England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Vichy France was also asked to play a role and Amiral Darlan was happy to oblige. Now firmly ensconced as Pétain’s deputy, he had arranged that the Axis aircraft should be staged through neighbouring Syria rather than fly in directly from Italian bases on Rhodes. More than ever Darlan was determined to win German concessions by showing them how much he wanted to hurt the English.

  In recent months the Royal Navy had stoked his Anglophobia with Operation Ration, a tightening of its naval blockade on French merchant shipping bringing colonial imports into Marseilles that the Germans might ultimately get their hands on. Top of the British list were rubber shipments from Michelin’s Indochina plantations. ‘The Cabinet are particularly concerned that the attention of the French should be drawn to the contrast between the arrival of food ships and the non-arrival of cargoes other than food,’ London had informed Admiral Somerville in Gibraltar, who was in overall charge.

  Operation Ration had led to several sea chases after French ships striving to get back into territorial waters on sighting British patrols. A fierce exchange of fire between a French shore battery near Casablanca and the cruiser HMS Sheffield ended suddenly with an impressive onshore explosion, presumably from a direct hit on a magazine or some kind of accidental misfire with the same result. Afterwards ten Vichy Glenn Martin bombers had caught up with the Sheffield and her attendant destroyers about 8 miles outside Gibraltar but in three separate attacks on the cruiser failed to inflict any damage.

  Encounters were more often settled by an armed boarding party getting onto the French ship, usually after dire threats of the consequences if she failed to heave to and lower a ladder. For those that did not comply with the last request an Australian ship adapted a Lee-Enfield cartridge so that the rifle could fire a grappling hook with a line attached like a whaling harpoon. On at least one occasion a stubborn refusal to stop and be searched ended in tragedy. On New Year’s Day 1941 a Frenchman named Tarte and his 12-year-old daughter, passengers on the liner SS Chantilly, were killed and four others wounded when they were hit by what was supposed to be a warning burst from a heavy machine gun on HMS Jaguar, one of the Dunkirk destroyers. The British got a doctor aboard and, not surprisingly, found the crew ‘in ugly mood’.

  ‘Please at once inform your French colleague and ask him to convey immediately to Vichy our profound regret at this misfortune,’ the Admiralty signalled the British naval attaché in Madrid. ‘But you should emphasise that it arose out of unjustifiable resistance to a perfectly legitimate operation.’

  Chantilly was intercepted off Morocco’s Cape Tres Forcas, one of a convoy of four ships whose journeys had begun in the ports of French West Africa with their last cargoes picked up in Casablanca. With the liner were two tankers and the Copenhagen-registered freighter Sally Maersk which had fallen into Vichy hands in Dakar and was discovered still to have a detachment of nine French marines aboard. As soon as their jailers were removed the Danish crew, voluntary exiles from their German-occupied homeland since the previous April, had hoisted the Red Ensign of the British Merchant Marine.

  All four ships were escorted to Gibraltar, while in Madrid the furious French naval attaché demanded their release ‘with the shortest delay if it is desired to avoid very serious consequences’. This was ignored. With Doenitz’s U-boats threatening to starve them into surrender the British had an enormous appetite for ships. Chantilly, built in St Nazaire in 1922 and big enough to carry 800 passengers, would first become a British troop transport then, painted white, a hospital ship. The fully laden tankers were obvious prizes and for all the innocence of the considerable tonnage of coffee, cocoa and palm kernels found in her holds the Danish Sally Maersk – which would be torpedoed off Greenland in September – was considered nothing less than a return to the fold.

  Darlan called it piracy. By the time the Germans were asking him for the use of the Syrian airfields his staff had worked out that since July 1940 the British had seized a total of 167 French ships: some 790,000 tons worth. Apart from the Syrian concession he had also decided to offer Rommel’s Afrika Korps the use of the Tunisian port of Bizerte which was closer to Sicily than Tripoli and would make his supply ships less vulnerable to air and submarine attack from Malta. And he would discuss the possibility of a German submarine base at Dakar.

  The Germans agreed to make Darlan immediate and visible payment for the airfields: by releasing for service in North Africa about 7,000 of their colonial army’s professional officer and non-commissioned cadre who had fallen into their hands in 1940; by easing some of the irksome formalities at the crossing points on the demarcation line between the occupied and non-occupied zones; by reducing from 20 to 15 million Reichsmarks a day what Germany charged France for the tediously expensive business of being obliged to occupy the country in the first place. All this was enshrined in a document, the first part concerning Syria signed by Darlan and Ambassador Abetz, to be known as the Paris Protocols.

  As far as the little amiral was concerned this was the high-water mark of collaboration. Certainly much better than anything Laval had managed to pull off. It might even revive a French proposal floated during the first days of the armistice that, using Syria as a springboard, France should seize the British-controlled Iraqi oilfields at Mosul and Kirkuk and divide the spoils with Germany. It would no doubt have come as a terrible shock to both Darlan and, to be fair, probably the Francophone Abetz, had they known that in return for oil Germany had secretly agreed to support a confederation between Iraq and Syria cleansed of the French. All that Rashid Ali and the colonels of the Golden Square had to do was await the arrival of the Luftwaffe so that they could rid themselves of the British first. They had already seen what a difference a little German assistance could make.

  Hitler’s decision to come to Mussolini’s rescue and intervene in both North Africa and Greece had certainly done nothing to detract from the invincible aura of the Wehrmacht.

  During the winter of 1940, the Greek campaign against their Italian invaders in the snow-filled passes of the Albanian frontier had won them worldwide admiration. In Britain comparisons were made between the dismal performance of the French Army earlier that year and the valiant, under-equipped Greeks whose most modern equipment seemed to be the distinctive French helmets they were wearing. Their defiance was a tremendous fillip for British morale. As the Luftwaffe’s night bombing was reaching its peak, the chorus of one of the most popular songs on the BBC’s Light Programme went:

  What a surprise for the Duce, the Duce,

  He can’t put it over the Greeks,

  What a surprise for the Duce, they do say

  He’s had no spaghetti for weeks!

  That the Duce’s appetite might well be restored by a German tonic had been by no means unexpected. By the beginning of March, Middle East Command had transferred almost 58,000 men to Greece complete with artillery, a brigade of tanks, lots of trucks and plenty of the little open-topped tracked vehicles known as Bren-gun carriers which comfortably seated four people. This was not a decision that had been lightly taken. A small RAF contingent had already depleted the Desert Air Force and Greek instructors were training Greek pilots at Habbaniya. The desirability of getting some British troops alongside the Greeks had left Churchill agonizing over the risk that it might fatally weaken the army that had inflicted such a gratifying defeat on the Italians in Libya.

  After initial reluctance it was Wavell who thought it could be done. He put the Greek expedition under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Maitland Wilson, an enormous bald ball of a man known as Jumbo, who had convinced himself that all would be well because the Greeks had agreed to fall back behind the Aliakmon river, a strong defensive position where they would join together to fight the Germans to a standstill. Instead, the Greeks left it too late and an orderly retreat is always the most difficult of military manoeuvres. By the end of April 1941, harried by the ubiquitous Luftwaffe, it had first become a headlong flight then abject surrender. In Athens the Acropolis was flying
a swastika flag. Jumbo Wilson was lucky that the navy got three-quarters of his men back to Egypt or to Crete though most of them, like himself, had got only the clothes they stood up in and their personal weapons.

  Disaster had also struck in North Africa. Even as Wilson’s expedition was crossing the Mediterranean for Greece, a panzer division under General Erwin Rommel was going the other way and soon unloading in Tripoli. At the end of March 1941 Rommel started his offensive. Two weeks later he had pushed the depleted British forces all the way back to the Egyptian frontier. In the process he captured 2,000 prisoners including three British generals, one of them Richard O’Connor who had started the chain of Italian defeats. The only part of Libya Rommel’s Afrika Korps had been unable to restore to Mussolini was the port of Tobruk where Australian infantry with British armour and artillery stood firm.

  These then, plus unfinished business with the Italians in Ethiopia and Somaliland, were Archibald Wavell’s more pressing concerns when Amiral Darlan decided to add to them by lending a helping hand to Germany’s Arab allies in Iraq. On 29 April the fast light cruiser HMS Ajax, of River Plate fame, brought Britain’s Middle East commander from Egypt to Crete. Wavell had come for talks with Jumbo Wilson, who had 30,000 of his Greek Expeditionary Force there, and Major General Bernard Freyberg VC, London-born but raised in New Zealand, whose division he was commanding.

  Crete is 70 miles off the Greek mainland and Admiral Cunningham’s fleet dominated the waters in between. In March it had sunk five Italian warships during a battle off Cape Matapan in which 2,000 Italian sailors died. When Greece fell, total catastrophe for the British had only been averted because the Royal Navy was able to stage a series of miniature Dunkirks. Yet it seemed the campaign was far from over. ULTRA wireless intercepts suggested that the Germans intended to make military history: they planned to exploit their overwhelming air superiority to leapfrog the Royal Navy by using paratroopers, gliders and, once an airfield was taken, Junkers 52 transport planes to capture the island almost entirely by airborne assault.

  The New Zealand Division had made a good battle debut in Greece, where they often provided the rearguard, and at Churchill’s request Wavell agreed to put the 1916 Victoria Cross winner Freyberg in charge of Crete. The Prime Minister, who loved the brave, thought Freyberg was marvellous. At a pre-war country house weekend he had once persuaded the barrel chested warrior to strip off and reveal his 1914–18 scars and stopped counting at twenty-seven though, as the object of his veneration modestly pointed out, some were from exit wounds.

  Jumbo Wilson was considered to have done well during the retreat forced on him in Greece, handing out a couple of bloody noses and keeping his command intact enough for the navy to get most of it out. But his Balkan adventures, for the time being at least, were over. With Rashid Ali in mind, Wavell had decided to make him commander of British troops in Palestine and Transjordan and sent him off with orders that were his usual model of concision: ‘I want you to go to Jerusalem and relieve Baghdad.’

  Except that in this case appearances were deceptive. Wavell’s heart was not at all into sending a relief expedition to Iraq. He felt Middle East Command was far too over-stretched to take on another front, however minor, and the reinforcements that had arrived in Iraq from India were too meagre to make much difference. The mostly British-trained Iraqi Army was quite formidable, with a considerable amount of artillery plus a few light tanks and armoured cars. And even without German help its air force possessed about sixty relatively modern American, British and Italian types that were certainly more than a match for Air Vice-Marshal Smart’s trainers at Habbaniya.

  Wavell urged London to take up the offer of Turkish mediation. Holding Rommel at the Egyptian frontier was bad enough without risking the consequences of taking on an Arab insurgency with inferior forces. He feared Iraq could easily bushfire into uprisings in his Palestinian and Egyptian rear areas where there was certainly enough dry tinder about. Three years of full-scale rebellion in Palestine over Zionist immigration had only ended in 1939 and it had taken several thousand troops to do it. The most he wanted Jumbo Wilson to do was rattle any sabres that came to hand in the hope that the noise might contribute to a negotiated solution. As Christopher Buckley, the Daily Telegraph’s Cairo-based war correspondent in the Middle East, would write when he was no longer constrained by censorship:

  Our patient and much tried Commander-in-Chief was in the position of the father of a family whose budget cannot cover all the needs of his numerous offspring … Ever since the preceding June his command had been primarily an affair of making ends meet with totally insufficient resources, and in the months of April and May 1941 it seemed that all the bills were coming in together.

  Above all, beyond the Iraqi problem loomed a much larger cloud. Wavell had long suspected that sooner rather than later Churchill would ask him to help the Gaullists take over Vichy Syria. For some time they had been arguing that, with a little English support, Syria (of which Lebanon was then an integral part) would drop into their basket like a ripe fruit. It was far more isolated than Vichy France’s African possessions. To its south and east were the British-controlled borders of Palestine, Transjordan and (up to a point) Iraq, while off its west coast were Royal Navy patrols and the crown colony of Cyprus. To the north was aloof and neutral Turkey.

  In recent weeks Free France’s Levant emissary Général Georges Catroux, a five-star general who had first met de Gaulle in a German prison camp in 1916 and was by far his highest ranking army officer to come over to him, had been hinting at mass Vichy defections if only Wavell would agreed to advance into Syria alongside the 6,000 Gaullist troops they could muster. But the Commander-in-Chief was adamant that they would need far more men than he had available and his opposition to any intervention in Iraq let alone Syria led to an increasingly acerbic exchange of telegrams between himself, Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff.

  Wavell: I have consistently warned you that no assistance could be given to Iraq from Palestine in present circumstances and have always advised that commitment in Iraq should be avoided.

  Churchill: A commitment in Iraq was inevitable. We had to establish a base at Basra and control that port to safeguard Persian oil … no question of accepting the Turkish offer of mediation. We can make no concessions … essential to do all in our power to save Habbaniya and to control the [oil] pipeline to the Mediterranean.

  Wavell: Your message takes little account of realities. You must face facts. I feel it is my duty to warn you in the gravest possible terms that I consider the prolongation of fighting in Iraq will seriously endanger the defence of Palestine and Egypt. The political repercussions may result in what I have spent nearly two years trying to avoid, namely serious internal trouble in our bases.

  Churchill to Chiefs of Staff: I am deeply disturbed at General Wavell’s attitude. He seems to have been taken as much by surprise on his eastern as he was on his western flank [a reference to Rommel’s offensive] … he gives me the impression of being tired out.

  Chiefs of Staff to Wavell: Settlement by negotiation cannot be entertained … Realities of the situation are that Rashid Ali has all along been hand-in-glove with Axis Powers and was merely waiting until they could support him before exposing his hand.

  At which, a week later, the Commander-in-Chief climbed down, indicating that he was not only willing to take offensive action in Iraq but at least discuss the situation in Syria with the Free French.

  Wavell to Churchill: If things go well in Egypt’s Western Desert [he had just ordered a tank attack against Rommel] … we will try to liquidate this tiresome Iraq business quickly … I am doing my best to strengthen Crete against attack. I discussed the question of Syria with Catroux this afternoon.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Anyone viewing the first visible evidence of Waveil’s new-found resolve to do something about the ‘tiresome Iraq business’ might have well understood his previous reluctance.

  Towards the end of the first week
of May, a curious collection of the kind of civilian transport kept alive only by improvisations bordering on genius was gathered near the eastern border of Transjordan to begin a desert journey of some 350 miles to the banks of the Euphrates. Buses, flat-bedded lorries or cars possibly so well born they had started life with roofs, running boards, even uniformed chauffeurs, were piled high with dented tins of bully beef, wooden ammunition boxes and incontinent cans of water and petrol. Next to them stood their almost invariably chainsmoking civilian drivers, most of them Jews from Tel Aviv or Haifa who had been pressed into service with their vehicles.