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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.