SOUTH AFRICA

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4535, 11 February 1942, Page 2

SOUTH AFRICA

ITS STRATEGIC VALUE “Without the use of South African ports it would have been impossible for Great Britain to have conducted her campaign in Ethiopia, to reconquer British Somaliland, take Syria, hold Iraq, and save Suez and Egypt for the Empire. Italy’s entry into the war, which Marshal Smuts foresaw and prepared against long before Mussolini openly declared war, virtually closed the Mediterranean, the British Empire’s ‘short’ lifeline, which formerly supplied its forces engaged in these campaigns. Without the

South African ports as sea bases to fall back on as halfway refitting and reprovisioning havens, Great simply could not have maintained her ‘long’ lifeline around the tip of Africa and her struggle in the Middle East. A ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ railroad, as envisioned by Cecil Rhodes, would have changed the whole picture of strategy in the present war in Africa and the Middle East. Many times General Sir Archibald P. Wavell and other British and South African strategists have sighed for it. It is only the half-dozen good harbours in South Africa which have compensated for the lack of good transport highways or the Cape-to-Cairo railroad had prevented the Empire from being cut in half at Suez.”—Mr Hiram Blauveit, in the New York “Herald Tribune.”