Word: suez
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...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...
...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...
...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 Löhr, commander of all German forces in the Balkans, Crete and the Aegean Islands. A solely airborne thrust from Crete...
Britain's soldiers stood in their classic and indomitable position: with their backs against the wall. West of Suez there was no other place to make a stand. Behind them was Cairo, capital of Egypt; the delta of the Nile, a great plain as large as Vermont, crisscrossed with irrigation canals; Alexandria, last major British naval base in the eastern Mediterranean. All that stood between Rommel and Suez was General Sir Harold (Rupert Leofric George) Alexander's Eighth Army. If it failed, then, in the words of one U.S. Army official last week, "God help...