“Nuisance Value” In The Mediterranean

Southland Times, Issue 23796, 19 April 1939, Page 4

“Nuisance Value” In The Mediterranean

MANY newspaper readers must have noticed that troop and naval movements on a scale greater than in the anxious days of September have been reported in the past few weeks from Europe. This activity has become especially noticeable in the Mediterranean since the Italian invasion of Albania. According to a message printed on Monday, forty German warships are to have their spring manoeuvres off the Atlantic coast of Spain. It has been emphasized in Berlin that the movement is nothing more than an “extraordinary foreign training cruise.” But it seems strange that a Government which claims to have peaceful intentions should have decided to send a fleet to this particular region at a time of abnormal tension in foreign affairs. Moreover the reports of troop concentrations in Spain and in Spanish Morocco are so persistent that it is becoming easy to suspect a connection between naval and military movements at the western end of the Mediterranean One message stated that 15,000 to 20,000 fresh Italian troops have landed at Cadiz, and large forces —including about 10,000 German technicians—are still in the Peninsula. A great deal of heavy artillery is believed to be near the Franco-Spanish frontier, and it is reliably reported that hundreds of aeroplanes are also in this region. Another report said that 90,000 soldiers are now stationed in Spanish Morocco “compared with 36,000 before the civil war.” According to a correspondent of the British United Press about 12,000 Spanish troops were transported from the mainland a few days ago and are concentrated near the international zone of Tangier. There is also a curious story about large numbers of Ital-,

ian sailors in Tangier, although no warship is there at present. A Co-ordinated Plan?

Taken separately these movements might not seem unusually ominous while troops are in arms or on the march (purely as “precautionary measures”) in various parts of Europe. But if they are examined together it is difficult not to see them as steps in a co-ordinated process. In any case the ominous possibilities appear to have been recognized by Britain and France, whose Mediterranean fleets have taken up positions near Malta and Gibraltar. It would be unwise to assume that these manoeuvres mean anything more serious than the display of armed force and the trick of keeping the world guessing which have become the usual accompaniments of fascist diplomacy. But they emphasize in a realistic way the strategic changes that have taken place in the western Mediterranean, largely as the result of fascist domination in Spain. The end of the civil war is not likely to mean the end of alarms and difficulties for France and Britain, whose vital interests in this region are now much more vulnerable than in the recent past. If war comes the Germans and Italians will be able to keep aircraft under the Pyrenees and at the same time make use of submarine bases near the Strait of Gibraltar, both in Spain and Morocco. They will also have an Atlantic coastline between Portugal and France, so that the Portuguese alliance (which has been described by competent observers as an essential condition for victory in a European war) may no longer be a decisive factor, even though it remains obviously important. There can be little doubt that fascist intervention in Spain has conferred real advantages on the Rome-Berlin axis. The question now taking shape against events in the Mediterranean is whether or not they ’ are to be used as anything more serious than nuisance value in the next phase of the fascist campaign.