England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  They did not have to take Laure’s word for it. Twenty-four hours later Abetz himself turned up in Vichy with a ten-man SS motorcycle escort bristling with weapons, explaining that this bodyguard was necessary to protect him from the notorious ‘band of criminals’ posing as Minister Peyrouton’s special police. Pétain saw him at 10 a.m. the next day. Abetz was usually polite and Pétain too old and distinguished to shout but the meeting, which had started with the maréchal refusing point-blank to reinstate his protégé in any capacity and Abetz threatening to walk out, broke up in disarray when the man himself was released from house arrest in Châteldon and brought in.

  The former Prime Minister was accustomed to the ups and downs of political life in the Third Republic but nothing as unexpected, humiliating or briefly as frightening as the virtual coup that had just deposed him. Laval was in a towering rage and, no doubt emboldened by the presence of Abetz, he tore into the maréchal in a manner he was unlikely to have heard since he last earned the displeasure of his drill sergeant at Saint-Cyr. He was, screamed Laval, ‘a puppet, a windbag, and a weathercock twirling in every breeze’. Outside the maréchal’s closed door Henri du Moulin de Labarthete, his young chef de cabinet who had first worked with Pétain when he was ambassador to Spain, could hear every harsh word. For good measure, and in front of the German ambassador, Laval accused him of ‘insincerity and double dealing with England’. Abetz, who respected the old soldier, realized Laval’s outburst made a swift reconciliation impossible and a decent interval would be required before they could persuade Pétain to take him back. In turn, the maréchal knew that he needed to make some concessions. Peyrouton’s Brigade Mobile was disbanded and the minister himself, regarded by the Germans as the muscle behind the ousting of Laval, exiled as ambassador to Buenos Aires where he no doubt did his best to miss mid-winter Vichy in wartime.

  Together Abetz and Laval returned to Paris from where the ambassador sent a message to von Ribbentrop extolling Darlan – ‘a proven enemy of England’ – as Laval’s understudy. ‘I propose that for the moment we content ourselves with the results achieved and not force the reinstatement of Laval until after Darlan’s personal position of power has been strengthened,’ he wrote.

  Less than a week later, on Christmas Eve 1940, the amiral was granted his first meeting with Hitler. The Führersonderzug Amerika was back on French rails again, for its captain was, understandably enough, preoccupied by the English and had been inspecting some newly installed coastal batteries in the Pas de Calais. Operation Sealion, the invasion of England, had been cancelled, though only a few high-ranking Germans knew this or the reason why. On 18 December Hitler had asked the Wehrmacht to prepare plans for a blitzkrieg against Russia. If Germany was to fulfil its destiny and expand eastwards there was no place for a ramshackle, proselytizing giant on its doorstep however convenient the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been when it came to consuming Poland. But the attack on the Soviet Union would have to wait until well after 1941’s Russian thaw had dried, at least another five months away.

  By then it was hoped that the war between distant cousins in the west would be over. It would be preferable if Germany was not fighting on two fronts at once. As it was, Goering was already whingeing about the losses being inflicted on the Luftwaffe by the RAF’s new Beaufighters, which appeared to carry a radar that made them almost as effective at night as the Spitfires were by day. Yet it seemed that the peace he needed with England could only be achieved by the persistent nocturnal bombing of its cities until their inhabitants insisted that Churchill gave in. After a Christmas lull, a massive fire-bombing attack on London was planned for Sunday, 29 December when the Thames estuary was due for a very low tide and it was hoped that water pressure would be further weakened by cracking mains with parachute mines. Meanwhile, Hitler’s appointment with Darlan at the railway station in Beauvais, an old cathedral town about 55 miles north of Paris, was his last official business before his return to the Reich and the war’s second Christmas.

  The amiral was travelling by car from Paris along winter roads and was an hour late for the meeting which did not put the Reich Chancellor in the best of tempers, if only because it reminded him of Franco’s tardy arrival at Hendaye. Also present were Abetz and Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s French language interpreter.

  Darlan had two tasks. The first was to hand over another letter from Pétain reiterating his enthusiasm for the policy of collaboration but stressing that the insults Laval had delivered ‘in the presence of Herr Abetz’ made it impossible to invite him back into the Vichy government for the foreseeable future. ‘Even if I wished it, the improper conduct of M. Laval now being common knowledge,’ wrote Pétain, ‘I would risk inflicting a dangerous blow to the unity of the empire.’ Hitler instantly reacted to this thinly veiled threat that General Weygand’s French North Africa might secede to de Gaulle with the accusation that France seemed to be hellbent on ‘setting out again on the same road which led it to Vichy’. He also praised Laval’s political vision and said that he suspected Weygand was behind his departure.

  According to the interpreter Schmidt, Darlan weathered all this ‘like a breaker off the oily skin of an old walrus’. No doubt he was thinking of his second task, which was somehow to convince Hitler that he was a worthy successor to Laval and even the maréchal himself. To do this he had decided to play to his strengths. Everybody knew that since Mers-el-Kébir his old irritation with the British had grown into an unbridled loathing. What more could Adolf Hitler wish to hear, what better music to his ears, than his heartfelt desire to join him in his battles against their common foe across the Channel? Or how he had long felt that Germany not England was France’s natural ally? How could the little amiral be expected to know that, at this point, the megalomaniac he was addressing remained a reluctant enemy of the British, even something of an admirer? That he yearned for nothing more than to make peace with them so that he could attack a country that might be much bigger but lacked a moat?

  ‘My family have always hated the English,’ Darlan confided to the man he sincerely hoped was about to crush them into cowering submission. ‘We’ve been fighting them now for 300 years.’ At this point he usually mentioned Trafalgar and his great-grandfather’s part in it but perhaps he preferred to give the impression of an unbroken chain of victories. In any case, Hitler was notoriously uninterested in naval occasions.

  Soon Darlan found himself, along with Abetz and the interpreter Schmidt, standing on the platform watching Amerika’s rear anti-aircraft wagon disappear from view as the the Führer headed first for Berlin and then Bavaria where he and the athletic Eva Braun would spend New Year’s Eve and the first weeks of 1941.

  PART TWO

  War on Land, Sea and Air

  Chapter Fourteen

  Outside the main gates of Iraq’s RAF Habbaniya one of those signposts beloved by the British military abroad informed visitors that they were 55 miles west of Baghdad and 3,287 miles east of London. It was also about 300 miles east of the nearest French airfield at Palmyra in Syria but by the time that was of enough interest to warrant a mention it was too late.

  Until the spring of 1941 Habbaniya, built on a bend of the Euphrates close to the large lake from which it took its name, was still very much a peacetime posting. It had a polo field, golf course, swimming pools, cinema, married quarters bungalows dripping with bougainvillaea and eucalyptuslined streets named Bond, Regent and Tottenham Court Road. Before getting their wings, cadets who had just learned to fly Tiger Moths at one of the RAF’s East African establishments went there for their final six months’ advanced training at 4 Service Flying Training School. Yet for all its creature comforts, old hands piloting the biplane transports that delivered these pupils delighted in painting doleful tales of the hellhole they were bound for: a desert scorpion colony rarely out of furnace heat.

  It could get hot; temperatures of 115°F were not unknown. But this was also part of Mesopotamia’s Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization. Sometim
es the Euphrates brimmed its banks, flooding the huts closest to the river, and the cadets spent a couple of nights under canvas on the nearest high ground, a 150-foot-high windswept plateau about half a mile to the south. But when the mud had dried, roses, stocks and sweet peas flourished around some of its Nissen huts and the little brick bungalows. And if these gardens were well tended it was probably because some of the instructors and administrative staff still had their wives with them. As did the Christian levies of the Assyrian Constabulary who, together with some vintage RAF armoured cars, patrolled its 7 miles of steel perimeter fence and were as loyal to the British as only a persecuted minority could be.

  Occasionally Bedouin herdsmen, who disapproved of this infidel carbuncle in their midst, would pass the time by sniping at it from the bluff where the RAF cadets went camping when they were flooded out. Sometimes the Assyrians in their Australian-style slouch hats would send out a patrol under the cover of darkness then come onto the plateau with the dawn and scatter the snipers and their herds, feasting on any four-legged casualties.

  Otherwise, sprawling and overlooked, RAF Habbaniya was never intended to defend itself from anything more serious. Apart from a single early model Blenheim bomber and nine Gloster Gladiator biplanes, recently replaced as the Middle East’s frontline fighter by the Hurricane, the other aircraft were all trainers. These were not, as some accounts would later suggest, museum pieces but the training aircraft of their day, the majority of them biplanes designed and first built in the early 1930s.

  The most common type were thirty pointy-nosed Hawker Audax, not much more powerful than the Tiger Moths the pupils had first soloed in, with the same tandem open cockpits. But unlike the Moths, the Audax was fitted with two .303 machine guns so that pupils could be taught the rudiments of aerial gunnery by firing at the towed canvas wind socks the RAF called drogues. Then there were eight Fairey Gordons, squat light bombers, 10 years old and withdrawn from service just before the war but good for teaching dive-bombing. The only monoplanes, apart from the Blenheim, were twenty-six twin-engined Airspeed Oxfords which looked like scale models of something much bigger, with a closed cockpit and retractable undercarriage. Best of all they had a slow stalling speed so that cadets might survive their mistakes while practising bomb aiming, navigation and gunnery from the Armstrong-Whitney rotatable turrets fitted to the upper fuselage.

  In charge of all this was Air Vice-Marshal Reggie Smart, a 50-year-old survivor of the dogfights over the trenches, whose first taste of Iraq was bombing and strafing Kurdish insurgents for which, in 1921, he was awarded the new Distinguished Flying Cross. ‘This officer has shown a very fine example to his fellow officers,’ read his citation in the London Gazette, ‘especially during low bombing raids when he has frequently descended among heavy rifle fire to very low altitude to ensure accurate bombing of small targets.’

  After that Smart had spent three years on attachment to the Royal Australian Air Force before progressing from one administrative job to another until, just after the outbreak of his second war with Germany, he was back in Iraq as Air Officer Commanding. This made him the most senior military person in the country for there was hardly any army there.

  Iraq was a backwater but an important backwater. Habbaniya with its endless days of clear blue skies was not only a training centre but one of the British Empire’s important staging posts. The Short flying boats British Overseas Airways Corporation used on its Asian routes through India to Singapore landed on its lake. And in the south, almost on the Persian Gulf, the RAF had another big base at Shaibah near the port city of Basra. Then there was the oil. Pipelines ran from the fields around Kirkuk to two Mediterranean ports: across Jordan to Haifa in British Mandate Palestine and a little up the coast to Tripoli in French Syria. But after Pétain took over the British told its engineers to turn off the pumps on the Tripoli line.

  So for seventeen months while France fell, while the Battle of Britain raged, while the Blitz tore great holes in British cities, Smart drew up his schedules and fought his own battles with the Air Ministry for the spare parts he needed to keep his training fleet in the air. Then came disquieting reports from the embassy the British had maintained in Baghdad ever since Iraq became independent almost ten years before and suddenly there were other priorities. Ground crews began to fit bomb racks to the Audax and the Oxfords and began stockpiling the bombs to go in them. The same went for machine-gun ammunition. Soon his pupils could have shredded every drogue on the establishment a hundred times over. And when Smart entered his Air Headquarters, he found himself eyeing in a thoughtful way the venerable pair of long-barrelled 4.5-inch howitzers with their big wooden farm cart-style spoked wheels which stood in ceremonial guard at its main entrance. They were at least a quarter of a century old, much painted by defaulters from the guard house and a legacy of the last time the British had fought seriously over Mesopotamia.

  Modern Iraq was a British confection conceived in 1916 at a clandestine Anglo-French congress to decide how the spoils of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire would be divided once the war was won. France was to get Syria and Lebanon, where it had historical interests and the British, who had done most of the fighting in the region, would control Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq. Possession of these three countries gave London, for the first time in its imperial history, an overland route from the Mediterranean coast to the Persian Gulf and thence to India.

  As well as the air bases, the Anglo-Iraq Treaty gave Britain the right to transit troops through the country by road and rail. Iraq, where oil had been discovered in 1927, had been an independent monarchy since it became a member of the League of Nations in 1932 but the treaty and Britain’s determination to maintain its grip on Iraq’s foreign affairs provided the main battleground for its often murderous brand of domestic politics with its massacres of the Christian minority, café assassinations and military coups. In Iraqi politics you were either a pro-British monarchist who wished your new country to retain its individual identity or a Pan-Arab nationalist bent on expelling the French and the British from all Arab soil and uniting its peoples under one flag: an Ottoman Empire but without the Turks.

  Baghdad itself was a centre of intrigue and ample proof that Iraqi independence was something more than notional. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the fugitive leader of the bloodily suppressed 1936–9 Palestinian rebellion against the British over Zionist immigration, had been given sanctuary there and openly walked its streets. When the European conflict started the Iraqi government resisted British pressure for them to declare war on Germany and reluctantly broke off diplomatic relations instead. But when, nine months later, Mussolini entered the war they declined to follow suit and expel the Italian ambassador since by then France’s defeat was obvious and the best Britain could hope for was a peace on Germany’s terms.

  After that the fortunes of Iraqi’s politicians tended to follow the ebb and flow of events beyond its borders. Thus in January 1941, when British land and naval victories against the Italians had reached their peak, the Pan-Arabist and pro-Axis Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, a bespectacled lawyer, was gently eased out of power. Then three months later Hitler came to Mussolini’s rescue, the British were thrown out of Greece and Libya and a coup by four Iraqi colonels who called themselves the Golden Square restored Rashid Ali. Fearing for his life, Emir Abdullah, the pro-British uncle and regent of 5-year-old King Faisal II, escaped via the US Embassy to RAF Habbaniya and thence to Basra from where he was transferred to the gunboat HMS Cockchafer. Meanwhile, the infant King was hiding out in Kurdistan in the arms of his British nanny.

  One of the first things Rashid Ali did on resuming power was promise that he would abide by the terms of the Anglo-Iraq Treaty. Newly appointed British Ambassador Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, one of the Arabists who had helped to build Iraq out of its Ottoman wreckage and highly regarded by the Foreign Office if not always by the Arabs, did not believe a word of it. He urged that the Golden Square be overthrown and the
Regent restored. At Karachi two British Indian Army brigades were in the process of embarking for Singapore where there were fears that recent Japanese moves onto Vichy France’s Indochina airfields were not well intended. But Japan was not yet at war with Britain and might never be. It was decided to divert these brigades to Basra. In addition, also from Karachi, the British Army staged its first ever airlift. Just under 400 men of the King’s Own Royal Regiment were flown across the Persian Gulf to reinforce Habbaniya, most of them making their flight debut in the aircraft the RAF called ‘the flying pig’: Vickers Valencia biplane transports that could take no more than twenty fully equipped infantry and even in good weather lurched through the air in a manner guaranteed to make even experienced fliers yearn for terra firma.

  All this was done in the name of the transit rights allowed by the treaty. The British told the Iraqis the brigades, each about 5,000 strong, were ultimately bound for Palestine. Rashid Ali, politely informed, said that it was inconvenient. When the second brigade disembarked at Basra, Iraqi patriots led by the police began sniping at them but this died down after it was announced Cockchafer would retaliate with her 6-inch guns. Then the Iraqi leadership suggested that the matter should be settled through Turkish mediation and the British pretended to consider this option. Neither side was being sincere.

  In Baghdad, Cornwallis’s embassy had heard rumours of the impending return of Dr Fritz Grobba, one of Germany’s most prominent Orientalists and for seven years, until his British-inspired expulsion in 1939, its ambassador to Iraq. Grobba, an energetic Nazi propagandist who had arranged for the Arabic edition of Mein Kampf to be serialized in a Baghdad morning newspaper he had bought, was highly regarded by the Pan-Arabists who saw him as the man who would deliver them from British bondage. Baghdad’s Italian Embassy, the Axis mission Britain had failed to remove, informed Rome and Berlin what the colonels backing Rashid Ali needed: not just arms and money but the kind of air support that would guarantee them success over the weak British forces deployed against Iraq’s army of 60,000. By 25 April it was all agreed: the Iraqis were getting thirty-three warplanes. Germany would supply fourteen twin-engined Messerschmitt 110 fighter-bombers and seven Heinkel 111 heavy bombers. About twenty Junkers transports, including a couple of the big four-engined Ju-90S of the type Lufthansa had used on their pre-war long-haul routes, would bring the ground crews, maintenance equipment and all the munitions the Heinkels and Messerschmitts required. Italy was sending a squadron of twelve of its nippy CR42 biplane fighters, considered easily a match for the Gloster Gladiator, the RAF’s equivalent. All the German aircraft would carry Iraqi insignia but their crews would be German, the same thin disguise the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion had worn for Franco in Spain.