Sir Henry at the Bridge

The Times arrived. General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, the British commander in Persia and Iraq, sat down to the only indoor amusement which, at 61, he finds really worth while. The issues in the bundle from the Army post office were wrinkled and limp after the long journey from London, and they were many days old. But they still were full of the only news fit for a Briton of Sir Henry's stamp. His heavy face intent, his huge body hunched and at ease, Sir Henry took up the oldest issue in the packet. He read it through, column by column, then proceeded to the next issue, and the next, in scrupulous chronological sequence. Refreshed, restored and as well up on events as a man so far from London could be, Sir Henry returned to his job of building the army which may yet have to save Britain and her Allies, including the U.S., from disaster in World War II.

This disaster would be the loss of Persia, Iraq and the whole Middle Eastern bridge between the main land masses of Europe, Africa and Asia (see map, pp. 34-35). Marshal Timoshenko. fighting for the Volga and the southern Caucasus (see p. 36), is also fighting to avert that catastrophe. So is General Alexander, at his gate to Egypt and Suez (see p. 34). If either fails, or both fail, "Jumbo" Wilson will find the enemy on his bridge. His task is to assume that both will fail, and to do all that can be done to retrieve their failures.

So long as Sir Henry holds his bridge, neither defeat in southern Russia nor defeat in Egypt can be final. At the inner core of the Middle East, Allied armies will still be where they can get at, hold off and thrust back the Axis armies. There will still be an Allied wall between the Germans in Europe and Africa and the Japanese in Burma or India. But, if the Allies lose their Middle Eastern bridge, they will then be on the outer fringes of the greatest land mass ever controlled by one power or group of powers. The Axis will have its oil. It will have Russia, boxed and all but impotent. India will be isolated or conquered. By all the ordinary rules of warfare, the war will be lost.

Sir Henry's patron and Britain's greatest soldier, General Sir Archibald Wavell, said last year: "The Caucasus, Iran, Iraq and Syria may well prove to be the great battlefield of 1942." He knew, and Hitler knows, that 1942 is the Germans' one year to fight for the bridge. The year is running out, and Hitler's armies are still at the approaches. The Allies' hope is to hold the Germans there. If the Germans reach the bridge this year, the Allies will probably lose all the Middle East.

Iran is ancient Persia, at the upper entrance to the bridge. It is also, at this interim stage, the one field where Russian and British armies are in full collaboration. The British and Russians occupied Iran last year, deposed its fanatically independent Shah, set up a pro-Anglo-Russian rule, restored the name Persia. U.S. military men are also in Persia, but they are not yet an army. They are engineers, airmen, quartermasters, building roads and ports, forwarding military supplies to Russia over its Caspian routes. Last week the appearance at Teheran of a new U.S. figure--Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf (the New Jersey policeman who failed to solve the Lindbergh kidnapping)--to reorganize and enlarge the national police in Persia perhaps presaged the coming of U.S. combat forces, but for the present any fighting would be a job for the British and Russians.

The Russians, and probably a part of Sir Henry's British Tenth Army, hold northern. Persia, the oilfields of Baku and a line across Russian Georgia, south of the Caucasus range where the Germans are trying to cross. They hold, too, the middle shores of the Caspian, a pathway the Germans may try to follow southward from Astrakhan. And they have an internal front in Persia to master as well. The wild Kurdish tribesmen of the hills and the milder people of the lowland towns love neither the British nor the Russians; many still harbor Nazi spies, take Nazi money, and even spend Persian money to help the Germans from within. Last week the British seriously suspected that a looming famine in wheat-rich Persia was the work of wealthy, pro-Nazi Persians, who had cornered domestic grain and withheld it to foment unrest around the British and Russians.

Iraq is the lesser third of Sir Henry's command; like Persia, it is an occupied, but theoretically independent, nation under a regency and seven-year-old King Feisal II. The British have more enemies than friends among the 4,500,000 Iraqi; it took British bombs and troops to suppress a brief, pro-Nazi regime in Iraq last year. In Iraq and in adjoining central Persia is the bulk of Sir Henry's Tenth Army, poised to turn northward if the Germans come down from the Caucasus, west if they approach from the Mediterranean and Egypt.

In Iraq is the most vital city in the Middle Eastern theater: Basra, the river port which U.S. and British engineers have turned into a busy reception point for war shipments through the Persian Gulf. At the military worst, it would be to Basra that the Tenth Army would retire, for with Basra would go the Persian Gulf, and its access to South Africa, the South Atlantic, the U.S. and Britain. The battle for the bridge would first be a battle for overland rail and highway routes from Basra through Bagdad to Persia, the Caspian and Russia; then, at the blackest last, for the city itself. At such a juncture, the loss of Basra and the Gulf would be even worse than the loss of Suez.

Syria, Palestine and the Sinai Peninsula are the Mediterranean roadways to the bridge. Jumbo Wilson helped to take Syria from the Vichyfrench. The British Ninth Army under General Alexander now holds the Mediterranean fringe from Egypt to Turkey. If & when Field Marshal Rommel masters Egypt and Suez, he may choose to turn north toward Syria, seize the Royal Navy's last (and insufficient) eastern Mediterranean bases at Haifa and Beirut, then drive on Iraq. His more direct route to Basra would be straight across the great deserts of Arabia, but even camel trails skirt those wastes.

The Balkan Way. Rommel rolling up from Suez is not the chief menace to Sir Henry's bridge. Neither, as it may well turn out, is the German drive through the Caucasus. Wilson and Wavell do not forget that the Germans have a third approach, one that may be the most dangerous of all, if Egypt falls and the Nazis control the inner Mediterranean. The man waiting on that approach is the Luftwaffe's General Alexander Loehr, commander of all German forces in the Balkans, Crete and the Aegean Islands. A solely airborne thrust from Crete to the British island of Cyprus and on to the Syrian mainland would be difficult and costly, and it may be beyond the resources of the strained Luftwaffe (see p. 38). But General Loehr will be in a better position if Rommel extends his control of the southern Mediterranean to Suez. Then the Germans could move forces from southern Europe through Nazi waters, giving them thorough air protection. Then they would stand all too good a chance to by-pass or conquer Cyprus, to pierce the thinly held Syrian shore line by concerted sea, air and land assaults.

Turkey is the imponderable X in all the Allied calculations for the Middle East. The Russian and British armies in Persia, Iraq and Syria hold guns at Turkey's back--friendly guns, aimed not at the Turks but at the Germans. Turkey's bouncing Premier Suekr ue Saracoglu and the Turkish army's tough, cagey old Field Marshal Fevsi Cakmak have no choice but to play with the winning side.

Last week the German advances in the Caucasus were enough to put the Turks in panic. Premier Saracoglu visited the Caucasian border; General Kiazim Orbay brought up seven Turkish divisions. They were probably there more for effect than for fighting, although the Turkish Government has sworn to battle any invader. The battle for the Turkish gates to the Middle East will be won or lost before an enemy trooper crosses the Turkish border. That battle is being fought in Egypt and the Caucasus.

The armies on the bridge are greater in numbers than in actual fighting strength. According to a report from Istanbul last week, General Wilson has some 150,000 troops in Iraq and Persia. The Fighting French and thousands of Poles reinforce the Ninth Army in Syria and Palestine. But the Poles lack equipment; the Eighth Army in Egypt has necessarily had the first call on weapons, and this priority has probably affected the other British forces in the Middle East. So has Russia's urgent need; the U.S. and British supplies pouring through Iraq and Persia to the Caspian have gone mainly to the Russian fronts.

Next year Sir Henry will have a bigger army. He will have more equipment. He may well have U.S. combat forces with him. But, in the last months of 1942, the Germans must be kept off the bridge. If they are strong enough to reach it, they will probably be strong enough to take it.

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