THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES Friday, February 5, 1943. THE STRUGGLE AT SEA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25142, 5 February 1943, Page 4

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES Friday, February 5, 1943. THE STRUGGLE AT SEA

If we have learnt anything at all in this war, it is surely, as the Governor-General has impressively warned us this week, that optimism based on the hasty assumption that minor successes presage speedy and overwhelming victories may be a snare and a delusion. Nowhere is this more true than of the war at sea. Because of a temporary improvement in the shipping position a month or so ago, many leading naval officials' in Washington, lacking perhaps the experience and calmer judgment of their British colleagues, proclaimed to the world their belief that the U-boat menace was at last completely under control. Recent events have discounted these sanguine utterances to an extent that demands notice. The appointment by the German High Command of Admiral Karl Doenitz, successor to Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, as commander-in-chief of the German Navy, provides a grim warning to the Allied nations that the German U-boat campaign, which has already become the most ominous threat to a speedy Allied victory, is about to reach a new pitch of intensity. Doenitz, a technical as well as a tactical expert in submarine warfare, a man who has consistently maintained the belief that the continuance of unrestricted U-boat warfare in the last war would have produced a German victory by 1920, has revolutionised the methods employed by the Germans in the struggle at sea with such marked success that the problem now facing Britain and the United States concerning the opening of a second front in Europe has again become acute. It may, of course, be argued that this new appointment is but the ;• last throw of the gambler’s dice, a desperate last-minute effort by Germany to stave off the inevitable. On the other hand there is little doubt that Doenitz, a fanatical believer in an unrestricted and ruthless U-boat campaign to cripple Allied seapower, will prepare his plans for a renewed onslaught on merchant shipping with all the strength of his undoubted genius. However much we may concern ourselves with global strategy, geopolitics, and the war of continents, it is clear that only by complete command of the sea, Britain’s first front, can victory for the Allies be assured. In a classic which has had a profound effect upon the thought of the world and the policy of nations, “The Influence of Sea Power on History,” Captain Mahan has pointed out once and for all that the course of history shows unmistakably that dominance on land has never been the final determining factor in war and that the ultimate argument rests with the nation that commands the seas. If it is true, as Mahan taught, that naval battles are few’compared with those on land, we must also remember that it is the unremitting daily silent pressure of naval strength—the continuous blocking of communication —which has made sea power so decisive an element in shaping world history. Land conquerors have often viewed sea power with thinly disguised contempt. Napoleon’s vast plans and ambitions crashed at Trafalgar even though he went on to enslave half Europe. Yet British commerce suffered grievously. During the twenty-two-year span of the Napoleonic wars 10,000 British merchant ships were captured or sunk by French, and later, American privateers—the U-boats of the day. In spite of this Napoleon had in the end to surrender to a British man-of-war. It was with similar hopes of destroying. British commerce that the Germans, in 1916, launched their unrestricted submarine campaign. During the dark days of 1917 it almost seemed as if Germany had secured the talisman of victory, yet once again’the command of the seas determined the victor. As Mahan has pointed out, serious interference with commerce is unquestionably an important secondary operation of naval warfare, but as a means to final victory, sufficient in itself to crush an enemy, it is probably a delusion. No one, of course, cam exclude the unexpected from the course of events.’ Historical parallels are often comforting, but as often misleading; and to argue that what happened in 1812 or 1917 must inevitably recur is to be guilty of a wilful complacency which the plain facts of. history can never support. To-day Germany possesses immense advantages for waging the war at sea; she has an iron hold on the Atlantic seaboard of Europe from Trondheim and Bergen to Le Havre aqd St. Nazaire. In the Mediterranean her submarine bases stretch from Marseilles to the ZEgean. All the vast resources of Germany and of Occupied Europe, possibly, too, the industrial strength of adjacent neutrals, will in the near future be devoted to one end—the maintenance at sea of hundreds of U-boats to prey upon Allied shipping in the hope that, if final victory is not attainable, the Reich will at least secure a satisfactory stalemate. This is the challenge which the German High Command has now flung at the United Nations, and on the outcome of the struggle that must ensue will depend the whole future of humanity.