Word: suez
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Both sides were obliged to make a try. Suez was the stake. The British, who realized that they had come within an ace of losing the canal in June, before Hitler turned back to Russia, were going to try to revise the scenario from here in. They were busy at the outposts. Iraq and Iran would now at least be buffers. Britain's Middle Eastern Commander in Chief General Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck flew to Cyprus, where he declared himself well satisfied with defenses, particularly air fields, which had been rushed into being to prevent a Crete repeat...
...some day a biography will be written of ginger-haired, dynamitish Admiral Sir John Cronyn Tovey, 55, now Commander in Chief of Britain's Home Fleet. Footnote material to such a work was orally contributed by one of his former shipmates who arrived last week in Manhattan from Suez (via the Cape of Good Hope) aboard the Empress of Asia with several hundred other British veterans of battles in the Mediterranean and campaigns along its shores. Said Sir John's former shipmate (insisting naturally that he be not quoted by name...
Nonetheless General de Gaulle is doing his part to hold Hitler in check. In Syria Free French and British forces stand guard over the northern approaches to Suez, which in turn guard one approach to Africa. And across two-thirds of the waist of Africa lies French Equatorial Africa, a vital link in one supply line to Egypt, a dagger pointed at Axis Libya, and a possible base for Anglo-U.S. operations along Africa's west coast...
...from Libya and possibly the Middle East and Turkey toward Egypt and Suez; 2) from Libya down through French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola (by transport plane) toward British South Africa; 3) from Spain and Spanish Morocco across Weygand's Morocco and West Africa (by persuasion or force) toward Dakar. The road to Dakar has already been improved and Dakar is the strongest fortress on the Atlantic coast of Africa...
Well aware are the Turks that their country offers Hitler the best road to Suez, the shortest land route to Russia's Transcaucasian oil fields (and to Iran, Afghanistan, India, beyond). Since the Balkan campaign, Nazi pressure on Turkey has increased notch by notch, with troop concentrations in Bulgaria, fortification of islands in the Aegean off the Turkish coast, increasing activity of Nazi agents behind Turkey's back (particularly in Iran). Economic pressure, too, has steadily risen since the German-Turkish trade pact was signed in June...