The first bombs were dropped and the first shots were fired last week in the Battle of the Middle East. Their sound was not great; it was a preliminary noise, like the crack of fungo bat against a baseball in warming-up time. But it was a business-like noise, a major-league, worldseries noise. There could no longer be any question where a new theater of war would be.
Preparations had been noticeable for some time. Observers had seen camels in Bulgaria, transport planes in Greece, seagoing barges at the Danube's mouth. Correspondents had seen Rumania's Puppet Premier General Ion Antonescu stage a ceremonial farewell for German troops faring southeastward. The Greek islands had been seized. German torpedo boats had appeared in the Aegean, and Nazi "tourists" in their outlandish, paper-stiff civvies had appeared in Syria. The German-French agreement (see p. 27), officially opening Syria to the Nazis, had been signed and sealed.
Inside Syria the Axis Armistice Commission had been happily taking inventory of the supply dumps left over from General Maxime Weygand's Army of the Levant: said to be enough materiel to equip 100,000 men and keep them in the field during a brief campaign.
For their part, the British had not been idle. Two months ago, after the successful British drive across Libya, it was rumored that General Sir Archibald Wavell had sent a large part of his troops to Palestine, to practice a hypothetical invasion of Syria. Last week a fair-sized British force was poised on the borders of Palestine and Trans-Jordan, perhaps intending to translate that hypothesis into proven matter.
The British had, besides, sent troops and planes to Iraq. In three weeks of sand-lot holy warfare, they had crushed the Air Force and just about crushed the land forces of the pro-Axis Premier-by-Revolt Rashid Ali El-Gailani. Last week the British reinforced their garrison in Iraq by sending units of the Fleet Air Arm to the top of the Persian Gulf.
The stage was set. The Germans were moving in from the wings—and when the Germans get onstage they have so far stayed there until the curtain.
Giant Leapfrog. Until Turkey might be persuaded either to do something or to do nothing, the Axis plan was apparently to play a giant game of leapfrog, transporting men, small artillery, light tanks, food and maintenance supplies by plane from Greece to Iraq. In Iraq they would, for the time being, fight a kind of vanguard delaying action, keeping the British from getting firmly established in the area until they themselves could.
Last week's promissory explosions of bomb and shell were the development of and resistance to this strategy. First of all, the Greek airports, rear bases of the German strategy, and Crete, the forward base of the British counterstrategy, were mutually bombed. Next the way stations got it: Italian Rhodes and British Cyprus. Then as German planes hopped across Syria and Axis transports moved from the Black Sea into the Aegean, the R.A.F. bombed Syrian airports and the Fleet Air Arm sowed mines off Syrian ports.