Colonel Donovan's War

Back to the U. S. from a three-and-a-half-month, 30,000-mile trip through Europe, the Near East and Africa came ruddy Colonel William Joseph ("Wild Bill") Donovan last week. Colonel Donovan had been on an assignment that any professional reporter would have given his left leg to get. He had been in England under bombardment, in North Africa with the British Empire forces, in the Albanian mountains with the Greeks. He had inspected ordnance, shipping, signal corps, maintenance depots. He had slept in sleeping bags, on desert sands, on the jogging backs of mules. He had talked to kings, prime ministers, generals, admirals. As a lawyer he was well equipped to digest what he heard. As a soldier (he commanded New York's "Fighting 69th" Regiment in World War I, won the Congressional Medal of Honor, the D.S.C. and D.S.M.) he was well equipped to put together what he saw. As a reporter he was a natural. But no newspaper got Wild Bill Donovan's story. Wild Bill would not talk.

A good soldier first, Colonel Donovan reported first to his Commander-in-Chief, Franklin Roosevelt, and to the chiefs of the U. S. fighting forces. Colonels Stimson and Knox. By the time he had shuttled back & forth between Manhattan and Washington several times and hidden out to write a radio speech, Colonel Donovan's trail was cold. But when finally his story did leak out, as stories always do in Washington, it was still hot. For Wild Bill Donovan was one man in the U. S. who was satisfied he knew how the war was being fought and what the U. S. ought to do to help win it.

In England, where he arrived last Dec. 16, Colonel Donovan promptly called on Prime Minister Winston Churchill, lunched at No. 10 Downing Street. To the Prime Minister and his colleagues the Colonel was refreshingly frank: he was no Anglophile; he wanted to see how Britain was doing; he thought Britain and the U. S. could help each other in "a relationship of mutual selfishness." The British understood this kind of talk, gave Colonel Donovan a free rein. He traveled through England, observed that the British had trained themselves to fight a guerrilla war if their island was invaded, concluded that guerrilla warfare would be effective if the British were not exhausted. The British problem, as the Colonel saw it, was to resist all kinds of assault without exhausting their strength for the eventual offensive. And they could resist only by keeping open their sea borne supply lines.

German strategy, Colonel Donovan saw as long ago as last December, would be to try to strangle Britain: to cut off the British Isles' supplies of food and war materials and soften them for the kill. At the same time Germany would try to cut the Empire lifelines. Since it is four times as far from the British Isles to Suez by way of the Cape of Good Hope as it is by way of Gibraltar, Britain would need four times as many ships if the Mediterranean were closed to her.

Gibraltar, where Colonel Donovan went next, is the key to the Mediterranean. And the key to Gibraltar is Spain. England and Germany are fighting for the seduction of Spain; England with food for the immediate present, Germany with promises of future prosperity and aggrandizement. But if Germany loses this skirmish, she may by-pass Spain and reach for the coast of West Africa, where she would be in a position to cut the Cape-route lifeline and draw the cord of strangulation tighter about Britain's neck.

In Egypt Colonel Donovan talked to General Sir Archibald Wavell, then spent two weeks with the British forces. He saw them in action, decided that two things were combining to defeat Italy in Egypt and Libya: 1) the individual superiority of the British soldier; 2) the fact that the Italians made the desert their enemy (i.e., shut themselves up in Maginot-like forts), while the British made it their ally. From North Africa the footloose Colonel went to Athens, where he found the British laying plans to widen their front. The Greeks were frightened of too much British aid, thought it would provoke the Germans. Colonel Donovan interrupted his stay in Athens to pay a call on Tsar Boris of Bulgaria.

In Sofia he sat down for two hours with Boris. Since both men are old soldiers, Colonel Donovan doubtless talked soldiers' language to the Tsar. And since Bulgaria waited another six weeks before joining the Axis, his language must have been somewhat effective. It was during his stay in Sofia that someone pinched Wild Bill's passport (TIME, Feb. 3). But the papers the pickpocket wanted were where he could not reach them.

Donovan's Axis. To Belgrade, back to Athens, then to Turkey, to Cairo again, to Irak and Palestine and Bagdad, then once more to London, the Colonel's travels carried him. All that he had seen & heard strengthened his belief in his private theory of the Mediterranean's importance in the war. The Donovan theory: think of the Mediterranean as running north & south, not east & west. Then it becomes a vast No Man's Land between two fronts: the European Front, which is Germany's (with a British salient in Greece), and the African Front, which is Britain's (with a German salient in Tripoli). So long as the British can keep patrolling this No Man's Land with their Navy, and can keep the salient in Greece, defensively Germany is not safe. She must drop her guard to cover her solar plexus (the Balkans), cannot risk a major blow at Africa for fear of getting rabbit-punched from behind.

Germany, Wild Bill thinks, is setting up optional fronts for attack if the attack on the British Isles fails or is abandoned. The principal optional front is the Mediterranean area, with an attack on Gibraltar or Suez or both. Another optional front is West Africa. A third is the Ukraine, but that must wait until the attack on England has succeeded or failed. Meanwhile Germany risks harassment from the rear and eventual attack through the Balkans.

The U. S. Job. Everywhere Colonel Donovan went he asked the same questions. Q. If Germany wins, what kind of Europe will come out of the war? A. A Europe dominated by Germany, with industry centred in the Reich. Q. What will this mean to the U. S.? A. Increasing economic pressure, probably including the establishment of economic bastions around the U. S.

If Colonel Donovan's observations were as accurate and his conclusions as sound as they seemed to be, the U. S. can protect itself only by seeing that Germany loses the war. To do this the U. S. must see that supplies reach Great Britain. To see that they reach Britain the U. S. must protect them with convoys. To protect the convoys the U. S. must have points of protection. (Obvious points of protection: 1) Ireland; 2) West Africa.) To get these the U. S. must soon make up its mind whether it is prepared to follow its declared policy to its inevitable conclusion.

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