EMPIRE STRATEGY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4563, 22 April 1942, Page 6

EMPIRE STRATEGY

ITS MANY' ANGLES PROPHECY OF A MILITARY STRATEGIST Theories of race and the laws and principles governing the destinies of nations are food for the philosophic mind usually. It is in terms of stress

and strain that we recalled their prophetic significance as they become topics of general discussion.

Lord Birkenhead caused a stir in England when, in his rectorial address at the Glasgow University in 1923, he

declared: “ The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout arms and sharp swords. It is for us, therefore, to prove in our history a martial rather than a military people, to abstain, as has been our habit, from provocation, but to maintain in our hands adequate means for our own protection, and, so equipped, to march with head erect and bright eyes along the road to our Imperial destiny.”

Twelve years earlier, on the eve of the European war- which roused in Saxons a militancy that Germany became conscious of for four years, a .young American genius, Homer Lea, published “ The Day of the Saxon,” the mocking truths of which now seem sharper in the grim logic of events. While finishing this extraordinary book of military science the

author was stricken with paralysis, and he died prematurely at the age of 36 years. In 1909 his book, “The Valour of Ignorance,” caused a sensation in America, dealing as it did in austere prose with a Japanese invasion of the United States. Mild by contrast, Hector C. Bywater’s imaginative account, with its happy ending, of war between the United States and Japan (in the hypothetical years 1931 to 1933, “ The Great Pacific War,” enjoyed wider popular appeal.

Homer Lea has been hailed as one of the greatest military geniuses of history. Born at Denver, Colorado, on 17th November, 1876, he grew up under-sized and a hunchback. He studied military tactics and the principal wars of history, particularly those of Napoleon; but his boast that he was destined to become a great military commander was received with incredulity by his friends. His physical deformity, however, did not deter him, in 1899, from crossing the Pacific and playing his part in the relief of Pekin during the Boxer rising. The Chinese made him a general in 1909 (he was then 32); he became associated with the reformer K’ang Yuwei, and later, during the revolution, became confidential adviser to Dr Sun Yat Sen. During these crowded years of his short-lived maturity he experienced incredible escapes from death. He never married, or developed strong ties within his own country. Opinions differed concerning his motives, but no one could doubt his uncanny skill in organising and leading the forces of the Chinese people. MILITANT RENASCENCE Brooding upon principles which govern the break-up of a scattered empire, General Lea divided an empire’s life into three stages of militancy—(l) the struggle to survive; (2) conquest; and (3) supremacy or the preservation of ownership. The Saxon race, he proposed, had entered upon its last stage of militancy. Had British statesmen at the close of the militant era of conquest taken the precaution to preserve Saxon militancy in its purity, and held it aloof from the sweat and hypocrisy of commercial supremacy, there would not have existed those dangers which are considered in his work, “ The Day of the Saxon.” As he saw the problem, a militant renascence of the Saxon race was its only hope. For a Saxon to deny war was to epitomise human vanity I

Reading the book at this time, th.

suggestion is irresistible that the Axis preoccupation with “ encirclement ” may have had its origin and encouragement in the strictures of Homer Lea. But it is upon the emphasis which he places on the political and military relation of the 'British Empire to the Far East that current interest is focussed. He analyses, with searching candour, the position of India, of Australia, and of New Zealand in Japan’s bid for control of the Pacific. It is by the way to reflect that the Fascists of Germany and Japan (Italy is not mentioned) must have smacked their lips while reading the phrase: “ The circle of the Saxon dominion must be broken, or the greatness of other nations be restricted.” Alopf in his expatriation, Lea appeared to think inevitably in terms of race and not peoples. Without heed of any fusion of democracies, of an .English-speaking bond, he detached America (Canada included) from the British Empire, “in the 'way and deeds of the day we dread to contemplate.” Loss of the American colonies had shattered for ever the possibility of a Saxon empire embracing the entire world. The United States were no longer an Anglo-Saxon nation. With each decade they were drawing, further and further away from the race of their origin. During ninety years of immigration only one quarter of the immigrants were British. INDIA THE PIVOT General Lea decided that the political and military relationship of the British Empire to the Far East was reducible to two conditions—first, the loss or retention of India; and, second, the loss or maintenance- of the political equilibrium of the Pacific. “ Next to an attack on and the direct seizure of the British Islands,” he wrote, “ the loss of India is the most vital blow that can be given to the Saxon Empire. So closely associated is India with the components of the Empire that it is by no means certain that an invasion of England would not be preferred to the conquest of India. In this consideration the wealth of India plays no part, and though its imports and exports exceed those of the Russian Empire ■ (of 1911), its population and area are six times greater than thftse of Germany. In the wreck of India is to be found the Golgotha of the Saxon. “ There are only three countries in the world that possess pre-eminent strategic positions the British Islands, the Japanese Islands, and India. The Indian Empire is in the strategic centre of the third most important portion of the globe. Its influence has had its effect upon the European mind from the earliest times and in the future the power of its strategic position as a determinate factor in world politics will increase with each international adjustment.

“ It is, however, the co-relationship of British possessions in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, in Africa and Asia Minor, that gives to India, as the centre of this vast region, its unique greatness and power. Westward they include Arabia and the east coast of Africa from Aden to Capetown; southward they include the entire Indian Ocean; south-east, Australia and New Zealand; eastward, the Malay Peninsula and the Straits Settlement. These eleven strategic triangles (see map) have, outside of India, their subsidiary centres-r-Asia Minor, the centre of the western sphere; the triangle Seychelles, Mauritius, Diego Garcia, the centre of the southern sphere, and Singapore, centre of the eastern sphere.”

The importance of India in the defence of Australasia was stressed. England’s great error was stated to be its ignorance of India. By this was not meant ignorance in internal government or economies, but in a just recognition of its political relationship with the world and of its character as (he basis of the British Empire. Had India not been where it is there would have been no British Empire. Only because India is British were the Mediterranean and Red Seas, Malta, Cyprus, Egypt, the Suez, and the coasts of Asia Minor under Saxon sovereignty. For the same reason Africa was principally British, as well as Mauritius, Seychelles, and other islands of’the Indian Ocean, together with Burma, the Straits ( Set-. tlement, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Australia.

Discussing the relationship of British Pacific Dominions to the Empire and Asian nations, the strategist declared:—

“ The people of Australia and New Zealand, in consideration of their control of Pacific affairs, are no exception to the above rule, and they have shown no greater prescience than the people of the United States in regard to the new military inter-relationship of nations and its inherent dangers. Australasia has stopped short of what it wishes to accomplish—preservation of the possessions of the Saxon rape. The security of Australasia rests entirely upon one condition—the integrity and continuance of the British Empire. And the first principle of Australasian defence is the defence of India.”

It was peace, not war, that dragged Australasia closer to the shores of Asia. With the gulf separating less than 10,000,000 Australasians in the south Pacific from the thousands of millions that surround them in a world advancing to equality in modern mechanisation, Homer Lea regarded home defence for Australia and N\ew Zealand as “ a military anomaly,” and

he reiterated that the normal defence of the Empire was the defence of India.

AUSTRALIA’S TWO SPHEREES

“ The seven military spheres of Australasia,” General Lea stated, “ are the environs of Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and the islands of New Zealand. It is seen that West Australia has, in mili-‘ tary sense, no defensive inter-relation-ship with the otjier six spheres, because of its isolation, and that its effort would be restricted to its own sphere. This is also true of the two New Zealand spheres. The same isolation exists between the remaining four spheres whenever (a) the line of railway (communication) between Adelaide and Brisbane is broken, or (b) the voluntary segregation of those spheres is enforced by the freedom of the enemy’s movements. The seizure of Australasia would thus be primarily restricted to two strategic spherest—

“ 1. The New South Wales sphere, Sydney. “2. The Victorian sphere, Melbourne.

“ Sydney and Melbourne constitute the arcs of invasion. They are the two strategic spheres of defence of Australasia. “ Once the defence of eastern Australia is thrown westward of the Blue Mountains, and the defence of southern Australasia is pushed north of the Australian Alps, organised defence in the formation of armies would pass in that final stage of inutile warfare to guerrilla warfare and predatory until, self-exhausted, it reached its end.

“ The most dangerous belief that ever laid hold of the Saxon race is the delusion that by defending separately their segregated portions of the Empire they are defending the whole, whereas it is also true that by the defence of the Empire in its concrete character are the components protected.” VALUE OF CHINA Homer Lea was convinced that the defeat of Russia by Japan made Japan more powerful in the Pacific than the. British Empire. He entered the domain of rhetoric when he envisioned the greatest threat to the Empire as coming from an alliance between Germany, Russia, and Japan. It is a happy chance that even genius can be wrong in its world dispositions. “ China is, even more than Russia, a continental nation,” he declared. “As British and Japanese progression are basically convergent on the sea, so are Russia and China convergent on the land. It is this convergence that constitutes the value of the Chinese alliance to the Empire. With the development of China and a diversion of its central population along the railway (and road) routes, which will be constructed to its northern and western frontiers, it can be said that the worth of its alliance increases proportionately with the' Chinese increase in area and the extension of her empire.

“ While the conquest of India predetermines the fate of China, so with equal certitude can we say that the dissolution of China only precedes the expulsion of Saxon power from Asia and the Western Pacific.”

Elaborating Admiral Mahan’s docrine of sea power, Homer Lea offers

solace to us to-day in his reasoning that the ruins of Carthage proved that when the supremacy of an insular nation is alone dependent upon maritime strength it is soon destroyed. “ Its security,” he wrote, “ is ensured only by control of the coasts encompassing the sea. Sea power in an insular empire is not guaranteed by its ships of war, but in the last resort by its capacity to prevent military superiority from encroachcing upon its shores.”