CLARITY IN PLAN AND IN PERFORMANCE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 38, 14 February 1940, Page 8

CLARITY IN PLAN AND IN PERFORMANCE

"An operation boldly conceived, skilfully planned, and efficiently concluded." This is the editorial summing up of the "New York Times" concerning "the new Odyssey," wherein an Anzac army has crossed the Indian Ocean without any Emden incident as in 1914, and under the convoy of a purely Allied squadron ranging from battleship class downward. The Australians have been moved over two seas, and the New Zealanders over three, to the strategic point where Red Sea and Mediterranean are joined by canal; jand the American editor, yiewI ing this silent transference of hitting power from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern —from the new lands of the South to the old Land of the Pharaohs—concedes boldness of conception, skilful planning, and success. These words are the more notable because they are capable of a wider application to the whole of the Middle East and Near East strategy, which covers not only the Anzac development but the wider disposition of British, Egyptian, Indian, and powerful French forces, who, with the Turks, stand on guard from the Balkans to Syria and from Syria to I India. The "New York Times" odints out that if not a shot is fired, this strategy will have been successful, for it is a warning to Russia and Germany rather than a threat —a form of insurance against a spread of the war."

Few things in the war of 1914-18 have been more criticised than the delay and confusion in the development of the AlKed strategy and operations in the Near and the Middle East—the halting evolution of the DardaneUes-GallipoH policy from a purely nav»l attack on the Dardanelles to an amphibious assault, and finally to land operations that from the originjal plan were expressly excluded. No one yet has been able to praise the conception and the planning; few have been able to excuse the continually changing objectives of the Dardanelles and Mesopotamian campaigns, though John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir) was able to point out the great .temptations which, for two or more centuries, have confronted British oversea leaders, especially the temptation to attempt too much in a foreign country with too small a striking force. Sometimes, in Empire history, the luck of a corporal's guard in bold inland penetrations —as, indeed, in New Guinea today —has held good; sometimes it has ended in tragedy, a3 with Gordon at Khartoum and as with Townsend in Mesopotamia. But though definiteness in conception and skill in planning could not be claimed for the Near East and Middle East strategy of 1914-17, there is good evidence that they attend the strategy of today —in, of course, a totally different set of political circumstances^ —and that the Anzac army, its Odyesey completed, is a perfectly fittiog cog in a skilfully wrought machine. This at any rate is the impression in New York Press circles if not in the propaganda factory of Dr. Goebbels —but that is another story.