spain. And then they plan merely to smash up the harbour, carry on an artillery duel with the defenders of the Rock, and to waste no time trying to storm the fortress itself. Meanwhile, the important business of cutting the Straits would be transacted a good many miles away. I was given the whole very significant story by some anti-Nazi friends in the Spanish War Department at Madrid, wjio had access to the German plans. Gibraltar, they reminded me, is not in the narrows; it merely commands the entrance to them. The Straits are a good 14 miles wide there. But if you move ten miles further along the Straits, out toward the Atlantic, the gap narrows to about B>} miles and continues at that width for some distance. There the Germans have prepared their Straits-cutting apparatus—a comfortable 12 to 15 miles from the British guns in the big Rock. My Spanish Army friend said that huge batteries of German guns were already mounted along those narrows, ready to open fire. He shrugged his shoulders when I asked how the Spanish felt about them. “What can we do,” he asked plaintively, “when the Germans insist?” But there were other Spaniards who were angry clear through. I had some friends who owned a lot of property right along the narrows, and I went to the south of Spain to visit them. The Spanish Army, they told me, had simply confiscated large portions of their best olive groves and vineyards, brought in German technicians and installed the big guns right on their property. Naturally I couldn’t get close enough to the heavily guarded gun emplacements myself, but my friends had seen them, under construction at least The Germans’ plan was to concentrate their fire at these narrows from both sides. Obviously Allied ships couldn’t run the blockade in daytime. Even if they sailed down the centre, the guns could still pour in shells at 4 miles distance. And that is pointblank range. What of night time, then? The plan was to use star shells from the Spanish side, laying a curtain of flares beyond the ships, silhouetting them cleanly against the brilliant light. Then the guns, and dive bombers, and torpedo planes, could operate just as in daylight. As for storms, conceivably a naval commander might be willing to blast his way through in really thick weather. Especially since the Straits cannot be mined because they are too deep, and the current is too strong. But sonic devices would help the Germans locate the ships, and they would station submarines and torpedo boats in the narrows, bringing them up from the superb Spanish naval base of Cartagena, not far away. It would be a risky business running that sort of gauntlet for 15 treacherous miles, and anyway, military operations cannot always wait for bad weather, especially in the sunny Mediterranean. I left Spain, then, convinced that the Germans could cut the Straits, in spite of the grand old Rock, and that we might as well face it. General Eisenhower faced it when he landed in Africa. That is one of the reasons why he didn’t push ahead I remember all this when people attack the diplomatic policy of trying to keep the Germans out of Spain. The diplomatic dangers of that policy are another story, of course. But from the military point of view, as long as we can keep those guns in my friends’ olive grove silent, the further ahead we’ll be.