SIR C. AUCHINLECK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 July 1941, Page 4

SIR C. AUCHINLECK

WAR LEADER WHO LOOKS FORWARD EPISODES IN NOTABLE CAREER. STUDY OF NEW METHODS. (N.Z.E.F. Official News Service.) LONDON. July 3. General Sir Claude Auchinleck, the sturdily-built Scot who will take General Sir Archibald Wavell’s place in Cairo, has been learning since this war began. He learnt a little at Narvik. He learnt more on the south coast of England last autumn when everyone thought the Germans might’try to land any day. He paid a visit to the Western Desert during the winter and went thoughtfully on his way to India. Then he summed it all up in one sentence. "There never has been an impregnable fortress.” He was thinking of this island, but there are other “fortresses” throughout the world today. Two other things he said as a result of all his study of hasty evacuation and hurried defence against a ruthless enemy who does not give a tinker’s curse for military tradition. Gazing out from under his bold over-hanging forehead one day not long after Dunkirk, he put into words the lesson we should learn from the Germans —“get together.” "The greatest good that the Germans have done us as a nation,” he said, “is increasing the co-operation between the Services. In conference nowadays we really get inside each other’s heads.” Perhaps that was wishful thinking. Perhaps he only hoped the chiefs of the three Services would get inside A each other’s heads, but it was the right kind of hope. Perhaps it had something to do with his new appointment. Another remark he made at the same time also showed that he was busy with his lesson-learning. “What has happened,” he said, "has freed our minds of tactical doctrines and allowed us to look forward, not back.” SERVICE IN INDIA. That is encouraging, for he had a good deal to look back on if he chose to keep looking back, as Indian Army officers of long service are sometimes apt to do. At the age of 56 he could look back on 38 years of service with Indian troops. He knew Egypt, Aden, Mesopotamia (three years of it) in the last war. They mentioned him in dispatches, gave him the D. 5.0., Croix de Guerre and 0.8. E., and made him a brevet-colonel for that little interlude. He could look back on the “Mohforce.” as they called it. The “Moht’orce" were -the Scottish. English and Indian troops who fought the Mohmand tribesmen on the frontiers bf Afghanistan in 1935. They used to watch their commander. Brigadier Auchinleck, walking up a front-line ridge to take a look at) the Mohmands sniping from a barren rocky valley. He would stand at the door of a desolate farmhouse directing the men who were pushing out their posts by climbing from peak to peak. It was rather like his own Scottish border country—hilltops set with ancient keeps or peeltowers. But veiled women watching’ the fighting from the roof of a fort-like farmhouse were a little out of place. THE NORWAY COMMAND. He could look back on the voyage to Norway and the capture of and the difficult time there till the der to leave came. They made him Commander in Chief of the Southern Command after that till the immediate invasion danger seemed to be over, and then they sent him out to India again. By that time he had no illusions about the war. When the rest of us were rejoicing and sitting back a little (because of our victories against the Italians) he was pointing out that Germany’s armed forces were as yet unscathed. He used his six months in India to alter the method by which the Indian Army was recruited from a few classes and areas. He speeded up the training of Indian officers and insisted that Indian public men should be allowed a share in the running of defence departments. A bare six months after his visit to the Western Desert on his wav out to India he was talking to General Wavell again. They met at Basra a few weeks ago. The men whose troops guard the frontier of India and the man whose troops were pushing north into Syria would naturally want to talk—to "get inside each other’s heads." as Auchinleck said. The war in the Middle East might become a war in the East. India, Syria, and Egypt might become one war zone. Their demands were dependent, their war strategy linked. Now Wavell and Auchinleck have changed over. Wavell moves east to India", Auchinleck moves west to the Mediterranean. Wavel, who has fought on the North-West frontier in his time, goes back to that problem. Auchinleck, who knows all about India, returns to the scene of his desert fighting days. Let us hope they will keep “inside each other’s heads.”