Strategic Map: Gateway from the Orient

On the following two pages TIME presents a map of the strategic geography of northeastern Africa and southwestern Asia. Between the two lies the Red Sea, no mean body of water. It is approximately 1,500 miles long, roughly half as long as the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans. But with its width (up to 250 miles) it is the size of 50 Mississippis.

This immemorial gateway from the Orient to the Mediterranean has an inner and an outer gate. The inner gate is Port Said, which is the focus of British strategy throughout the region. The outer gate is the island of Perim at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden. In World War I the British found their enemies, the Turks, in Asia and drove eastward and northward from the Canal into Arabia, Palestine and Syria. In World War II, when Italy declared war in June, the British found their enemies on the other side of the gate and faced about to fight westward and southward.

Last time, with their naval bases at Alexandria and on the island of Cyprus, they commanded the eastern Mediterranean, keeping open their short trade route to the Orient. This time that route is cut farther west, by Italy in midMediterranean, and the British Fleet protecting the Canal found another function: to threaten Italy in the Mediterranean, raid her supply lines and cut off completely the Italian forces in East Africa (which now includes what once was Ethiopia).

But these very Italian forces in East Africa threatened to cut off the British who had cut them off. Except for the dangerous route the full length of the Mediterranean, the main supply line of the British forces at Port Said runs the length of the Red Sea after passing Perim at the head of the Gulf of Aden.

The strait there is too wide to be blocked and the barren island of Perim, whence pirates once took toll, although in British hands, does not control it so much as the nearby ports. Along the Red Sea’s African Coast the Italians held Assab, Massaua and got Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden when France surrendered. The nearest British base was Aden across the Gulf.

With each side holding one of the entrances to the Red Sea, the two adversaries were like men each of whom has a tight grasp on the other’s windpipe. The question was largely which one could first choke the other and break his grip before he himself was strangled.

The Italian grip at the southern entrance of the Red Sea was weaker because the Italian squadron in East Africa was only strong for commerce raiding, not to meet any major British squadron in battle. But the British had to break the Italian grip in order to feel comfortable, and this would involve a campaign against the Italian ports in that area and against Ethiopia.

The last time the world went mad the turning point in the Near East was the revolt of the Arabs. Thomas Edward Lawrence, a magnificent introvert from Wales, organized the Arabs for the revolt which broke Turkey’s power and set up Great Britain’s and France’s control over what are now Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Trans-Jordan, Oman, Aden and the Hadramaut. That Britain planned a similar campaign appeared in July when she made Emperor Haile Selassie, the ex-Lion of Judah, her formal ally in order to have his aid in raising revolt among his African people.

Britain also counted on a potential second Lawrence of Arabia, Major John Bagot Glubb, commandant of Trans-Jordan’s independent Arab legions since 1930. The Arabs

(continued on third page following) call him Abu-el-Hanak (“The Man With The Jaw”). He won their admiration and confidence by leading bands of Iraqi and Bedouin tribesmen against raiders from Saudi Arabia in 1924. Quiet, studious, slender, stooped, Major Glubb spoke Arabic even better than Lawrence did, was believed to have even more influence than Lawrence had.

Ethiopia is no Arab-country, and far from wanting to raise a revolt among the Arabs who came mostly into Britain’s sphere of influence after World War I, Britain wanted nothing so much as to keep them quiet. But various dialects of Arabic are the language of Egypt, the Sudan and Libya, as well as of the Asiatic shore. Furthermore, the Arabs are expert desert soldiers and might prove useful allies to the British in Libya and the Sudan, where roads are almost as scarce as railroads, and the chief highways are furrows in the sand worn by the feet of generations of camels traveling from oasis to oasis—where in fact the only cultivated land is the green strip that follows the winding Nile.

The Italians on their part, soon after entering the war, began advancing on the Sudan from the Abyssinian watershed where rise the Blue Nile and the Atbara River, around Lake Tana in Ethiopia. Fear of these streams’ sources falling into Italian hands was one of the factors which undermined the famed Hoare-Laval Deal in 1935, whose adoption might have averted the Axis’ being formed. Ethiopia became Italian anyway, and the threat to the vital water supply of Egypt and the Sudan was underscored by the Italian advance in this region.

Methods of desert warfare have altered materially since Colonel Lawrence campaigned in Arabia. Now the territory is covered with numerous airfields (indicated by red windsocks on the map). The opening phase of the war was a continual exchange of bombings between Libya and British posts in Egypt, including Alexandria. More important, perhaps, air reconnaissance makes difficult surprise attacks and raids across the desert such as those at which Lawrence was adept.

Moreover, the warships of the deserts are no longer camels but tanks and armored cars. The picturesque British Camel Corps, set up in Africa 50 years ago, now rides in tanks, armored lorries and motorcycles.

When Italy entered the war, defending the British position in the Middle East were the same kinds of soldiers who won it 22 years ago: 80,000 English soldiers, 15,000 Australians (not allowed in Egypt because they raised such hell there last time), 10,000 New Zealanders and several thousand Indians, in the basic force in Palestine and Egypt. To these are added numerous local detachments such as 1,000 Indians and Britons at Aden. The total strength of the R. A. F. in the region was believed to be about 1,300 planes.

Italy’s forces in Libya under fierce Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, who succeeded Italo Balbo when the latter was killed, could be reinforced from Italy’s total reserves at home as long as Italian transports could safely cross the Mediterranean. Water is the direst military factor in Libya. In East Africa, reinforceable only by air (because Suez would be plugged before being surrendered), Italy had one white division (Savoy Grenadiers) of 21,391 men, seven native militia legions (50,000), 70,000 white farmers and workers trained as a militia reserve. Her airplanes there, which could be added to from home, totaled only 225 frontline, 200 reserves.

The British naval strength at Alexandria comprised only three battleships, with not nearly enough cruisers and destroyers (they had counted on French vessels which instead were disarmed in Alexandria’s harbor) to match—on paper—the full strength of the Italian Navy (six battleships, with two new ones coming up). But the British counted on the fact that the thin-skinned Italian ships were not built to stand punching from British 15-in. guns.

With this small force strategically placed, the British hoped to held the eastern Mediterranean. If the Italians succeeded in taking Egypt and the Canal by land or sea, the British Fleet or what remained of it might flee, the Canal might be blocked, but Egypt’s teeming millions, whose bond to the British, whom they dislike, is only that they dislike the Italians more, could offer no opposition. There would be imminent danger that the Arabs of Palestine, still piqued at Britain’s unfulfilled promises of 1915, would revolt. And certainly the termini at Haifa and Tripoli of the pipelines from Mosul would fall into Italian hands. Britain’s hold on the Near East would collapse.