CUNNINGHAM’S TASK

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25802, 24 March 1945, Page 10

CUNNINGHAM’S TASK

SEA POWER IN PACIFIC PLANNING FINAL BLOWS At a large ornate desk in a creamEanelled room at the Admiralty, in ondon, there sits a little tight-lipped man thinking out bad news for the Japanese, writes Carl Olsson in the BBC News Service. Above his head a portrait of Nelson stares reflectively across at a print of England’s ancient sea battles. It is a silent room. .As he sits brooding there the noise of traffic in nearby Whitehall reaches him only as a muted murmur like the far-off beat of surf on shore. Fit background for his ‘thoughts. “ Home is the sailor, home from the sea. . The little man is Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, Bart.. First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff.

A.8.C., as the Navy calls him, has spent 46 out of his 60 years at sea. (There is a story that once he received some war-time official form by mistake. Opposite the clause asking him what he had been in civil life he wrote the word “ child.”) For 35 of those years he has held commands, known the loneliness of full responsibility. Records of Service

His first command was a destroyer, Scorpion, which he got at the early age of 25 and held for seven years 'a record). His last was that of the Mediterranean Fleet, in which he created another recor'd as holding a longer tenure of office than any other fighting chief in this war. In all his long years of service he has held a shore job—a desk job—only twice: a few months at the Admiralty as Deputy Chief of Naval Staff in 193839'and a short spell of duty in Washington, while the North African campaign was being planned. When he was in command in the Mediterranean his H.Q. was Navy House, in Alexandria, where the Admiralty wanted him to be. His staff was there, but not Cunningham. He was in his cabin in his flagship where he wanted to be, and where he did most of the business of his high command. The Admiralty had misgivings about this arrangement. The Mediterranean zone of operations was so vast and so complicated that the Lords Commissioners preferred a C.-in-C. to be sitting ashore, not liable to go charging off into battle at any moment. But that was how Cunningham liked it, and he won his point. And proved it. For on one day while he was at sea he had 16 separate British naval operations (apart from anti-U-boat patrols) going on at the same time, and divided by many hundreds of miles of sea. Yet all were'closely interlocked in the general scheme, and Cunningham from his sea, cabin kept control of them all.

Not Numbers Alone

It is his own expressed opinion that he is no good at a desk job. In the opinion of those best fitted to know, however, he is one of the best administrative brains the navy has ever had, ,as -well as its most legendary fighter since Nelson. He has held seagoing commands from too early an age ever to become a specialist (that cramping influence on all-round administrative ability) in any branch of naval art. But in his job as First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff he has all the specialist assistance he needs. And now this sailor who loves the sea, this great fighter and leader, is up against the toughest proposition of his life. The Japanese Fleet has got to be defeated within the next two years, and it is going to be no easy matter. It is going to need the whole of British naval power as well as American to do it.

Do not be deceived by the undoubted numerical superiority of the American over the Japanese Fleet. Numbers, alone, do not decide sea actions. Remember Cunningham himself. The day after Mussolini declared war Cunningham put to sea to challenge the Italian Fleet with a force consisting of two battleships, one carrier, live cruisers, and a few destroyers, which was about his entire fleet. For long years during the greatest, sea campaign in history his numerical inferiority verged on the ludicrous. At one time his entire battle-worthy force in the Mediterranean consisted of three cruisers. At another time his entire air support consisted of one fighter pilot. (When they gave Cunningham a K.C.8., he is reported to have said. “ I wish they had given me three squadrons of Hurricanes instead.”) The Grim Days

He knows what can be done with very little, what can be done by bluff and. fighting whenever opportunity offers. In his sea-going cabin there has always hung his favourite piece of verse by his hero, a seventeenthcentury Scot, the Marquess of Montrose: He either fears his fate too much Or his desserts are small That dares not put it to the touch To win, or lose it all. How often, during the grim days of Malta and Crete and Libya, he must have looked wryly at that verse. But, in the end, after those terrible povertystricken years, he was able to receive the surrender of the whole Italian Fleet, to sit down and write that famous despatch, beginning: “Be pleased to inform their Lordships that the Italian Battle Fleet is now anchored under the guns of Malta.” Yes, Cunningham knows what can be done with very little. And the Japanese have still a lot and, perhaps, some things we do not know about yet (How many 16in “ battlewagons ” have they built, for instance? We know they have built some under the blanket of secrecy dropped over Japan’s warbuilding of the last eight years.) It may need almost the whole of the Royal Navy to finish that job. It is Cunningham’s last and biggest task to plan how that job may best and most speedily be done. It will need all his sea cunning, his vast experience as a naval strateg'st. And if no man need envy him that task, yet we know that there is none more fitted to carry it out.