740.0011 European War 1939/21085: Telegram
The Minister in Egypt (Kirk) to the Secretary of State
[Received April 19—1:55 p.m.]
608. Personal for the Acting Secretary. I suggest you see and show to the President telegram 978 to War Department from Military Attaché to this Legation regarding Malta as well as material which Fellers has been sending in about Rumanian oil fields.
Furthermore I hope that both you and the President are seeing the reports on the war situation in this area which our Military and Naval Attachés here are sending to Washington. They should be carefully weighed as against reports from British sources for I am unable to satisfy myself that the British are adequately impressed both by the threats to this area as well as by its offensive possibilities or are sufficiently astute and energetic in obtaining and making effective use of the material suitable for defensive and especially offensive operations in this theatre. In April of last year I said that I thought that we should take the initiative in determining what is needed out here and in seeing that it gets here. Now we should be in a position to take also the leadership in determining [what] strategy should be determined by the immediate necessity of preserving and developing the offensive potentialities of the relatively few bases from which the German, Italian, Japanese mainlands can be struck. Such blows struck now even with smaller forces would be more effective than massed attacks later after these bases may have been lost and would go far to end the war. Hitler’s open discard of the fiction of Vichy independence increases the threat to this area and to whole African continent. The only reinforcements that can be brought quickly are air reinforcements and the immediate use of high altitude long range daylight bombers may still serve to check the Axis preparations in the Mediterranean. After all we cannot do everything everywhere but we can do something somewhere and I maintain that even in the scheme of all the operations on the limitless front special emphasis on the Mediterranean area is fully justified. In short we need here American planes under American supervision to fight in the American way, and we need them at once.