India's War

by Srinath Raghavan

  As with Iraq, Wavell was opposed to any pre-emptive move on Syria. All he wanted was ‘a stable and neutral Syria on my northern flank, in view of my general weakness’. Wavell was even averse to making any moves that ‘might result in disorder in Syria, which I did not want’.30 Of greater concern to him than the Vichy Syrian regime were the clamorous demands of the Free French forces under General Charles de Gaulle, who deplored Britain’s coddling of the Syrian government and insisted on securing the Levant for the Free French. The Gaullists hectically lobbied London and Cairo for the launching of an offensive on Syria. While de Gaulle sought Britain’s military support, he also harboured a deep suspicion that the British sought to dismantle the French empire and sully the glory of France. This schizophrenic stance jangled on London’s nerves. Wavell, for his part, remained unwavering in his opposition to any military venture in the Levant.

  In early April 1941 de Gaulle landed in Cairo, intending to bring matters to a head. At a meeting with Wavell on 15 April, de Gaulle’s Middle East envoy, General Catroux, insisted on nothing less than an immediate Anglo-French invasion of Lebanon and Syria aimed at capturing Beirut and Damascus. Catroux also demanded that MEC contribute two full divisions for the operation. Nothing could be better calculated to draw Wavell’s ire. His antipathy to opening another front apart, Wavell had been working to prevent a collapse of the Syrian regime and the ensuing instability by relaxing the economic embargo and concluding a trade agreement. So he dismissed the Free French plan out of hand.31

  De Gaulle’s demands, however, fell on sympathetic ears in London. By the end of April 1941, the crisis in Iraq was bubbling up, and signals intelligence gleaned by British codebreakers revealed that Germany and Italy planned to use Syrian territory to support Rashid Ali’s revolt. Also, the Syrian government was apparently providing direct military aid to the Iraqis. Churchill wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt that ‘If the German air force and troop carrier planes get installed in Syria they will soon penetrate and poison both Iraq and Iran and threaten Palestine.’32 As hostilities broke out in Iraq, London leaned on Wavell to consider options for Syria. The general reluctantly convened a conference in Cairo on 5 May. Catroux held on to his earlier demands, impervious to the fact that Wavell had just suffered defeat in Greece and had Iraq on his hands as well. An exasperated Wavell shot back that ‘the loss of Syria would be better than the risk of … intervening with inadequate forces’.33

  Churchill did not take kindly to Wavell’s resistance. ‘A supreme effort must be made’, he instructed the chiefs, ‘to prevent the Germans getting a footing in Syria.’ If Wavell did not have resources to spare, he should provide transport and air support to the Free French forces and allow them to go ahead with an invasion.34 Wavell was unpersuaded. On 17 May 1941, he wrote to the CIGS that the only force he had in Palestine had been sent to Iraq. ‘I feel strongly’, he added, ‘that Free French without British support would be ineffective and likely to aggravate situation.’35 This was not an unreasonable opinion, given that the Free French forces stood at barely two brigades, a little over 5,000 men.

  Churchill, however, insisted that the Free French should be allowed to proceed with their plans, and ordered Wavell to give them as much military and air support as possible. Wavell curtly asked the chiefs of staff to either trust his judgement or relieve him of his command; the chiefs felt that they should stand by Wavell. Opinion in the cabinet swung towards Churchill’s stance, however; the foreign secretary Anthony Eden noted that ‘if the Free French are prepared to chance their arm … we are in favour of letting them have a shot, faute de mieux’.36

  The prime minister was already vexed at Wavell’s dragging his feet over Iraq and had thought aloud more than once about sacking him. He now came down heavily on Wavell. On 21 May, he wrote to his commander: ‘Our view is that if Germans can pick up Syria and Iraq with petty forces, tourists and local revolts we must not shrink from running equal small-scale military risks and facing the possible aggravation of political dangers from failure.’ Churchill took full responsibility for the decision. If Wavell could not implement it, he would be relieved of his command. Wavell beat a hasty retreat and ordered the 7th Australian Division, less a brigade, to move to Palestine and prepare for an advance into Syria.37

  The force that assembled in Palestine included a Free French division and the 5th Indian Infantry Brigade. The brigade was part of the 4th Indian Division and had fought at Sidi Barrani and Keren. Led by Brigadier Wilfred Lewis Lloyd, it included the 4/6th Rajputana Rifles, the 3/1st Punjab and the 1st Royal Fusiliers. The operation began at 0200 hours on 8 June 1941. The initial advance was smooth and by the following morning the brigade had entered the town of Deraa, which was evacuated by the Vichy troops. At the next objective, Sheikh Meskine, the Rajputana Rifles encountered stiff resistance. The Vichy forces made effective use of artillery, machine-gun nests and armoured cars to hold the Indians at bay for over twelve hours. When the battalion launched a final assault, it found that the Vichy troops had evacuated under the cover of darkness.38

  The botched operation at Sheikh Meskine portended the challenges that the 5th Brigade would confront during the attack on the village of Mezze, on the outskirts of Damascus, ten days later. The brigade began the attack on the night of 18 June with the Punjabis in the lead. The advance company of the 3/1st Punjab was met with a hail of machine-gun fire. The Indian troops immediately took to the ground and dispersed widely. Although the firing stopped after a while, the battalion found it difficult to regroup the scattered companies and platoons. In the ensuing melee, the Rajputana Rifles went ahead and captured the village. By the time the Punjabis got their act together and assaulted the fortified positions adjoining Mezze, mortar and artillery shells rained down on them from Vichy positions to the rear of the village. The attack on the forts failed and the Rajputana Rifles were isolated in Mezze.

  At 0900 the next morning, as the Indians were setting up roadblocks around the village, the Vichy troops counter-attacked with a number of tanks. Several Indian troops were taken prisoner, while the rest pulled back to a two-storey building in the village. Over the next twenty-four hours, they put up a doughty fight against the Vichy forces that had entirely surrounded their position, but at 1430 on 20 June, after the Vichy troops brought in their heavy artillery, the Indians had to surrender. Brigadier Lloyd made several unsuccessful attempts to relieve his beleaguered forces, but it was not until the morning of 21 June that Mezze was retaken and secured by the brigade, opening up the road to Damascus. At 1430 on 21 June, Free French forces entered Damascus.39

  As the initial attack on Mezze faltered, Wavell was forced to deploy additional troops in Syria. He now ordered up another brigade and an artillery regiment from Egypt. Troops from Iraq were also diverted to Syria. Habforce was asked to advance to Palmyra. On 19 June, Auchinleck told General Quinan that the operations in Syria were of greater importance than securing southern Iraq. In consequence, the 10th Indian Division under Slim was asked to concentrate a force at Haditha and advance up the Euphrates River to Aleppo. The major objective for the division was identified as Deir-ez-Zor, the capital of eastern Syria, a hundred miles or so inside the border with Iraq.

  The first major problem confronting Slim was logistical. Despite using ‘native boats on the Euphrates, hiring all available civilian lorries from Baghdad and even the village donkeys’, it took days before the division reached Haditha.40 By this time, Damascus had fallen. Nevertheless, the Vichy forces continued to resist and control the bulk of the country. More importantly, the logistical problems would become all the more acute from Haditha onwards. Slim realized that only one brigade of the division could be deployed for battle so far ahead of the bases near Baghdad. And so the 21st Indian Infantry Brigade was beefed up with supporting units and provided with all available mechanical transport. The commander of the brigade group, Brigadier Weld, drew up a plan for the attack on Deir-ez-Zor which was approved by Slim on 29 June. The plan envisaged moving
the force of nearly 800 vehicles over a distance of 200 miles in two days and enveloping the target in a two-pronged attack.

  The second problem was the weather. When the brigade group commenced its advance, the mercury was soaring in the desert summer. Captain John Masters of the 2/4th Gurkhas was in the convoy:

  The earth shimmered and heaved, at first only in the distance, then closer and closer until sometimes the trucks in front of me took on distorted shapes of animals or vanished altogether. I felt heatstroke closing in on me. The dust billowed up now and I began to choke.41

  Only part of the route had been reconnoitred by the Indians. No sooner had they crossed this stretch than a dust storm kicked up. Satyen Basu’s vehicle lost contact with the unit to which he was attached: ‘at one place where the road bifurcated immediately after a turn, I went the wrong way. When I realised my mistake, I turned back and searched for another hour to find the unit in vain.’ Basu’s travails did not end even after he caught up with the convoy. ‘Dust and smoke had made visibility extremely poor … My only duty was to follow the vehicle in front of me. We had eaten very little in the last few days and had nothing to drink in the last 24 hours.’42

  Under these conditions, the brigade group struggled to keep together. The armoured cars in the front and flanks lost touch with the main body. The vehicles were forced to move in a low gear, so consuming large quantities of petrol. The sandstorm also scrambled the wireless network and severed communications between the brigade headquarters and the units. By the time the brigade group was to have formed up for attack, the commander had no option but to call it off. Worse still, Vichy aircraft dived in at dawn, carpeting with bombs the Indian positions in the desert. Masters hurled himself into a trench as he sighted the Martin Maryland bombers: ‘Suddenly the ground jumped. A huge force lifted and shook me and the trench and the whole earth in which the trench had been dug, moving everything bodily upwards and sideways. Thick yellow earth clogged my mouth and nostrils.’43

  Slim was in a quandary. He had lost the advantage of surprise; his stocks of petrol were running dangerously low; and his troops had no anti-aircraft guns to counter Vichy bombardment. Yet he resolved on a bold plan. He decided to send one column to probe the main defences of Deir-ez-Zor, while another would move out wide, round the southern flank of the Vichy positions, take the Aleppo Road and swing at Deir-ez-Zor from the north. The plan carried both the promise of surprising the enemy from a direction he was unprepared to defend and the danger of the column losing its way and being destroyed piecemeal. Slim’s gamble paid off. On the morning of 3 July Deir-ez-Zor fell to Indian troops.

  As the Indians moved into the town, they were struck at the sight of large numbers of Syrian troops peeling off their uniforms and melting into the population. The prisoners of war taken by the Indians were almost entirely French. Equally striking was the attitude of the local populace, which was sharply at variance with that of the Iraqis. As Basu entered the city, ‘the inhabitants were waving welcome to us and the constable at a road corner saluted as our car passed by’. Slim found the streets ‘full of men milling round, Indian sepoys, native civilians, and, judging by their undress, some of our friends the Syrian soldiers … the bank holiday atmosphere pervading the scene did not fit in at all with my idea of the serious business of capturing a city by assault’.44

  Yet the Syrian campaign was no walk in the park. When the armistice was finally signed on 13 July, the Allies counted 4,600 dead and wounded. The Levantine flank of the Middle East had been secured, but the Persian Gulf still seemed dangerously exposed.

  Iran had long been a fixture in British imperial strategy. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Britain and India saw it as an important buffer state that held an expansionist Russia at a secure distance from the frontiers of the Raj. Controlling the Persian Gulf was also deemed critical to securing the sea lanes to India and ensuring that the Indian Ocean remained a British lake. The treaty of 1907 ushered in a détente between Britain and Russia and divided Iran into two informal spheres of influence: Russian to the north and British-Indian to the south. The country was accordingly occupied by the two powers during the Great War. Following the Bolshevik revolution, however, Russia and Iran concluded a separate treaty in 1921. That accord allowed Russian forces to enter northern Iran if any other power sent its troops to the southern part of the country. Thereafter, British and Indian policies were geared towards ensuring that no pretext was provided to Russia to send its forces into Iran.

  In the inter-war years, Britain’s interests in Iran had centred on oil. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company pumped out most of the oil in the Middle East. Securing these fields and the refinery at Abadan figured prominently in military planning and eventually shaped the decision to occupy Basra. From India’s standpoint, Iran’s importance was also strategic. Not only did India share a border with Iran, but it was believed that a hostile Iran would threaten the stability of Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province. It would also endanger the sea and air routes of communication between India and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf littoral.45

  At the outbreak of the Second World War, Iran had declared its neutrality. The country had been ruled since 1925 by Reza Shah Pahlavi. An authoritarian modernizer, the shah sought both to leverage economic assistance from all corners and to shield the sovereignty of Iran.46 Apart from granting oil concessions to the British, the shah brokered trade relations with the United States, the Soviet Union and, above all, Germany. Indeed, he gratefully accepted Nazi Germany’s generous offers of financial and technical assistance for the industrialization of Iran. At the same time, the shah refused to hitch his wagon to any of the great powers. Thus, when Berlin pressurized him to support Rashid Ali’s regime in Iraq, the shah remained unyieldingly aloof. If anything, he looked askance at the Iraqi putsch, and even toyed with the idea of sending his own forces to tame the rebellion.47

  The British government was initially keen to respect the neutrality of Iran. The chiefs of staff did not consider ‘a Russian land advance through Iran as likely’. If war broke out with Russia, they would set in motion the existing plans to secure Basra and the Anglo-Iranian oilfields against ‘internal disturbance and air attack’. If these contingencies did not occur, then it would be best to avoid sending troops into Iran: ‘in order to preserve Iranian neutrality until such time as we needed Iranian co-operation for offensive operations against Russia’.48 When Force Sabine was preparing to sail from Karachi, the commander was instructed not to infringe the neutrality of Iran. However, in the wake of the crises in Iraq and Syria, London’s attitude towards Iran began to change.

  The shift in Britain’s stance was initially spurred by two problems. Eight German and Italian ships had been stranded since September 1939 at the Iranian port of Bandar Shahpur. If these vessels were scuttled in the channel that led to the Shatt al-Arab waterway, they could prevent the passage of oil-bearing ships through the Persian Gulf. The Royal Navy could easily stop this happening, but it would involve taking steps that would impinge on Iranian neutrality. Further, and more important, was the presence of German nationals in Iran. Up to three thousand Germans were working in Iran on a range of technical and commercial ventures, and intelligence intercepts showed that the German Legation in Tehran had played an important role in supporting Rashid Ali’s coup. London concluded that all Germans in Iran ‘may be counted as fifth-columnists’.

  With the launch of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, Britain’s concerns about Iran were greatly magnified. The German invasion of the Soviet Union threw out all the assumptions underpinning British military plans for Iran. As German forces made stunning thrusts into Soviet territory, the British feared that in the months – if not weeks – ahead, the Wehrmacht would strike through the Caucasus and reach the northern frontiers of Iran. As the director of military operations put it, ‘If the Germans were to appear in force in Iran by way of Russia, our whole position in Iraq would be threatened
and our communications in the Persian Gulf might be cut.’49

  As soon as Germany supplanted Russia as the threat to the Persian Gulf, Britain and Russia began shuffling towards a strategic embrace. And Iran proved to be an area where their interests closely coincided. Towards the end of June, both Britain and the Soviet Union delivered communiqués to Iran, warning that the presence of German nationals pointed towards an imminent coup.50 On 1 July 1941, the British envoy in Tehran, Sir Reader Bullard, met the Iranian prime minister and asked that the Axis ships in Bandar Shahpur be immobilized, either by removing their crews or by stripping them of essential machinery. Bullard also demanded that 80 per cent of the Germans in Iran be immediately expelled.

  The Iranians took a cautious tack. Their prime minister informed Bullard on 27 July that Britain’s demands amounted to abridging Iranian sovereignty. The Iranian government was alive to the need for vigilance and was taking some steps to reduce the number of Germans. They had also posted a gunboat at Bandar Shahpur to ensure that the Axis ships could not move out. Bullard felt that these steps were inadequate and pressed his demands again.