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Aviation History
1941
1941 - 0638.PDF
212 MARCH 13TH, 1941. THE MIDDLE EAST OFFENSIVE (Continued) Greece were, first, his need to strengthen his sea lines of communication across the Mediterranean, and, secondly, the ulterior objective of closing in towards the northern end of the ^igean Sea as a first move to- wards the inevitable attempt upon the part of Germany to circle the Black Sea in the eastward plunge for oil, Hitler's most vital commodity, as it is also Italy's. .To-day, the position is that Germany is faced with making the great attempt ^alone, for Italy's failure to get through to the .#igean forces Germany to alter her strategy and make a more westerly stroke than she might otherwise have had to make. The calculation must have been that Italy should take Thrace. Instead Italy took flight. The Hitlerian spring comes again, and with it the drums of war beat loud. Japan has entered from the other wing now that Italy has left the stage. And all this is, as near as no matter, the direct result of the tactical employment of aircraft in the Middle East. Some people may say that is drawing too long a bow altogether and argue that the victory on the Western Desert was won by mechanised ground forces and infantry. And I agree, provided that it is first agreed thai the initiation of the campaign was pendant upon the supremacy of the air. Else why wait for more aii era ft before starting? Co-ordinated Power Which is the most important part of a hand barrow —the wheel Which goes in front and takes the load off the ground, the container portion, or the handles by which it is lifted? It would take a Solomon to say; but I have seen more barrows disabled by a broken wheel than by any other part. And the wheel which went in front, and which took the load.off the ground, in the Western Desert, was like the wheel which is spoken of in the first chapter of Ezekiel, when the prophet written of in that book was by the valley of the river of Chebaf and dreamed a dre"am which was a vision of the future. The campaign in the Western Desert was postulated upon a co-ordination of concentrated power which could be applied by a nation able to obtain local air and sea supremacy, and so provide the requisite conditions to enable a relatively small and highly mobile land force to hit far harder than it could have hit unaided. It is the place of no one but General Wavell to apportion the precise relationships of each of the extremely im- portant auxiliary forces which enabled the ground units to break through the Italian fortified positions one after the other in a series of what we, in air parlance, would call half-rolls along the coastline of that sponge-fisher's paradise. Nevertheless, it is pertinent to say that a force on land too inferior in strength would have been unable to bring to .bear the weight of high explosive necessary to prepare the way for the final ground assaults, which in every case were reported as having been made with almost fabulously small losses. And hi work of this nature we >ee the Navy and the Air Force in action in a way which must be the dream of the Staff College graduate. The Navy with its mobility and ability to carry its own magazine of shells : the Air Force with its capacity to strike far from its base and to do so quickly, so that the effort needed to get back and refuel and re-bomb seems trifling by comparison with the swiftest movement of the ground forces. In the course of the campaign we have seen the forward movement of ground forces referred to as phenomenal when they have been in the order of about fifty miles or so per day. It does not cut much ice with the fellow who is accustomed to thinking in terms of a cruising speed of 200 miles an hour as normal. It is a great difficulty in life that all things are relative. And the relativity of the Western Desert campaign must have been. the greatest problem which confronted the Staff responsible for the calculations of the movements of the tripartite forces engaged. And here precisely is where we come to the principal lesson of the Western Desert campaign. . • " ;'**- The Limiting Factor There is nothing ing^y part of the campaign to show that more was d#ffe than could have been calculated—* years ago in the Staff College, with the co-operation of the three Services faced with the new situation which had arisen as a result of the conquest of Abyssinia by the forces of the Duce. It would not have mattered very much whether the aircraft employed in the triple collaboration in the advance were monoplanes or bi- planes, were very fast or very slow, so long as they were able to wrest the mastery of the air from the enemy who had to be engaged. For the essence of the whole operation was not concerned with the speed of aircraft but with the speed of the ground forces. Jolly old 50^-* Avros would have been all right if the I-ties had had nothing superior. As things panned out, the Italians were armed mostly with Fiat CR.42 fighters, and a few of the more modern monoplane type, which were not up to the Hurricane standard anyhow, with a number of bombers which were first-class in 1935 but have since been superseded in countries not owing allegiance to the " old black shirt," which is a far more deadly enemy than the "old school tie." My critics will arise to slay me. They will say: " But there was never a more successful campaign, was—* there? " And I will answer: "Yes, a campaign which defeated an enemy entirely in one operation." Then will the critics say: " But the Italians were defeated in Cyrenacia." And again I will answer : " The Italians, like the Germans, must be defeated at home, and as the Chinese say : ' Allee same like the British.' " And this brings me to what I consider to be the crux of the whole campaign in Libya. As it is, it is a local N^ victory. A brilliant victory. A grand advertisement for the reinvigoration of John Bull. But it is not con- clusive. Italy is still intact. Hitler is still making his— moves. Our preponderant Air Force hitting power, expended upon desert objectives, has assisted German industry to work less impeded by bombs during the winter months. And, at the end, Italy, although no doubt grievously wounded, is not necessarily mortally stricken. Could it have been otherwise? I believe it might. I believe that, simultaneously with the onslaught of our forces in the desert upon the trumpery (as they turned out) soldiers of Mussolini, we ought to have concentrated the remainder of our bomber force—all that we could spare from day-to-day operations—to engage upon the. task of striking at Mussolini's metropolitan Italy and so to claw down the evil structure which he has built about the people of the land of whom Garibaldi spoke when he said cursed be the Italian who does not go to the help of Britain when she needs an ally. If we had gone for the main structure at the same time as the outhouses Mussolini might have been out of the war by now. Our tactical error was in not attacking metropolitan Italy simultaneously with the offensive in the Middle East. -
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