Between Hemispheres

From Madagascar to the Libyan Desert a single battle is being fought: the battle to keep Africa open as the supply crossroads of the United Nations. Rommel's dusty warriors menaced the land bridge between Africa and the Middle East. Vichy intrigue and Japanese submarines at Madagascar menaced the waterway up the African coast toward Eritrea, Suez. Persia and Russia.

Three years ago Africa's strategic potentialities were almost untouched. Now airfields pock equatorial jungle and flinty desert, hop-stops for U.S. planes ferried across the South Atlantic bound for Egypt and the Middle East. Gun snouts poke out of many an African harbor protecting supply bases and ports where vital convoys collect. U.S., British, Free French and Belgian officials shuttle across the once dark continent that is dark no longer.

After Hitler, in June 1940, created the fiction of an Unoccupied France and headed off French resistance from North Africa, one-third of Africa was at best neutralized, at worst pulled into the Axis orbit. The rest was saved for the United Nations: France's middle African colonies (Chad, Cameroun, Gabon), the rich Belgian Congo, onetime Italian East Africa. From Cape-Town to Cairo and west to Sierra Leone, Africa was preserved for Allied communications.

Africa's contribution in raw materials and manpower to the United Nations cannot be in proportion to its size, but what resources Africa has are precious. The Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia are the world's principal sources of cobalt, used in hard steel for toolmaking. Vanadium and manganese, also necessary for steel, come from the Gold Coast and South Africa. Tin comes from Nigeria, industrial diamonds from the fabulous Transvaal mines, rubber from Liberia, copper from the Congo.

Strategically Africa offers even more. The African bulge juts westward within 1,800 miles of the Brazilian bulge, providing the shortest air route between Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Pan American Airways had pioneered that route before the war and done spadework for the U.S. Air Forces Ferrying Command, which took over the job of shuttling all planes from U.S. factories to the world's battlefronts. The importance of other African routes has skyrocketed in proportion to the decline of British power in the Mediterranean.

To keep Africa, the United Nations have more than Rommel and Madagascar to consider. Once the vast Sahara was considered a sufficient barrier to guard the heart of Africa from invasion by forces using Vichy-controlled Tunisia and Algeria as a jumping-off point. Mechanized warfare changed that concept. If the Germans conquer Egypt, they may turn south. French North Africa and Dakar, the continent's westernmost base, in the hands of Axis-enslaved Vichy can never be anything but a danger to the security of Africa as a great crossroads of the United Nations.

That reality, no doubt, was clear to swarthy, scheming Pierre Laval when, on the day new Madagascar attacks were launched, he conferred first with German Consul General Krug von Nidda, then with General Alphonse Juin, who succeeded General Weygand as Commander in Chief in French North Africa. Asked if the Madagascar attack increased the possibility of United Nations' action against Dakar, Laval sputtered: "Why ask me? Why not cable Roosevelt?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.