NAVAL’BLUNDERS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 December 1940, Page 5

NAVAL’BLUNDERS

POSITION OF ITALY MUCH IMPAIRED OVERSEAS COMMUNICATIONS ENDANGERED. RESULTS OF POLITICAL PANIC (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, December 1. According to the naval correspondent of the “Manchester Guardian,” it is no longer possible for the Italians to maintain their lines of communication with their overseas armies. They have provided, he says, the most ludricrous example of panic overpowering the reasoned thought of naval experts. By attempting to withdraw the main fleet from Taranto' to Cagliari, resulting in the battle of Sardinia, the naval command committed a major blunder. British naval experts have thus been provided with the opportunity of summing up the new situation in the Mediterranean. Their conclusions are that Italy’s strategic dispositions have been broken and the basis of Mussolini’s defensive plans both in Albania and Libya has been endangered. The naval correspondent of “The Times” especially calls attention to the improvement of the British strategical dispositions as the result of the possession of Greek harbours some of which are among the best in the world, as compared with the situation when the fleet was based on Alexandria, which is some 800 miles from the vital centres of Italy’s communications. “The Times’s” expert also points out that Suda Bay affords an excellent harbour at Crete and is 400 miles nearer than Alexandria to the localities in which naval operations against Italy can most effectively be carried on. Thus a 500-mile radius from Suda Bay, he claims, takes in Brindisi, Taranto, Messina, and Syracuse, while the Libyan ports, except Tripoli, are only 250 miles from Crete.