The Battle Joins

The first bombs were dropped and the first shots were fired last week in the Battle of the Middle East. Their sound was not great; it was a preliminary noise, like the crack of fungo bat against a baseball in warming-up time. But it was a business-like noise, a major-league, worldseries noise. There could no longer be any question where a new theater of war would be.

Preparations had been noticeable for some time. Observers had seen camels in Bulgaria, transport planes in Greece, seagoing barges at the Danube's mouth. Correspondents had seen Rumania's Puppet Premier General Ion Antonescu stage a ceremonial farewell for German troops faring southeastward. The Greek islands had been seized. German torpedo boats had appeared in the Aegean, and Nazi "tourists" in their outlandish, paper-stiff civvies had appeared in Syria. The German-French agreement (see p. 27), officially opening Syria to the Nazis, had been signed and sealed.

Inside Syria the Axis Armistice Commission had been happily taking inventory of the supply dumps left over from General Maxime Weygand's Army of the Levant: said to be enough materiel to equip 100,000 men and keep them in the field during a brief campaign.

For their part, the British had not been idle. Two months ago, after the successful British drive across Libya, it was rumored that General Sir Archibald Wavell had sent a large part of his troops to Palestine, to practice a hypothetical invasion of Syria. Last week a fair-sized British force was poised on the borders of Palestine and Trans-Jordan, perhaps intending to translate that hypothesis into proven matter.

The British had, besides, sent troops and planes to Iraq. In three weeks of sand-lot holy warfare, they had crushed the Air Force and just about crushed the land forces of the pro-Axis Premier-by-Revolt Rashid Ali El-Gailani. Last week the British reinforced their garrison in Iraq by sending units of the Fleet Air Arm to the top of the Persian Gulf.

The stage was set. The Germans were moving in from the wings--and when the Germans get onstage they have so far stayed there until the curtain.

Giant Leapfrog. Until Turkey might be persuaded either to do something or to do nothing, the Axis plan was apparently to play a giant game of leapfrog, transporting men, small artillery, light tanks, food and maintenance supplies by plane from Greece to Iraq. In Iraq they would, for the time being, fight a kind of vanguard delaying action, keeping the British from getting firmly established in the area until they themselves could.

Last week's promissory explosions of bomb and shell were the development of and resistance to this strategy. First of all, the Greek airports, rear bases of the German strategy, and Crete, the forward base of the British counterstrategy, were mutually bombed. Next the way stations got it: Italian Rhodes and British Cyprus. Then as German planes hopped across Syria and Axis transports moved from the Black Sea into the Aegean, the R.A.F. bombed Syrian airports and the Fleet Air Arm sowed mines off Syrian ports.

Finally the enemies brushed in Iraq. First-line German planes, Heinkel bombers and Messerschmitt fighters hurried to attack the British at their Habbannia airport. German cadres of officers headed Iraqi troops for new infantry attacks near Basra. The British counter-bombed the Luftwaffe bases. The Fleet Air Arm planes flew 160 miles up the Tigris to bomb oil tanks at Amarah. R.A.F. fliers caught convoys of French motor trucks carrying Arab volunteers from Syria to Iraq.

Germany's Lawrence. These convoys were bad news. National uprisings play an important part in Empire warfare, as the British well know. The British have used them to good advantage in Ethiopia. They were the crux of T. E. Lawrence's successful operations in World War I. But in World War I the British position in the Middle East was exactly the opposite of the present position: then Britain was out to deliver the Arabs from Turkish dominion; now the British are supposed to be oppressors, and the Axis warriors call themselves liberating knights.

Leader of the knights is a German named Dr. Fritz Grobba. He was born Arthur Borg and as a boy was prophetically nicknamed "the Turk," because he looked like one. As a soldier in World War I he was assigned to the Turkish Front, was wounded, and, as a convalescent, fell in love with a Syrian Arab girl. He took her back to the mountains of Bavaria; but her lungs were not fit, and she died. Borg became a Mohammedan, studied Orientology, and eventually was persuaded by General Erich Ludendorff to undertake military intrigues in the Middle East. He disguised his name by spelling his signature, A. Borg, backwards and adding a euphonious b.

Grobba showed up in Bagdad. He persuaded the then King, Ghazi I, to send some young officers to military war games in Germany. They returned to Iraq amazed. In 1938 he had 50 German officers invited to Iraqui war games. They stayed in Iraq. Next he arranged to have some "research expeditions" sent from Germany to Iraq. They stayed in Iraq. In October 1938, some Arabs attacked and fired the main British pipelines from the Iraq fields; when this was found to be a Grobba job, he had to flee to Saudi Arabia.

He did not cease his operations. He spent millions of English pounds (reportedly counterfeit) softening up Iraqi officers. He met some of them in Damascus last winter, and by April had evolved a thoroughly pro-Nazi native organization in the Iraqi Army.

It was simple then to engineer the El-Gailani revolt. Without firing a shot, Grobba thus won the first skirmish in the Battle of the Middle East. Last week he was out in front, getting the German Army in touch with native soldiers not only of Iraq, but also of Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Battle for a Battlefield. But the Battle of the Middle East was much more than a nationalist movement. It was a strategic contest of the first importance, in which time was a crucial factor. The immediate stake was the oil of Iraq, and last week's scrimmages suggested that the British might not have time or strength systematically to destroy the wells and refineries before the Germans arrived in force. The secondary stake was the Suez Canal.

But the real issue was whether the British would still have a place to fight the Germans on land when U.S. aid becomes effective. The German aim was clearly to eliminate the whole of the Middle East and the whole of North Africa--as the whole of Europe had already been eliminated--from the areas of the world where British soldiers and U.S. arms might attack German soldiers and arms. If this could be done, there would be few places left where the U.S. could support a British attack against the Nazis.

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