by Douglas Boyd
Nowhere was the war more confusing for the Legion than in Syria. In 1941, 6 REI was part of the Armée du Levant commanded by Gen Fernand Dentz who, as military commander of Paris had surrendered the capital to the Germans on 14 June 1940. His promotion to the post of High Commissioner in Syria, where he remained loyal to Vichy, earned him a death sentence at the end of the war, which he only avoided by dying in prison. The men of 6 REI were luckier. When captured, they argued quite correctly that they were professional soldiers obeying orders from their officers, who in turn were obeying instructions from their legal government in Vichy.
There had been a pro-Gaullist faction among 6 REI’s officers, headed by Col Edgard De Larminat, who used the liaison mission from the British forces in Occupied Palestine as a channel to sound out British willingness to support a coup. Indications are that his following was significant until he was arrested on orders of Gen Dentz. Held in Damascus pending execution for treason, Larminat was rescued on 30 June 1940 from his prison cell by a small commando of legionnaires, who spirited him south to Palestine, where he was welcomed as an honoured guest in the officers’ mess of Warwickshire Yeomanry.[329]
With him gone, other officers judged too Gaullist were either transferred back to North Africa, where they could do no harm, or understandably changed their minds about hitching their wagons to the star of a renegade colonel whose only support came from the people who had killed the defenceless sailors at Mers el-Kebir. Although holding the acting rank of general, De Gaulle’s substantive rank was colonel, and it was thus addressed that a letter he sent to the French Army High Command, explaining his actions in the summer of 1940, was returned to him in London.
Reinforcing the observation that many of the apparently political choices facing French soldiers during the war were resolved for non-political reasons Col Fernand Barre, then commanding 6 REI, put in writing much later that he had no quarrels with his brother officers in 13 DBLE. He thought that, had he been in their places, he would probably have made the same choices they had.[330] The confusion of loyalties was such that Monclar and one of his company commanders opted out of the Syrian campaign altogether because they refused to fire again on fellow legionnaires, no matter what might be the justification. Command of 13 DBLE then passed to Marie-Pierre Koenig, promoted to colonel.
The Vichy forces in Syria/Lebanon totalled thirty battalions. Against them, the Allies invaded with twenty battalions – and a confusion of reasons. Britain was invading to stop the airfield at Aleppo being used by German planes to bomb British targets in Iraq. Dentz had ordered his troops to fire on any aircraft overflying or landing in Syria, until Vichy granted landing rights to the Luftwaffe in the naïve hope that it would lead to a softening of the Occupation terms. Ordered also to open Syrian ports to Axis shipping, Dentz refused.[331]
In this difficult-to-read situation, De Gaulle seems to have assumed that 13 DBLE arriving in a show of force with British support would swing the largely colonial troops garrisoning Syria/Lebanon over to his side without a shot being fired, notwithstanding Dentz’s reluctant reply to an informal sounding-out that he would obey orders from Vichy.[332] With this in mind, the opening move on the Free French side was the bombardment of positions held by 6 REI with thousands of leaflets. The reply came in the form of equally denunciatory leaflets putting the opposing argument.
For the invasion of Syria the hard-pressed Allied Middle East Command cobbled together a mixed British, Indian, French and Australian force under Sir Henry ‘Jumbo’ Maitland Wilson – among them a squadron of Australian horse cavalry known as ‘Kelly’s gang’. As a kind of olive branch to the Vichy garrison in Syria of 35,000 mainly colonial troops plus aircraft and tanks, the Ozzies were ordered to wear their bush-ranger hats rather than helmets ‘until fired upon’. The order was greeted with coarse laughter and appropriate gestures.
Hitler’s launch of Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of the USSR in June 1941 – forced him to withdraw all German aircraft and ground troops from Syria. Wearing British battle-dress and khaki pith helmets bearing a tricolour shield, 13 DBLE entered Syrian territory from what is now Jordan, taking Dar’ah in the far south and heading north towards Damascus, together with 5th Indian Infantry Brigade. On 19 June, thirteen legionnaires were killed and several others wounded in the assault on the heights of Kissoueh, controlling the southern approach to the capital, but the big test lay ahead.
On 20 June, as Damascus fell to the Allied force, a company of 13 DBLE commanded by Dmitri Amilkvari – now a major – ran smack into 6 REI at Kadam, a southern suburb of the capital. One of the Legion’s most popular officers, the dashing, shaven-headed Georgian prince who affected a green cloak slashed by shrapnel in Narvik, and refused ever to wear a steel helmet, halted the firing after one casualty on each side and ordered his bugler to sound Le Boudin. When the defenders answered with the same call, Amilakvari coolly walked across to make contact with a sergeant, a wounded corporal and five legionnaires of 6 REI, who explained that they had orders to hold until 0100 hours.
‘Fine,’ said Amilakvari. ‘We’ll leave you alone until then.’ At 0105, he resumed the advance without bloodshed, but the same trick had no effect when 13 DBLE came up against 29th Algerian Tirailleurs elsewhere in Kadam. They fought so tenaciously that some of Amilakvari’s legionnaires had to be restrained from killing the wounded afterwards.
The record is not very clear, but it seems that Maitland Wilson tried to avoid using ‘his’ Legion against Dentz’s, and ordered 13 DBLE to attack Baalbek in Lebanon when the focus of conflict was 200km northeast of them at Tadmuriyah, where half the 500-strong garrison was drawn from 4th Battalion of 6 REI. That Dentz had no similar qualms about using 6 REI in the thick of the fighting is borne out by comparative casualty figures: in the brief campaign 13 DBLE suffered twenty-one killed and forty-seven wounded to 6 REI’s 128 killed and 728 wounded.
One of the two strong-points at Tadmuriyah, known as T2 and held by eleven men from 6 REI, surrendered to British Household Cavalry after a token exchange of fire, but strong-point T3, held by three 6 REI NCOs and nineteen legionnaires, resisted a week of attacks by RAF Regiment, yeomanry regiment personnel and elements of Glubb Pasha’s Jordanian Arab Legion. On 28 June an Essex Regiment patrol found it occupied by only six legionnaires. On 3 July after its main force of local Bedouin deserted en masse, the commander of the principal defensive position Fort Weygand sent emissaries to the Allied lines, surrendering six officers and eighty-seven legionnaires, mostly Russian or German.
With Tadmuriyah taken, fighting continued in Lebanon, where 1st, 2nd and 3rd battalions of 6 REI, with a high percentage of Spaniards, acquitted themselves well against combined British and Australian attackers from 6 – 12 July. Writing about it afterwards, Col Fernand Barre of 6 REI said that he had not wanted to fight, but could not honourably surrender until the Allied forces had demonstrated overwhelming superiority. With Operation Barbarossa in full swing, trouble in Yugoslavia and the commitment in North Africa, Hitler had no uncommitted forces to spare for Syria. Having no chance of reinforcements, the Vichy command capitulated.
The armistice signed at Akko in Palestine on 14 July provided for the men of 6 REI to have a choice between transfer to 13 DBLE and repatriation to France. Whatever De Gaulle had thought about them rallying to his cause, he was in for a shock. Relations between officers of 6 REI and 13 DBLE were correct but frigid, many of the former considering that their opposite numbers, promoted rapidly by De Gaulle to fill the gaps on his staff, were traitors who had jumped the promotion queue. Fuelling the fires of their jealousy, the increasingly confident leader of the Free French, on a visit to Palestine and Syria, promoted Koenig to general.
Two days before the arranged repatriation date of 6 REI, the entire strength of officers and men from Col Barre down to the most junior legionnaire paraded at the séance d’option. Koenig had ordered Barre to withdraw so that all the men of 6 REI could make a personal choice, free from coercion. Barre refused
to leave. A compromise was reached. He walked through a doorway and turned left for repatriation. The entire regiment followed him, with those who wished to stay with 13 DBLE free to turn right. To Barre’s delight, all but one man followed his lead. The regiment reformed behind the regimental band and marched proudly away. It seems that although the conditions seemed to guarantee each man a free choice, there may have been an element of coercion that day, for a mystery surrounds the fact that from a nominal roll totalling 3,344 men on 8 June, only 1,233 landed with him at Marseilles. Allowing for the killed and wounded, the discrepancy was claimed by 13 DBLE to be due to 1,400 men from 6 REI deciding to join them after all. However, a more reliable estimate put the number at somewhere between 677 and 1,000 – some by desertion before the séance d’option, others trickling in from Allied POW camps in the theatre, and the rest from hospitals and elsewhere.[333]
With 6 REI gone, 13 DBLE settled down to one of those strange interludes in war, during which Travers not only had an affair with Koenig, but also fell in love with him – to discover that he was deeply jealous of her previous relationships with several of his officers. Sharing his villa in suburban Beirut, she was awoken one night by a man, whom she took for him, getting into her bed. During their love-making she happened to run her hands over his head and found it clean-shaven. The equally startled Amilakvari, who had assumed he would always be welcome in her bed, scurried away with his tail between his legs on being given the news that she was now his general’s mistress.[334]
In Britain by this time De Gaulle’s arrogance had caused Churchill to reflect that of all the crosses he had to bear as the country’s war leader, none was heavier than the cross of Lorraine – symbol of the Free French. In the Middle East the unreliability of 13 DBLE in the eyes of the Allied command made them a very doubtful asset in the war along the North African littoral, with the result that it was given – as had happened to the Legion so often in the past – the dirty jobs.
Like Koenig, Monclar was now a general, forgiven his crisis of conscience. In the levelling-up, Amilakvari was promoted to lieutenant-colonel, commanding 13 DBLE from 16 September. With the new blood acquired in Lebanon, he now led 1,771 men organised in three four-company battalions designated 1st, 2nd and 3rd Bataillon de la Légion Etrangère, abbreviated to BLE. The chosen nomenclature seemed to deny altogether the existence of the main Legion regiments sitting out the war in Algeria. Equipped by the British as mechanised light infantry, two of the battalions were re-designated demi-brigades under Lt Col Amilakvari and Col De Roux, together making up 1st Free French Brigade under Gen De Larminat, attached to Eighth Army. The other battalion was left out of the war for the moment, seemingly because the Middle East Command had not enough equipment to fit out all three.
As 1942 dawned, C-in-C Middle East Gen Sir Claude Auchinleck was busy reinforcing the Gazala Line – a series of defensive fortified ‘boxes’ in the Western Desert, stretching from the village of Gazala near Benghazi on the Libyan coast all the way south to an abandoned pre-war Italian fort at a map location labelled Bir Hakeim. This was in expectation of the attack that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel launched on 20 January, sucking in much-needed reinforcements throughout that month and the next, and pushing his Afrika Korps and its Italian allies eastwards in the hope of driving the British back into Egypt and wresting from them control of the Suez Canal.
At the southern end of the line, Bir Hakeim consisted of a hexagonal ‘box’ of wire and trenches approximately 16km in circumference, centred on some underground rock-hewn cisterns called bir, no longer filled by a well that had gone dry, but on which converged several desert tracks. On 4 February, Larminat’s 1st Free French Brigade inherited this desolate tangle from British 150th Infantry Brigade, who were delighted to move out from a position surrounded by so many mines of all sizes and sensitivities that sand storms and even the heat often set several off in sequence.
It is possible that, somewhere on the road, the NCOs in Larminat’s column recognised a familiar face in British uniform. Former Legion Sgt Brückler had been in Wehrmacht uniform a few weeks before. Wounded and taken prisoner by Commonwealth troops in the Western Desert, he had apparently been ‘turned’ by British military intelligence while recovering in hospital at Shallufa and was a member of a small team of German-speakers in British uniform setting off on a long-range raid on the Luftwaffe airfield at Darnah in Libya.
At the airfield, Brückler volunteered to make a solo reconnaissance, during which he ‘surrendered’ to the duty officer in the control tower. The officer, alarmed at the sight of a scruffy man in British uniform wearing an Arab headdress, was on the point of shooting him when Brückler gave away the rest of his group. As he told the story years later in Algeria to British legionnaire James Worden, he was decorated by Rommel and posted to the 361st Regiment, far from the line so that there would be no chance of being re-captured by the Allies. What he left out of the story is that his three surviving companions on the raid were Jewish and almost certainly sent to their deaths. Scared after the war that he would be on a list of war criminals for betraying them, he re-enlisted in the Legion under the name of Brockman. In a typically Legion closed-circuit, Worden later recounted the story to a German adjutant-chef who was a drinking pal – and discovered that his pal had been one of the Luftwaffe officers on duty at Darnah on the night of the raid. Part-fact and part-fiction, it makes a good yarn![335]
At Bir Hakeim, night-time temperatures went below zero; afternoon peaks could reach 50o Centigrade and sunburn was punished as a self-inflicted wound. Apart from hordes of biting flies that went mad at the approach of each sand storm arriving as a sky-high wall of black travelling at speeds of sixty miles per hour or more, the only movement in the arid waste was a continuity of dancing ochre-coloured dust-devils, of which the fine airborne particles combined with sweat or mucus to make an abrasive paste in armpit, crotch, eyes, nose and every other orifice.
In addition to the Legion, the Bir Hakeim garrison included some French marine gunners and a British Bofors anti-aircraft battery, Algerian and Moroccan light infantry, artillery from Madagascar and Mauritius, a pacific battalion from Tahiti, some Lebanese sappers, Vietnamese auxiliaries and a black Chadian bataillon de marche, rumoured to practise witchcraft.
For the next three months this odd assortment of all colours and races strengthened the defences, which were nowhere near good enough in Koenig’s opinion, while Travers learned the art of moving about the desert at the wheel of his command car, a Ford Utility station wagon with its side and rear windows painted over so as not to reflect sunlight. Every hour on the hour she had to stop, check the badly punished tyres and clean the clogged air filter. Koenig could not stay at a desk and spent as much time as possible at the head of two- and three-day long-range patrols known as Jock Columns – after Gen Jock Campbell, who was credited with thinking them up. The other vehicles – jeeps and Bren-gun carriers – had their Brens on a mounting that permitted use against aircraft as well as ground targets. When finding a tempting enemy target, the motto was Shoot and scoot!
At the beginning of April, Larminat handed command to Koenig and departed to form 2nd Free French Brigade at Bardia in Libya, unaware that he was walking away from history and that Bir Hakeim was to join Camerone on the flags of the Legion.
Chapter 30: ‘La Miss’ and the heroes of Bir Hakeim
Western Desert, 1942
Two weeks later, Koenig was informed that a South African force was to take over Bir Hakeim.[336] It never happened. On 26 May came his chance to redeem the doubtful reputation earned by 13 DBLE in Syria when Rommel swung south and put Bir Hakeim on the map by handing it over to his Italian allies with the remark that they should be able to neutralise its heterogeneous garrison in about fifteen minutes.
Contact was first made by a column of M-13 Italian light tanks from the Ariete Armoured Division and the Trieste Motorised Division, who collided outside the wire with a screening party from 7th Armoured Division and 3rd Indian
Brigade. After dusk, with their protectors ordered elsewhere, the defenders clearly heard the menacing squeal of Italian tank tracks and the throbbing of heavy diesel engines surrounding the box.
At dawn, Koenig’s radio brought him a message from 7th Armoured HQ informing him that he was on his own, now that Rommel’s attack was building up to the north. Koenig was a man of action. Although ordered to mine the safe passages through the minefields and sit tight, waiting for the enemy to come to him, he despatched several Jock columns in Bren-gun carriers to reconnoitre. They returned with the bad news that German Mk IV Panzers were already east of Bir Hakeim, cutting it off from re-supply and from the nearest water.
At 0900hrs next day legionnaires on the perimeter spotted a column of seventy Italian M-13s with 75mm guns approaching in line abreast, the first wave of fifty being followed by another of twenty. Against them, the French had eleven 75mm anti-tank guns. At 400 metres’ range, both sides opened fire just as the lead tank detonated a mine that put it out of action. The Italian infantry behind the tanks lost interest at this point and scrambled aboard trucks that disappeared to the rear, but the Ariete Division tanks continued coming, despite losses. Six of them penetrated the defences. In the Legion’s forward command post, the code books and flag were being burned with the enemy only twenty paces away when the anti-tank gunners, who had been biding their time, opened up and broke the attack.[337]
By 1130hrs the Ariete had lost thirty-three tanks – not from any want of fighting spirit. Its commander Col Prestisimone had already had two tanks shot from under him when taken prisoner in his third. Wounded, burned and wearing only underwear after tearing off his smouldering uniform, he was a worthy opponent, to whom the stocky Yugoslavian Legion padre Père Mallec gave a pair of pyjamas to wear for his meeting with Koenig. ‘What went wrong?’ was the gist of Prestisimone’s conversation, surveying ninety of his tankers in an improvised POW cage adjacent to HQ. Once in the cage with them, after accepting Koenig’s sincere apologies for having no better accommodation, he blamed Rommel for telling him it would take a quarter of an hour to roll up Bir Hakeim. ‘He also told us all the mines had been lifted,’ his men replied.
