Once more this country has had to prepare for war or the possibility of war anywhere or everywhere over the earth. Twice in this century we fought world wars and there is much that can be learned from them, so that if it must be done again, we need not come so close to disaster as in the wars past.
Chief among the facts which have made themselves evident is this—that the ocean routes from this country to Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic islands must not be severed if we are to have a chance to win in a war with any continental enemy. The converse of this cannot be ignored—that if the enemy has broken the lines across the Atlantic, he has won the war, and all the rest, no matter how bloody or prolonged, is anticlimax.
It is well known that when this country entered World War I, England was within a few weeks of national starvation because the ships carrying her people’s food had been sunk. Warships were steaming at reduced speeds, because there was not enough fuel oil making its way across the ocean to permit them to move at normal speeds.
That war took place almost entirely within the bounds of the European sub-continent, and many millions died gaining a mile or so here or there in France or in Russia or in the Alps. Yet, the fate of the war, and of the European states involved depended on what occurred in the ocean west of England. Across that Western Ocean came the supplies and war materials required by the Allies and, eventually, two million fresh troops for battle in France.
Had possession of the Atlantic been taken from the Allies, France would have fallen. As we found in 1940, this would not have been decisive. But so too, would England have fallen, for lack of food and munitions, and that is a different matter.
If France fell, it did not necessarily mean the loss of the Continent, for the Allies were elsewhere on that peninsula-studded peninsula. Even if they had been driven off entirely, as in 1940 and 1941, they could return as in 1943 and 1944.
But with England gone, there would have been no return. The British Isles dominate Europe, whether one looks from the East or from the West. From British harbors and airfields invasions and bombing raids can be launched upon the long western face of the Continent, and Continental harbors are easily blockaded by ships leaving from British seaports. Using these same British ports and fields, ships and planes can parry any transoceanic movement from the West, whether attempted upon or over the sea.
In World War I England nearly fell through loss of control of her sea communications. Russia did fall for that reason, from whence many of our present difficulties arise. The Dardanelles expedition, brilliantly conceived in London as a means to providing a supply route to Russia, failed through errors on the part of the operational commanders. There was no Murmansk run in those days, nor any Persian railroad, and in 1917 there was revolution in Russia. It was mild to begin with, but the moderates were overthrown by the extremists who promised peace at any price—which they got—and a lot of other things. The extremists are still in control.
England and the Western Allies were threatened with loss of their sea communications by the German Navy, which for practical purposes was in two parts, surface and submarine. The first and most apparent threat was from the surface force or High Seas Fleet. England countered this with the Grand Fleet, based at Scapa Flow and Rosyth in Scotland. The Grand Fleet was nearly twice the size of the High Seas Fleet. At the only major meeting of the two fleets, at Jutland in 1916, the British had 151 ships of all types to their opponent’s 99. While on the whole, the British appeared less skillful and inflicted less damage than the Germans, when the action was over the British Fleet was at sea and the German back in the safety of its ports.
Admiral Jellicoe, in command of the British Fleet at Jutland, has been criticized, and rightly so, for his extreme caution in action against an enemy far inferior in numbers. But in criticizing, it is well not to forget that he was “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.” Had the British Fleet by some chance been destroyed, then the cruisers on the blockade line would have been swept away, and German squadrons would have placed themselves between the Allies and their source of supply.
But the Grand Fleet remained in powerful being and ready to do battle, and German ships never got into the Atlantic to run down the freighters.
This state of affairs was recognized in Germany long before the Battle of Jutland took place. While the battle fleet could not break the strangling cordon, the submarines could go under it. And though they had none of the efficiency of fast cruiser squadrons, the U-boats were nearly sufficient to bring England and the whole Allied cause tumbling down. The intervention of the United States had much to do with the turn of the Atlantic war.
With their imports cut off by four years of blockade, with their battle fleet unable to get into the sea lanes of the Atlantic, and their submarines beaten in their attempt at a counter-blockade, the Germans had lost all chance of victory. The Allies were able to add a great new army to their forces in France and with their new superiority, arrived from overseas, were able to drive the German Army back to its very frontiers. The surrender came at that point. It made no particular matter when it came. It was inevitable once the Allies were able to make unhindered use of the Atlantic to carry across their new munitions and supplies and troops.
Notice this—the Germans could have won the war by denying the use of the Atlantic to the Allies, but to the Allies the winning of the Atlantic did not mean victory. What it gave them chiefly was the chance to put a stronger army into the field, and there to win the final decision. Command of the Atlantic was necessary to the Germans for victory. To the Allies it meant survival and a chance to fight for victory.
The second of the great wars, beginning in 1939, was spread over almost the entire face of the earth. It was more truly a world war than the first had been. But the fact that control of the North Atlantic was the key to victory did not change. Once again the Germans were the main enemy, and this time they had the entire Continent at their disposal. For a year England held alone, and without any army to speak of. What forces she did have she sent to Egypt where they shielded the Suez Canal. Because she controlled the Channel, England even dared to send the desert army to Greece, on the European mainland, before she had provided herself with a real army at home.
Like the other European conquerors before him, Hitler could not see beyond the shores of the continent which bound him. Victory over France was a function of divisions and corps. For that matter so was victory over Russia. But victory over England, even though within his sight when he stood on the French coast and even with his air fleets over the capital city of London, was a different thing entirely.
If he got over the Channel and into England, it would have been the business of corps and divisions once again. But he had no means of getting his army over there, and so the project died. The German submarines once more were the chief threat to England’s survival. The United States, alarmed by the success of the U-boats, edged into the Battle of the Atlantic with the fifty old destroyers, lend-lease, occupation of Greenland and Iceland, and finally the escorting of convoys as far as Iceland, which is to say more than half way.
These measures were taken to keep England in the war against the Continental enemy and to keep the Atlantic Ocean open to British (and American) ships. The two are entwined. We have noted that England dominates Europe and the westward approaches to Europe. Every ship headed towards or away from the western face of Europe must pass not far from the British Isles. So we have a situation in which the British Isles dominate the Atlantic and the Atlantic in turn dominates the British Isles. To have the one without the other is to have a precarious hold indeed.
We have made the claim that control of the Atlantic is the primary concern of the United States and our Western Allies if we hope to win our wars. This appears to be quite clear when dealing with a war of limited geographical scope, such as that of 1914-18, or in 1939-40. But it is also true in a war where action takes place all over the world, as after 1940. Or, for another instance, any war involving the United States and Russia, not to mention those agrarian reformers, the Chinese.
We do not wish to minimize the importance of the Pacific, or the Indian oceans, or the Mediterranean. But we hold that they are eventually dependent upon the Atlantic. That is, whoever holds the Atlantic gets the others in due course.
The Mediterranean Sea, to which the British Navy has long attached such importance (and which we too have recognized in these times of our oceanic hegemony), is of the greatest influence upon the three continents bounding it.
To Europe, the Mediterranean offers a means of defence. Freighters and transports bring in food and warriors through that central sea for the use and defence of the Continent, while carriers and gunnery (or missile) ships in the Mediterranean stand by to provide support for the armies ashore.
If the attacking armies from the East are successful, the Mediterranean offers a means of turning their flank, with assault either direct or far behind their lines, while air groups from the carriers strike at their communications and their fuel supplies, without which no modern armed force can take offensive action.
Soviet oil production is centered on the Black Sea region, and it is within range of United States carrier aviation. (There is some oil production in the Far East, but it does not yet appear to be significant.) If these fuel supplies can be destroyed through air action, and carriers are our best means of bringing large amounts of air strength to bear upon a small target, or if they can be denied the enemy through capture by ground forces, it will have a tremendous effect on any Soviet-American conflict in all theaters of operation.
In the last war the Italian Navy, the last of the Japanese Fleet, and the German surface forces were all destroyed in their harbors because they had no fuel to take them out where the fighting was. They were unable, because they could not move, to influence the course of events. They had to remain in port until the bombers came to them and they sank ingloriously. The same fate, in lesser measure, befell the Luftwaffe and the German Army’s panzer divisions. It is worth remembering when considering any future wars.
We have hinted at the possibility of amphibious assault on the oil-producing regions of the Black Sea. Hold or lose the land to the west, this remains a possibility to consider, and worth many ships and planes and divisions to achieve. The weak point, of course, is the passage through the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, which is long and narrow and subject to attack from nearly all mediums. But prizes worth having are not usually easily gained. With a prize such as control of the enemy’s fuel resources the result of success, such an undertaking is not lightly to be passed over.
Success in the Black Sea would mean not only control of the Russian fuel resources, but also an army at the back of enemy’s assault forces. That this can be disconcerting is easily seen from events following our own landing at Inchon, behind the enemy’s lines, in September, 1950.
Upon Africa too, the Mediterranean has a great influence. Again, it is a road of supply and of military reinforcement. More important though, the Mediterranean is a barrier to those who would cross without the means to cross and the power to force a crossing. As long as we and our friends can maintain strength to prevent the crossing of that sea, Africa remains safe from military conquest except at the far eastern end, where the Suez Canal is all that splits Africa from the Middle East. This is not to say that Western military force in the Mediterranean will positively prevent the conquest of Africa by the communists by political means. What we are claiming is that with the Mediterranean in our hands, the opposition cannot conquer with armies, which for the most part, seems to have been his method. We should note that no nation has ever submitted to communist domination without military conquest by communist forces. There are no communist governments 'where there are no communist armies.
The Mediterranean, as long as United States and British naval forces remain there, is a tremendous factor in the favor of the West. But if we lose the Atlantic, we can’t very well stay in the Mediterranean.
The Indian Ocean has been the least disturbed of all the great seas. In the past he who controlled the Cape Route and the Suez (which is to say the Mediterranean), has had the use of the Indian, and the possession of the vast lands which border that ocean.
In recent times there has been but one challenge to British (Western) control of the Indian Ocean basin. That was in the spring of 1942, when a Japanese fleet, operating from the eastern seas, entered the far reaches of the Indian and sank a number of British war and merchant vessels. Then the Japanese disappeared and never returned. The chief agent of their disappearance was the United States Fleet, located in the U.S. West Coast-Hawaiian area at the time. Japan could not adventure in the Indian Ocean when the opposition had a force which could strike much closer to home.
This effect of the United States Pacific Fleet upon Japan may well have had a bearing on events in Africa. The Japanese Fleet, which was more powerful than England’s Indian Ocean Fleet, could have stopped all traffic by the Cape Route to Suez. It was by this route that Montgomery got the armor with which he defeated Rommel at El Alamein. It is probable that in the near future the U. S. Pacific Fleet will be able to control events emanating from the Pacific more directly than in 1942. It is clear though that the Pacific Fleet in 1942 affected only a Pacific-based navy. It would not, then or now, have the same effect on one operating through the Suez.
If the usage of the Mediterranean is lost to us and passes to the enemy, he will have our best means of access to the Indian Ocean, and one which is not too far from his repair and replenishment bases. Our contact with the countries of the Indian Ocean is by sea. The opposition is just over the mountains to the north. If he gains control of the sea routes to the Indian subcontinent, those new nations will have lost all contact with the West. They will be subject to those same military and economic pressures which brought surrender to many European nations. The East African coast, without military strength of its own, must fall. The area of conflict will be Malaya and Indonesia, with the West’s advanced bases in Australia and the Philippines.
We have shown that the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean are of high importance, and that control of the Indian depends for the most part on control of the Mediterranean. It is clear that both are dependent on free transit across the Atlantic, which is in large part dependent upon the British Isles. If we cannot move our ships across the Atlantic Ocean as we desire, we cannot very well operate in the Mediterranean, much less push forces through to the Indian Ocean.
The Pacific Ocean remains to be considered. To possess it is to hold a great prize, but it lacks the transcending importance of the Atlantic. The United States dominates the entire eastern rim of that ocean, and all the islands up to the coast of Asia, save the Kuriles north of Japan, and Hainan, off the south China coast. The Asiatic shoreline of the Pacific is in the hands of the communists, with the exception of southern Korea and the Indochina-Malaya peninsula. Those holdings of the West on the Far Eastern mainland were the subject of vigorous military campaigns to oust us. So far, they have been failures. There appears little likelihood of their success now unless the Chinese put in large new forces. Such a renewal of the communists’ energetic campaign would involve a large part of Western military strength, and practically the whole of China’s. It might indeed put an end to the untouchability that China has enjoyed in the recent period of desultory war.
With the Pacific free from enemy domination, we are able to make use of the vast resources of the area, and we have the advantage of denying them to the enemy. We are able to subject his lands to naval, aerial, and amphibious assaults from the islands lying off the Asiatic mainland. We can prevent him from undertaking any amphibious adventures of his own, and we can hamper his anti-shipping forays, whether they be by submarines, airplanes, or surface craft.
With the Pacific islands and ocean in the hands of the enemy, as they were from 1941 to 1944, we will be sorely hurt. The advantages we derive from the area will be turned to the enemy’s account. But we had to labor with all these disadvantages during World War II. We found the loss of position and resources was painful, but not fatal. As long as we held the Atlantic, and our primary effort was devoted to that end, we could muster the forces necessary to regain the parts of the Pacific which had been ours, and to gain military and political control over those parts which had never been ours.
All the foregoing is not to ignore the land- areas of the world. Indeed, as Walter Millis has pointed out in an article in Foreign Affairs, control of the land and its peoples is the ultimate objective of war.
But the Atlantic Ocean and no other sea or land area is basic to our ability to wage war anywhere on earth. We lost control of substantial portions of the Pacific, the Indian, and the Mediterranean, as well as huge land-masses over the northern hemisphere, including all of continental Europe. But we survived these losses; when we had forged our strength, we regained them all. Had we lost the Atlantic we could have regained none at all.
That is sufficient reason to regard the Atlantic as our most precious holding, to be sacrificed to no other claim.