World War, STRATEGY: Invasion Front

Adolf Hitler’s most vital objective in all Russia is the Caucasus. On that bridge of land between the Black and Caspian Seas lie fields which give Russia 93% of her war-blood: oil. Last week the British appeared to have made the crucial decision to help the Russians keep Hitler away from Caucasian oil as long as possible.

This was not a decision to be made with a snap of the fingers. It might mean sacrificing many men, much equipment. But it was so logical as to be imperative: a race to the Caucasus would both protect the Russian Achilles’ heel and provide the least difficult means of sending supplies to Russia.

There were several hints of the British decision:

> General Sir Archibald Percival Wavell flew from India to London. There he had frequent talks with Winston Churchill and with Chief of the Imperial General Staff General Sir John Dill. One day he went out into Dorsetshire to see if he could flush a few partridge. He bagged two brace. When someone asked what he would do with them, he answered: “Eat them myself, of course, in Teheran on Tuesday.” This week, sure enough, Sir Archibald was in Iran, nearly 3,000 miles by air from the Dorset downs. He had stopped on the way for urgent discussion with General Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck, commanding in the Middle East. In Teheran he talked with the Russian commander in Iran, Major General Vassili Novikox. A British mission flew to Tiflis in the Caucasus for further discussions. The implication of these scurryings was obvious.

> Field Marshal Lord Milne, who was Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1926-33, wrote an article for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in which he said: “To those who are desirous of action and demanding a new front for attack, I would suggest that the opportunity for action is approaching. . . . The Russian-Persian line is our invasion front and we must invade with all the power we have.”

> Captain Oliver Lyttelton, Britain’s political and economic coordinator in the Middle East, flew to London for consultations.

> The British appointed a transport expert, Brigadier General Sir Godfrey Rhodes, as director of transportation through Iran. Within a few days complete plans had been drawn up. It was decided to improve two Persian Gulf ports, Iran’s Bandar Shahpur and Iraq’s Basra (see map). Road and rail links with Teheran and Tabriz would be improved or completed as soon as possible. Auxiliary lines, from India via Baluchistan or Afghanistan, and from the Mediterranean via Syria or Palestine, may also be developed. But all this would take a long time.

> Australian troops who fought in Greece and Crete were re-equipped for mountain fighting with the very things they lacked last time: mortars, pack artillery, mules.

> A big convoy hurried to the Middle East the hard way—straight through the Mediterranean. This was apparently the first load of equipment for Russia. Its passage was marked by the usual flurry of Italian air attacks on the convoy itself, by an unusual flurry of British air attacks on Italian and Sicilian cities—an apparent effort to divert the Italian Air Force from attacking the convoy.

Wall and Gate. Urgency was evident in all these preparatory hints. The British obviously wanted to get into the Caucasus as soon as they could. What would they find when they got there?

They would find a spine of mountains far more formidable than the Balkans, grimmer and higher than the Pyrenees. Across this spine they would find only one motor road, the so-called Georgian Military Highway, which is military in a strictly 19th-Century sense. It is an unpaved road as full of hairpins as a Gibson hairdo; it is cut by many mountain torrents, across which the only passage is sometimes a breeches buoy; it is impassable during much of the winter. The road around the range on the Black Sea end is almost as bad. Only on the Caspian Sea end is there a low-lying, negotiable road and railway, which run through the Caspian Gate, a narrow defile at Derbent.

This has always been the classic route of trade and invasion. It would be again, because it leads straight to Baku, the biggest oil field.

Hopes of Victory. Manning a ready-built Great Wall sounds easy. But in doing so the British will have to perform miracles of supply, do wonders with inadequate airfields. And the British have little equipment to spare from the defense of Egypt.

But the defense of Egypt, which seemed so crucial last spring, was apparently a secondary consideration last week. Said the cautious New Statesman and Nation:

“The German advance guard on the shores of the Sea of Azov is already dangerously far on the road to the Caucasus and its oil wells. That is the stake which the Russians must hold at all costs, and to us it is more vital than the Suez Canal and Gibraltar together. . . . Should the wells be lost, Russia, within six months, would face both defeat and starvation. With that catastrophe our own hopes of victory would vanish, for there is no other army on which we could rely to effect the liberation of Europe.”