The scene of conflict shifts ineluctably to the Middle East. There are several factors that made this development all but inevitable. The first is the historic strategy of England to draw her enemies out to points beyond which their communications can maintain sustained operations, leading to that eventual defeat on a vulnerable extremity that is the prelude to decisive military action, the rolling up of a flank.
Now the Germans are being drawn out by Russian operations toward the Middle East. So the problem of the English is how they can best help the Russian Army. Were a British army to force a landing in Western Europe, Germany might leave only enough in the West to prevent their landing or contain such an expeditionary force while finishing the Russian Army in the East. Or Hitler could keep just enough in the East to contain the Russians, and detach enough to the West to destroy the Allies there, unless the Allies are able to put at least one and a half times as many divisions there as are left in the West by the Axis powers.
Germany has the advantage of central position and interior lines enabling her to defeat the enemy on each front in detail, unless the bulk of the German eastern forces can be drawn out and pinned down far away from the splendid road net Germany has developed in Western Europe to deal with an eventual two-front war.
Hence it is conceivable that help for Russia might best be given by reinforcing the Russian front in the East, inasmuch as the bulk of British Empire man power from India, Australia, and South Africa is much nearer to the Middle East than it is to Western Europe. Nor would such armies have to denude the British Isles of a defensive force or force landings or develop in haste an extended and secure beachhead, organized in the depth that would surely prove indispensable to such an operation.
The second force for this phase of the war is oil. For Europe, Asia, and Africa produce but 57 million tons of crude oil, while their consumption is much greater. In danger of defeat in a war of attrition for want of adequate oil, particularly lubricants, the Axis forces are driven to the Middle East, in which are produced 45 million tons of the 57 million tons found in the Eastern Hemisphere. There are the wells of Russia, Iran, and Irak, all around the Caspian Sea.
Moreover, sea-power strategy consists of blockading a land power enemy and at the same time forcing it to make great expenditures of supplies in land operations that cannot be long sustained while blockade prevents replenishment of those supplies. Make Germany spend oil and prevent her from getting any oil in the Middle East, and the war is won.
Then, the Middle East was the last hole in the British blockade through which could come materials desperately needed by Germany and Italy.
Turkey, too, is a factor. Through Turkey are some of the British routes to Russia—by sea and overland. Likewise, Turkey is the nut that Germany may yet have to crack to reach either the oil fields of Baku or the Suez Canal, as long as a way via Spain and French Morocco is barred, and a Russian army remains undefeated and in being on the Don River-Stalingrad- Volga River line.
Then, from a secure base in this Middle Eastern area, Germany could cut the British Empire in two, reach to Suez, and extend a tentacle out towards British India. Finally, through Persia lies the shortest all-year land road by which supplies and reinforcements can reach the Russian armies. Under such circumstances, it will probably be profitable to consider and plan for decisive operations in this theater. No such plans would be complete without solution of the vital problems posed by the existence of three seas insulated from the main oceans of the world. Those seas are the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, the Caspian Sea, and the Aral Sea.
There are several roads and railroads leading to these inland seas from points to which Britain has, or can secure, safe access to by sea. The main ones are:
- Suez-Damascus-Nisibin-Tabriz-Tiffis and the Caspian or the Black Sea;
- Bander Shappur-Bander Gaz and the Caspian;
- Rarachi-Quetta-Kandahar-Kusjk Mery and the Caspian;
- Rarachi-Peshawar-Kabul-Termez-Bokhara- Sarnarkand-Tashkent and the Aral Sea.
These avenues of communication must be added to, improved, maintained, and protected.
While the Black Sea is not geographically landlocked, strategically it is so, by reason of the Axis control of the Aegean Sea and the approaches to the Dardanelles, plus the possibility that Turkey may be swung into the Axis orbit eventually. The Caspian Sea is unconnected with any other sea by any means; likewise the Aral. History teaches us that naval operations on landlocked bodies of water have often had decisive effects in adjacent land operations.
In 15 B.C. there was fought a battle on Lake Constance but for which Rome might have been stopped in her tracks of conquest and civilization. In 1453 when the Turks took Constantinople it became necessary for them to gain control of the Golden Horn. To do this they transported a part of their fleet across the stretch of land separating the Bosporus from the stream called The Springs which flows into the Golden Horn west of Galata. Thousands of workmen were employed to level the ground, build a wooden runway, and grease it. Then the ships with sails and flags unfurled were hauled overland and slid into the Golden Horn'.
One of the most interesting landlocked water operations took place on the shores of Lake Tezcuco, which in 1521 surrounded Tenochtitlan, the present site of Mexico City, and which made of that Aztec capital an island. It was captured by Cortez only because he succeeded in getting control of Lake Tetuzco. To do this he used 13 brigantines that he dismantled, carried over 60 miles of rough mountain trail to the lake, and reassembled on the shores of the lake. With these 13 ships he defeated the Aztec navy, consisting of small pirogues, and once he obtained command of the "sea," blockaded the city proper, and kept the pirogues from transporting food, supplies, or troops. Then, when Tenochtitlan was worn out by famine, pestilence, and the cutting off of its water supply, Cortez brought about the surrender of the Aztec empire.
In our Revolutionary War, operations on Lake Champlain prevented the early collapse of the American Revolutionary effort. Late in June, 1776, the remnants of Benedict Arnold's army had retreated from its disastrous campaign against Canada to Lake Champlain. Fortunately, Arnold found a small naval force on that lake previously provided by the foresight of Generals Washington and Schuyler. This force controlled the lake and, since there were no other roads for the British to follow in pursuit of Arnold, they were unable to catch and destroy him. Then began a shipbuilding race, with the British at the north end of the lake and the Americans at the south end, for without control of the lake the British campaign could not succeed.
The plan was to advance from Canada and catch the rear of Washington's army with one arm of the pincer, while the other arm pushed up the Hudson under General Howe. The Americans lost the building race and the subsequent naval engagement on Lake Champlain. But they gained the necessary time to save Washington's hard-pressed army and thus won a great strategic advantage, the delaying action that turned out to be a decisive victory, though a tactical defeat.
Lake Champlain figured again in Anglo-American hostilities when in 1814 Commodore Macdonough defeated the British fleet, with small ships built on the shores of the lake, the largest of which was the British 1200-ton Confiance, carrying 37 guns. This success prevented the English from cutting New England off completely from the rest of the country and decided the war. As soon as this battle had been won by Macdonough, the British General Prevost marched his veteran army back to Canada.
Another operation, that like the others proved to be crucial and based upon ships built on the shores of an inland body of water, was the famous Battle of Lake Erie. This victory came at a critical moment, for the spirits of the American people were very low. However, as a military consequence of their naval defeat on Lake Erie, the entire military position of the English around the lake collapsed like a house of cards and the subsequent momentous land battle of the Thames put the entire region under American control and cut communications between the various parts of the British forces.
Even in the present war there have been reported operations on land that were facilitated by an improvised "navy" in landlocked waters. It is said that the Finnish operations on the Karelian Isthmus against Leningrad were given important help by small ships, trawlers, and even speed boats on Lake Ladoga, brought overland from the Gulf of Finland.
But most in point, because it was an operation in the very theater that we are now considering, was the adventure of the Dunsterforce at the end of the first World War. Major General Lord Dunsterville was given the objective of cutting off the Caucasus from the Germans, Turks, and the Russians at the end of 1917, after the capture of Bagdad. To accomplish this mission he was given only a nucleus of some 200 officers and a similar number of noncommissioned officers. His route lay through Persia, Kermanshaw, Hamadan, Kasvin, and Resht. When his command, which has since been called the Dunsterforce, reached the Caspian, he found that it was almost impossible to reach Baku, the point from which comes almost half of all the oil produced in the Eurasian-African land mass, except by sea.
On the Caspian there was a fleet of some 250 merchant ships of from 200 to 1,000 tons, some of which had been built in England and transported on their own bottoms to the Caspian via the Volga. The waves of the sea were ruled by a small fleet of three gunboats, the Kars, Ardaghan, and Grob Tepe. Fortunately, these three gunboats were not in the hands of the enemy.
Three ships were seized by Dunsterville on which he mounted a few 4-inch naval pieces and secured control of the sea. For they were the three best merchant ships on the Caspian, one a vessel of slightly over 1,000 tons, the President Kruger, and two other good ships, the Kursk and Abo.
As he wrote in his fascinating narrative, The Adventures of Dunsterforce: "The key to the Caspian problem was the little fleets."
It was because he was able to get command of the Caspian that he was able to reach Baku at all and it was only owing to his continued command of the Caspian Sea that he was able to effect the safe withdrawal of his force when Baku proved untenable against the Turks.
Command of these seas is a problem like all the problems of naval strategy, twofold: (1) How to obtain and keep the use of the seas for oneself; and (2) how to deny its use to the enemy.
For it is the mobility given to land armies which command of waterways affords, more than anything else, which lends to sea power its decisive character. That means that there must be means to keep Axis forces from transporting their ships, supplies, and men over the Caspian, Black, and Aral Seas while the British must be in position to move their troops and supplies at will.
It means that they require armed elements which can deny those waters to the enemy and protect their transports while the English armies make use of them. For this there must be the fighting force and the merchant marine. The character of the fighting force may differ from that which Lord Dunsterville used so resourcefully. The airplane may take the place of the 4-inch guns of the President Kruger, but for steady patrolling and protection some form of floating fighting element will, no doubt, be found necessary.
If there has been any lesson from the operations of the war on the sea to date, it is that the plane without the co-operation of the ship cannot patrol as well as control the seas, just as we have learned that the ship without the plane can do neither.
Nor will it be possible on the shores of these inland seas to do what Perry, Cortez, and General Washington did: to build their ships out of material found upon the shores of these waters, out of the tall timbers that grew along their banks.
A modern ship is a complicated mechanism that must have steel at least for deck armor against enemy air action and complicated machinery to drive it, apart from all the other refined requirements of a modern fighting ship. Therefore, the problem posed by the possibilities of decisive action in the Middle East is the technical problem of how to get those ships upon those waters.
For the answer, we must again look to what the Germans have had the foresight to do in the Black Sea. Instead of trusting to improvisation, once they reached the shore of the Black Sea, through Rumania, overland by rail, came dismantled parts, long ready, which the Nazis brought down to the port of Sulina. There they assembled on the shores of their new-found waters small submarines, and perhaps other ships.
For the English the problem will be somewhat different. They will not need just submarines. They will require ships that will carry men and supplies, ships to convoy the transports, and other ships to act as a line of battle against such ships as the enemy may build or seize for the same purposes.
Close by all the fuel needed is available. Those ships can be driven by Diesel engines. It would, therefore, be the part of wisdom to begin now the production of diesel engines and vital parts of ships on which, when assembled on the Caspian, Black, and Aral Seas, can be mounted the necessary arms, anti-aircraft, and naval pieces that can win the coming decisive battle of the Middle East.
Baku oil must be denied Germany and a front must be maintained in the Middle East at all costs. The ships that may play a decisive role to those ends must be available when needed, if we are to successfully fill the role of democracy's arsenal that we have assumed.