The Southland Times SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1941. Unity of Command in Total War

Southland Times, Issue 24593, 15 November 1941, Page 6

The Southland Times SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1941. Unity of Command in Total War

LIEUTENANT-General Sir Thomas Blarney, who is at present in Australia on special leave from the Middle East, was reported yesterday to have hinted at the possibility of an “extensive campaign” next spring. He went on to explain that air support in the Middle East “had improved out of all comprehension, while the newly devised co-opera-tion between the Army and the Air Force would probably spell the end of all the former troubles.” The full extent of these “former troubles” is not yet fully realized by the general public. It is widely known, of course, that the German system of unified command, under which the Luftwaffe was placed at the disposal of the military authorities for concerted action with the ground forces, proved one of the decisive factors in the battle for France. The British and French system, which left the air forces under separate commands, could scarcely be contrasted with the enemy’s method while so few Allied planes were available. A tragic shortage of equipment was the outstanding fact of last year’s campaigns: to a certain extent it obscured the second, and equally important, fact that there were deficiencies of strategy and tactics as well as of supply. A severe, but not essentially unjust, criticism of the British system of separate commands was quoted a week ago in a cable message from New York. Writing in Collier’s Magazine, RearAdmiral Harry Yarnell declared that “the Royal Air Force has been ineffective as an all-round military tool.” He was careful to emphasize that the R.A.F. had been magnificently successful in defending Britain against the Luftwaffe: his point was simply that its function as an independent unit weakened its value as an instrument of total warfare. The same argument has been put forward in the magazine Foreign Affairs, by George Fielding Eliot, a distinguished American expert. “The British,” he writes, “have tried to obtain unity of purpose and effort, not by co-ordination and control, as have the Germans, but by co-opera-tion and agreement. This may produce reasonably satisfactory administration in time of peace, but it is not a method suited to waging war.” Like Rear-Admiral Yarnell, he quotes a number of cases where lack of experience in co-ordinated action has resulted in disastrous failures, and he repeats the story of bad feeling between troops evacuated from Crete and the personnel of the R.A.F.—even going so far as to suggest that its effect on morale “is still one of the considerations which operates against a renewal of the British offensive against Axis forces in Libya.” Fortunately the old system of separate commands has its critics inside as well as outside the British Army. The brilliant success of the offensive in the Western Desert was partly the result of an agreement by which the air squadrons engaged in the operations were placed entirely under the control of General Wavell. In Crete, on the other hand, General Freyberg had to depend for air support on squadrons controlled by the Air Officer Commanding the Middle East Command of the R.A.F., stationed in Cairo. Similarly, naval support was outside his control; and the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet was in his turn without any direct authority over the air operations. Divided responsibility means hesitations, loss of valuable time in crucial periods, and the lack of that unity and complete understanding which gives thrust and power both to offensive and defensive actions. Perhaps it is true that the co-ordination of all services —industrial and propagandist as well as military—for the purposes of total warfare is incompatible with democracy, since it implies an authority and discipline unknown outside the totalitarian States. But if a unified command could be secured by General Wavell in the Western Desert, the pre-, cedent surely indicates the direction of future developments. General Blarney’s statement encourages the hope that the hard lessons of Crete have been learned in the Middle East, and that there, at least, there ;vill be no more fatal divisions of function and responsibility.