by Colin Smith
This was the logistics tail of Habforce, Hab standing for Habbaniya which was where they were bound, for the RAF base was now under siege. Up front at Habforce’s sharp end was KingCol, named after its commander Brigadier Joseph Kingstone. Its point included the small 15 hundredweight Morris and Chevrolet trucks of the newly mechanized Household Cavalry Regiment, known as the Tin Tummies to the rest of the army after the breastplates they wore on London ceremonial duties; a battery of nine 25-pounder field pieces; some of the RAF’s 1915-pattern armoured cars with their Vickers machine guns; the vehicle mechanics of a Light Aid Detachment who were as important as ammunition; and 200 riflemen of the 1st Essex, a battalion in disgrace ever since their baptism of fire on the Sudanese-Eritrean border six months before when they bolted under Italian bombing.
In his desperation to cobble together an expeditionary force of sorts Jumbo Wilson had also availed himself of a standing offer from Transjordan’s King Abdullah, who feared the republicanism afoot in neighbouring Iraq, to make use of his British-officered Arab Legion. Under its commander Glubb Pasha (aka Major John Bagot Glubb, Royal Engineers) 350 of the legion’s mechanized regiment, almost entirely Bedouin, would be travelling with KingCol as scouts and sabotage parties. The British troops took one look at them in their ankle-length frocks with crossed bandoliers and ornate daggers and knew what they had to call them: Glubb’s Girls.
Behind KingCol came the rest of Habforce. Most of it was from the 4th Brigade of Major General George Clark’s 1st Cavalry Division which was mostly close-knit county yeomanry mixed in with regulars such as the Tin Tummies. Habforce’s yeomanry came from two regiments, the Warwicks and the Wiltshires, who had each supplied a squadron of about 200 men. Yeomanry were mostly weekend soldiers of the pre-war Territorial Army. Their fathers and older brothers had often fought in the same regiments during Allenby’s Palestine campaign against the Turks in 1917–18. The yeomanry had still been horsed when, shortly after the start of hostilities in 1939, they returned to Palestine on internal security duties. Then over the last year the division, regiment by regiment, had begun a process of mechanization that would end up with most of them becoming tank or, in the case of the Tin Tummies, armoured car crews.
The Habforce units had reached the interim stage where, having gone through the heart-wrenching business of shooting some of their horses, they were being used in the old cavalry role of mounted riflemen. In this case their mounts were their small canvas-topped trucks, some of them mothballed in Egypt and Palestine since 1918 and so old they had solid tyres. Kingstone was to lead them across a wilderness the Arabs had for centuries called the Syrian Desert though the map makers at Versailles had placed the biggest part of it firmly in Iraq. For most of the way he was to follow the Kirkuk oil pipeline along which there were pumping stations, usually with a small clinic and other facilities, manned by British civilian engineers. Some of these were believed to have fallen into the hands of the Iraqi Army and KingCol was to recapture them and free any prisoners. Then, shortly before the Euphrates, they were to leave the pipeline and turn south-east to lift the siege on Habbaniya.
It had started on 30 April when Iraqi troops began to deploy onto the plateau above the base with artillery, armoured cars, light anti-aircraft guns and a couple of their small Italian tanks. Rashid Ali had tried to counsel patience but the military had grown tired of waiting for their German air support and decided they must act before it was too late. By blowing holes in some of the dykes along the Euphrates flood waters they had made it difficult for Habbaniya to be relieved by the Indian troops advancing slowly upriver from Basra. But they were well aware that some British infantry had already been flown into the base and were determined that this would not be repeated. From Baghdad one of the last messages out of Cornwallis’s embassy before Iraqi police confiscated their wireless and, ‘for their own protection’, interned them in their own compound was that a large Iraqi force was heading towards Habbaniya. Shortly afterwards, a reconnaissance flight over the plateau by one of Smart’s Audax Harts, still in its bright yellow training livery, confirmed his worst fears.
Yet the shooting did not start immediately. Instead there had been something of a military gavotte with an Arab officer carrying a white flag appearing at the cantonment’s main gate to deliver a note explaining they were on a training exercise and must be treated with respect. ‘Please make no flying or the going out of any force of persons from the cantonment. If any aircraft or armoured car attempts to go out it will be shelled by our batteries.’
Air Vice-Marshal Smart bade the emissary wait while he dictated a reply. ‘Any interference with training flights will be considered an act of war. We demand the withdrawal of the Iraqi forces from positions which are clearly hostile.’
It was a bold answer but the odds were rather less favourable than the last time Smart had been in action in Iraq. In the 1920s the Kurds could rarely take on aircraft with anything better than a Mauser rifle. Sitting above Habbaniya were some 6,000 Iraqi troops trained by a British military mission under a Major General George Waterhouse, presently languishing in the embassy compound in Baghdad. They were well equipped. The abundance of the latest Bren light machine guns in Iraqi hands was the envy of the forces sent to deal with them. They had these and a few larger calibre anti-aircraft weapons to protect the fifty or so artillery pieces that held RAF Habbaniya’s airfield, which was actually just outside the perimeter fence, entirely at their mercy.
Smart’s ground troops were commanded by Colonel Ouvry Roberts, an Indian Army staff officer who had flown in from Basra for what was supposed to be a brief assessment and had easily been persuaded to stay. Under him were the infantrymen of the King’s Own who were perhaps 360 strong; 18 of the RAF’s vintage armoured cars which had Rolls-Royce engines but Ned Kelly armour plate; and 1,200 British-officered Assyrian and Kurdish levies who might be good at chasing snipers off the plateau in less turbulent times but had never been tested against more serious opposition. In addition there were about 1,000 airmen of all ranks, mostly ground crew, for whom there were not enough rifles to go round and even those lucky enough to have one had rarely squeezed a trigger since basic training.
Smart ordered slit trenches to be dug all around the base’s 7 miles of perimeter which included a stretch of river bank by the airfield. Everybody not immediately engaged in flying or servicing an aircraft was required to man them. This led to some disquiet among those commanding the aircraft, which were the most plausible part of Habbaniya’s defence, who toured the perimeter quietly removing essential air and ground crews they were reluctant to risk as infantry.
By this time almost sixty of the training aircraft had been transformed into bombers of a kind but there were not enough qualified crews to fly them. Including the Greek attachment from the Hellenic Air Force, whose foreign language tended to be French or German, there were thirty-five pilot instructors of whom three had seen some air combat. The rest were selected from the more advanced pupil pilots. Air gunners, bomb aimers and observers tended to come from the cadets most recently separated from their Tiger Moth basic trainers or from a pool of ground crew volunteers. Some of the biplanes, which required less take-off space than the Oxfords, were moved to the polo field and the golf course had also been prepared as an emergency landing strip.
By May Day twelve Wellington bombers, badly needed for Wavell’s forthcoming offensive against Rommel in the Western Desert, were transferred from Egypt to Basra, from where they could support Habbaniya. On the same day Churchill sent a message to Smart: ‘If you have to strike, strike hard. Use all necessary force.’
Whether the necessary force was available was another matter but at dawn on 2 May Smart’s twin-engined Wellingtons from Basra made his opening move. Wellingtons carried a bomb load of 4,500 pounds but with a wingspan of 86 feet and a top speed of 235mph they were big, slow and vulnerable and from quite early on in the war whenever possible they were used only in night attacks. For maximum effect they made what, for a
Wellington, was an unusually low-level daybreak attack on the plateau from about 1,000 feet and as a result most of them took hits. Fortunately, for all its faults it was an aircraft that could take a lot of punishment. Only one Wellington could not get back to Basra. With both engines knocked out before it had the chance to drop its bombs, its pilot managed to put it down on Habbaniya’s airfield gently enough not to explode its cargo though Iraqi gunners were soon doing their best to rectify this. As the crew dashed for the dubious shelter of the hangars, a tractor escorted by two RAF armoured cars sped out to pull the plane to safety. Under fire, the driver got a rope around its tail wheel when a near miss wrecked his tractor and ignited the aircraft. Deafened by the blast, the driver was pulled aboard one of the armoured cars that sped from the scene as the first flames licked the bomb bay.
For the Iraqi gunners the explosions that followed must have been a heartening sight. They returned to shelling the hangars, workshops and barracks areas with renewed enthusiasm, though it was noted that a large red cross painted on the hospital’s roof was being respected. But they were close enough for their muzzle flashes to give away their positions and now Smart’s second wave took off: thirty-five Audax, Gordons and Oxfords.
The aircraft, which had been lurking between the hangars, shot out of the cantonment’s main gate one after the other already doing 30mph before they hit the airfield where the pilots took a deep breath and pulled themselves off the ground some seconds before normal air speed had been attained. Compared with the Wellington the bomb load of these aircraft was pathetic. The Gordons could carry the most, two 250-pound bombs. At the other end of the scale the little Oxfords, even after their practice racks had been modified, could only manage eight 20-pounders. Even so, for the Wellington bombers a round trip from Shaibah to Habbaniya and back lasted four hours, whereas what Smart called his Air Striking Force could take off, bomb and strafe Iraqi positions, and land to be bombed up again in less than ten minutes.
In charge of the Oxfords and the Gordons was Squadron Leader Tony Dudgeon who had recently arrived at Habbaniya with a newly awarded Distinguished Flying Cross and a dachshund called Frankie. Aged 25, Dudgeon, an Old Etonian and Cranwell-trained regular, had already been in the RAF for six years, flown fifty operations against the Italian ports, airfields and troop concentrations in North Africa where he had commanded a Blenheim squadron, and had been sent to the training school as a senior instructor for a rest. It was Dudgeon who had personally made the prototype modified bomb rack for his Oxfords and test-flown it himself to prove it would not crash them. ‘One 20 pound bomb carries the same amount of explosive as a 6-inch shell. And 27 Oxfords could now carry 216 of them, which was about a couple of tons of bombs, much better than none at all.’
We were only too aware that we had nothing, just nothing, which could stop a tank driving up to the front door of Air HQ except our bombs. We knew our very survival depended on knocking out every offensive weapon or vehicle before the Iraqis could bring it to bear effectively. And to keep on and on, without respite until they left … This drove us into a routine which was to fly, fly, fly in any aircraft we could get our hands on. We bombed and we gunned and looked for other targets. Something had to crack and it was not going to be us. As soon as the aircraft was back on the ground, one of the two crew members would report to the ops room telling the results and suggesting new targets then plot both bits of info on the latest photomap and allot the crewman his next target. While that was going on the other crewman – pilot or pupil acting as bomber aimer – would help reload the machine and make an additional check for any damage which was worse than superficial. ‘Superficial’ meant any new hole which did not appear to have damaged something important like a main spar, an oil pipe or a control hinge. Usually things would be done with the engines still running. Surprisingly, no-one got clouted by a spinning prop … the pupils acting as bomb aimers and rear gunners quickly became remarkably accurate even if some of the bombing run corrections were a bit garbled at first. ‘Left, left … right … RIGHT … LEFT, LEFT!!! Oh Christ, bomb’s gone … Sir.’
By nightfall the Iraqi artillery fire had noticeably diminished. In total the Air Striking Force had flown 193 sorties during which two of its planes had been shot down with the loss of four crew and four more destroyed on the ground as a result of shellfire and a brief appearance by the Iraqi Air Force. Another twenty aircraft would not fly again without extensive repairs. It was not just the Iraqi anti-aircraft guns that were inflicting the damage but thousands of rounds from machine guns and bolt-action rifles. The flimsy, relatively slow-moving aircraft were quite easy targets for men who were reasonable shots and could keep their nerve, and it seems a good many of the Iraqis had both these attributes. Every machine had taken hits. The record perforation was held by Flight Lieutenant Dan Cremin whose Audax returned after a ten minute sortie above the plateau with fifty-two new bullet holes and a pupil gunner in its rear cockpit in danger of bleeding to death. Cremin was unscathed. Dudgeon mentions several cases of pilots being shot through their thighs and buttocks by bullets that had come straight through their seats. As casualties mounted and the shortage of any kind of aircrew, trained or half trained, became more acute, heavily bandaged young men with what they insisted were superficial wounds often returned to the fray. ‘The terms “minor damage” or “flesh wounds” might have been stretched a bit and not assessed in a normal manner,’ said Dudgeon. ‘But then our situation was far from normal.’
Emboldened, the RAF began to extend its operations, still concentrating on the guns and the armoured vehicles but sending aircraft to attack the Iraqi fighters and bombers parked at Baghdad airport and the nearby satellite field of Rashid on the capital’s eastern outskirts. Six twin-engined Blenheim bombers, initially based in Palestine, joined in. It was by no means one-sided. An Oxford trainer’s sergeant pilot was killed by a single bullet which severed a main artery and the plane was brought down by the acting air gunner, an aircraftsman normally employed on a target drogue. A Wellington was forced down and its six-man crew captured. More of the flimsy, zippy little Audax were turned into flying colanders. Men survived several missions above the plateau unscathed only to become casualties on the ground either from artillery or Iraqi bombers. Dudgeon had his only experienced bomb aimer killed this way while he was lying beneath his Oxford reloading the racks between missions.
Nonetheless, they began to wear the Iraqis down. Night bombing deprived them of sleep, though some of the half-trained pilots found the return landings in the dark on unlit runways about the most dangerous they were asked to do. Even a little counter-battery fire was introduced after Basra was persuaded to fly in a couple of army gun teams and shells for the headquarters’ decorative howitzers, which turned out to be in a remarkable state of preservation.
But if Iraqi morale started to crumble it was not least because the famous Luftwaffe, scourge of the Inglizi, had so far failed to put in a single appearance and their own air force, used in dribs and drabs instead of overwhelming force, had done little better. Yet Habbaniya with its swimming pools and polo pitch and unwarlike ways had produced all these bombing planes. How was it possible? On the fifth day the siege ended with the Iraqis abandoning most of their guns and heading back towards Baghdad pursued not only by Smart’s hornet’s nest of riddled aircraft but the King’s Own and the Assyrian levies, who fought even better than their British officers had ever dared hope.
Fearing something like this might be about to happen the Golden Square had sent reinforcements from Baghdad, a fresh mechanized infantry brigade with towed artillery. They met, heading in their different directions, a few miles west of the town of Fallujah and being unused to the ways of mid-twentieth-century warfare there they parked their vehicles nose-to-tail and got out to talk things over. Which was when about forty of Habbaninya’s Air Striking Force found them. At least one account claims ‘a solid mass of flame 250 yards long’. These things are often exaggerated *but undoubtedly there was sufficie
nt terror to start a stampede back towards Fallujah.
The defence of Habbaniya was as remarkable as it was unexpected and ultimately it would prove the undoing of Rashid Ali’s uprising. Having groped its way through the pipeline’s foggy sandstorms, skirmished with an Iraqi police detachment around Rutba’s old mud-brick fort, got bogged down in soft sand then rescued by Glubb’s Girls, and marked its trail with the exhausted machinery of its civilian baggage train, it took KingCol ten days to get to the RAF base. By that time Habbaniya had managed to relieve itself and be reinforced by Blenheims, Gladiators and even five Hurricanes from Egypt and Palestine. More importantly, it did so seventy-two hours before the first of the German aircraft from Vichy’s Syrian airfields had touched down in Iraq in circumstances of such dire misfortune it would seem that their luck could only get better.
On board the Heinkel III was Dr Fritz Grobba, Germany’s returning ambassador, and Major Axel von Blomberg, son of a field marshal once close to Hitler but prematurely retired after a messy divorce. Major von Blomberg, a rising star in the Wehrmacht despite his father’s indiscretions, had just been appointed overall head of the German Military Mission to Rashid Ali. As they approached Baghdad, the major ordered the pilot to advertise their arrival by flying low and slow, paying particular attention to the army positions on the west-facing bridges across the Euphrates. This was a silly idea and a reflection perhaps of how little the Germans knew of the RAF’s heightened presence. The Heinkel’s newly painted Iraqi colours did not prevent the inevitable burst of machine-gun fire from the ground and the pilot scooted off for Baghdad airport. After the aircraft taxied to a halt and Grobba and the crew prepared to get out von Blomberg did not move. It was soon discovered that there was a simple explanation for this: the major had been shot through the neck and was quite dead.
It took RAF reconnaissance one day to spot German aircraft at Iraqi airfields; two days to have their first bloodless encounter with one of them – a Blenheim and an Me110 failing to get on each other’s tails over Mosul – and three days to confirm that they were coming through Vichy Syria. At first light on Wednesday, 14 May, a Pilot Officer Watson, flying the longdistance fighter version of the Blenheim, spotted what looked like a four-engined Junkers 90 rising from an oasis airfield at Palmyra, the old caravan stop in French Syria. Later that morning he returned and this time counted four transports plus some smaller planes. Some of them appeared to be refuelling.
