by Colin Smith
Vichy territory was still off limits to the RAF but this was a blatant breach of its neutrality and there seems to have been little agonizing over what to do next. In the late afternoon, Watson with four other Habbaniya-based Blenheims escorted by two newly delivered Curtiss Tomahawk fighters, a low wing monoplane known to its American manufacturers as the P40, bombed and strafed all the aircraft they could find on the Palmyra airfield which included at least two Heinkel bombers. But the RAF was short of incendiary ammunition and the results were disappointing. No smoke and all remained intact-looking. Next day the indefatigable Watson twice revisited the Palmyra field and thought the German aircraft looked to be in much the same positions. On the second occasion he machine-gunned them and again there was no visible sign of damage. But later a reconnaissance by a different pilot revealed one burnt out Heinkel with three more and a Junkers 52 transport looking a little the worse for wear.
The RAF now began a Syrian milk run, delivering regular strikes on those rear echelons of the Luftwaffe’s military mission to Iraq which were using Vichy airfields at Palmyra, Damascus’s Mezze airport, a landing ground outside the northern textile town of Aleppo, and a French fighter field at Rayak amid the haunted ruins of the Baalbek valley’s Roman temples. At the same time, leaving the much patched trainers of Habbaniya’s Air Striking Force to harass the Iraqi Army, they hunted down the Messerschmitts and Heinkels that were operating out of northern Iraq, particularly Mosul, and from the airstrip at Rashid near Baghdad.
When they could the Luftwaffe responded in kind. On 16 May three Mosul-based Heinkels inflicted more damage on the aircraft parked at Habbaniya than all the Iraqi Air Force raids put together, killing the engineering officer who had kept Dudgeon’s machines flying. But once again they paid a price. Ignoring the bombs, Flying Officer Gerald Herrtage managed to get his Gladiator fighter into the air and, though the biplane was slower, got close enough to Oberleutnant Graubner’s aircraft to hit his starboard engine before he was killed by the concentrated fire of the three German tail-gunners. Losing height at the rate of 6 feet a second Graubner left the formation and tried to coax his stricken Heinkel back to Mosul on its one good engine, his crew jettisoning everything that was loose ‘except for the guns and a little ammunition’. But they crash-landed in the desert and there was no hope of recovering the aircraft unless Rashid Ali’s forces won the day.
The attrition of the German air contingent continued. Next day Herrtage’s 94 Squadron, which had been converting to Hurricanes before they were put back into Gladiators at Habbaniya, took spectacular revenge for their first casualty. Sergeant pilots Leslie Smith and William Dunwoodie were patrolling over the Iraqi airfield Rashid when, blissfully unaware of the circling Gladiators, two Messerschmitt Bf 110s took off. They had started to gain altitude when the more lightly armed biplanes, which made up in agility for what they lacked in speed, ambushed them. Dunwoodie got the second one.
One Me 110 flashed past my port wing, masses of smoke pouring from both engines and Sergeant Smith hot on its tail. A few seconds later I was able to get in an excellent astern attack on the other aircraft, putting a burst right into the fuselage. Almost immediately there was a terrific flash and the Me 110 was a mass of flame and disintegrated in the air. The one that Sgt Smith had shot down blazed furiously on the ground.
Perhaps one Messerschmitt crew survived a crash landing but Leutnant Woerner and his rear gunner Unteroffizier Fischer were killed in the midair explosion, probably because they were carrying small bombs as well as full fuel tanks.
The Luftwaffe’s mission to Iraq was known as Sonderkommando Junck, after its commander Oberst (Colonel) Werner Junck. It was meant to be a gesture to the strongest and best educated of the quasi-independent Arab states, its oil-fuelled literacy rates and urbanization growing apace, that would give its well-equipped army the heart to take on the threadbare British Empire. Even so, in terms of priority it came a long way below Operation Mercury, the airfleet that was being assembled for the invasion of Crete now scheduled to start on 20 May. Both were eclipsed by the preparations being made for the blitzkrieg against Russia and the need to reconcile the ingredients essential for success: deception, surprise and overwhelming force. Nonetheless, the miniature Fliegerführer Irak’s logistics tail had been put together with all the care, efficiency and daring that were so often the hallmarks of Wehrmacht operations, big or small.
Moving short-range warplanes around required constant engineering back-up. As well as fuel they needed bombs, bullets, spare parts, tools and skilled ground crews. Sonderkommando Junck’s logistics tail was, in terms of cubic capacity, much bigger than the twenty-one front-line aircraft it was supporting. Initially it included thirteen transport aircraft: ten tri-motored Junkers 52s, three of the big four-engined Junkers 90s of the kind spotted at Palmyra, plus a single-engined Storch spotter and courier aircraft, a small high-winged monoplane. But once they were established ten of these aircraft, which also had to deliver Dr Grobba’s large secretariat, were to be returned to Greece for use over Crete, Junkers 52s being needed for the paratroop drop.
Behind them they would leave one of the Junkers 90s and two special Junkers 52s. The latter had been specially adapted for Sonderkommando Junck. One was a communications centre with high-frequency transmitters that would not only keep Oberst Junck in touch with his command’s several airfields but also with the Luftwaffe’s new advanced headquarters in Athens and even Berlin. The other was a wonderful example of German thoroughness. It was a flying laboratory where technicians could determine which chemicals must be mixed with Iraq’s dismally low-octane fuel to refine it to a level suitable for finely tuned Daimler-Benz engines.
All this might have worked had it been in place at the beginning of the Iraqi attack on Habbaniya. If the British garrison had, in addition to bombardment from the plateau, been subject from the start to remorseless bombing and strafing from Messerschmitts and Heinkels, inspiring emulation from the Iraqi Air Force as they did so, then it might well have overwhelmed the makeshift RAF aircrews who saved the base. But Iraqi morale never recovered from the defeat at Habbaniya and the British continued to destroy Sonderkommando Junck in detail both in the air and on the ground.
Inevitably, as the raids against the Syrian airfields continued, Vichy French casualties began to mount. On 19 May, the eve of the German attack on Crete, there was another attack on Damascus’s Mezze airfield when, along with a Junkers 52 and a Heinkel, a couple of French aircraft were destroyed or badly damaged. One of them was a twin-engined Potez 630 fighter-bomber which looked a lot like a Messerschmitt 110. Three German airmen and one French soldier were wounded. At first Vichy had seemed to ignore the RAF’s intrusion into its air space as if it wished to pretend that neither they nor the Luftwaffe were there. It was several days before the first anti-aircraft fire was noticed, almost a week before Morane fighters were scrambled in pursuit. Then, a bit like an old car starting up, Vichy began to cough and splutter into action.
Both the Armée de l’Air and the RAF flew a twin-engined American light bomber that the French called the Glenn Martin, which was the name of the company that made it, and the British the Maryland. Knowing that Vichy had several Glenn Martin squadrons in Syria, a Maryland borrowed from a South African squadron was sent on a low-level reconnaissance over Aleppo. Two of its three-man crew were Free French, though whether this was in response to Gaullist pressure to participate in operations over Syria or there was an element of deception involving the use of radio or both is unclear. If there was it failed because the Maryland was almost immediately treated as hostile, hit by anti-aircraft fire then pursued nearly all the way back to its Haifa base by Moranes. By the time it landed one of the Free French, Adjutant-chef Contes, had received a bad leg wound and the limb would have to be amputated.
On 28 May the Moranes were in action over Aleppo again and this time their quarry did not get away. Sous-lieutenant Vuillemin shot down a Blenheim, also on a reconnaissance mission, with the los
s of sergeant pilot David and his two crew. The dead men belonged to 211 Squadron which was just back from Greece where the RAF had suffered heavy casualties. Later that day the same Moranes were given the task of escorting four Junkers 52s in transit across Syria. This was the first time L’Armée de l’Air had ever done this for the Luftwaffe and was surely another pinnacle of la collaboration though somewhat marred by the cautious German rear gunners who, uncertain of these attentive monoplanes, kept them at a safe distance with long bursts of tracer.
Not all German aid to Iraq went by air. Under the Paris Protocols Vichy had recovered 25 per cent of the arms it had been obliged to store with the Italian-administered Armistice Commission in Syria by agreeing that the rest could go to the Iraqi Army whose main arms supplier was Britain. The shipments were made overland to Mosul, mainly by rail but sometimes by road, and overseen by Dr Rudolf Rahn, Ribbentrop’s representative on the Armistice Commission in Syria. Starting on 13 May, Rahn sent 12 field guns – 8 of them big 155mm – with 16,000 shells, 15,500 rifles with 6 million rounds of ammunition, 354 machine pistols, 200 machine guns, 30,000 grenades and 32 trucks. Then the British learned what was going on and intervened in what became their first land action against the Levant’s Vichy French.
Rahn was using the Taurus railway that was part of the Kaiser’s old dream to extend the Berlin–Istanbul leg of the Orient Express east through the Ottoman Empire to Baghdad and then down to Basra, thus securing a German foothold in the Persian Gulf. Eastwards from Aleppo, using a magnificent series of tunnels and bridges, the line hugged Syria’s northern border with Turkey until it reached the small Armenian town of Nusaybin. Here it turned south for the last 50 miles to the Iraqi frontier post at Tel Kotchek, which had finally been linked to Mosul a few days after France’s surrender when Iraqi engineers completed the last 100 miles of track and thus, wars permitting, made it possible to go by train from Berlin to Basra. On the Syrian side the line’s last handsome river bridge was just before Tel Kotchek and this is the one the British elected to destroy to put an end to Darlan’s gun-running.
Although it was decided that the operation was too important to leave to the vagaries of aerial bombing, the RAF did play a leading role. For all the unkind things people said about the Vickers Valentia bomber-transport it was a robust machine that could land and take off in spaces more contemporary aircraft would find fatally cramped. Flight Lieutenant Christopher Bartlett, a Canadian already accustomed to bush flying in his native Saskatchewan when he joined the RAF in London in 1937, aged 20, volunteered to land a demolition party of thirteen British Army sappers on what looked like a possible landing ground close to the bridge. It was a risky business: the chosen spot might be rougher or softer than it appeared in the photo-reconnaissance pictures and they could crash on landing; it would have to be a daylight raid and they were so slow they would be easy meat for French fighters. Valentias were used for night bombing the Italians in the Western Desert – Bartlett had done it eleven times – but attempting to land on strange territory in the dark was suicidal.
As it happened, Moranes did not intercept them and the ground was as firm as the pictures promised. The Royal Engineers took forty-five minutes, which was perhaps a bit longer than they had estimated, to place and wire up their charges and wreck the bridge beyond easy repair. By this time some outraged locals had managed to get word to the nearest gendarmerie post. Just as the sappers were returning to the Valentia, and the Canadian had started up its Bristol Pegasus engines, a French armoured car appeared, machine gun blazing, but by then Bartlett was making enough dust to coax his lumbering machine into the air before the enemy got close enough to hit it.
This all happened on 24 May 1941, a minor incident in a minor campaign, though it was the first step to bigger and infinitely more bloody things as far as Vichy Syria was concerned. Bartlett got a Distinguished Flying Cross for it and for the sappers who bumped back to Habbaniya in his old Valentia it had no doubt been both exhilarating and frightening enough. On that same day HMS Hood, which under Somerville had helped capsize the Bretagne and cripple the Dunkerque, was sunk by the Bismarck when a fluke shot from the German battleship exploded a magazine. Among three survivors from a ship’s company of 1,418 was the teenage signaller Ted Briggs who at Mers-el-Kébir had so admired the brave attempt to torpedo them by the French gunboat Rigault de Genouilly. Briggs, now just 18, had been sucked down by the sinking battle cruiser then shot to the surface on a bubble of escaping air. Three days later the Bismarck shared the same fate as the Mighty Hood, cornered by British warships while turning helplessly in circles after a torpedo from one of the Ark Royal’s Swordfish had maimed her steering. Only 115 of the 2,222 German sailors aboard were saved.
In the waters off Crete the Luftwaffe was reaping revenge. A couple of nights after the Bismarck went down, French sailors on Godfroy’s moth-balled Vichy Squadron in Alexandria witnessed a chilling spectacle. As the cruiser HMS Dido limped into the Egyptian port a destroyer captain with a sense of occasion ordered his searchlight to seek out the Black Watch piper playing a lament from the cruiser’s ruined bridge. In Crete the Black Watch had inflicted grievous casualties on the German paratroopers who had the misfortune of being matched against them at Heraklion, only to be obliged to evacuate by events elsewhere on the island. Before they reached Alexandria two bombs had hit the Dido. The first split open a gun turret and the second went through the hole it had made to explode in the between-decks area where, in its enthusiasm to save as many as it could, the Royal Navy had packed its catch like herrings. About 200 were killed.
Yet forewarned by ULTRA intercepts, Freyberg’s defence of Crete had started well. Although his over-stretched garrison had little air cover, artillery, radio links or transport, for the first forty-eight hours it looked as if General Kurt Student’s Fliegerkorps might suffer Hitler’s first major land defeat. But Freyberg, brave rather than brainy as even his best friends would admit, had failed to clinch his victory over the decimated paratroopers. He clung to the belief that the main German threat was a simultaneous seaborne assault in commandeered Greek caiques, though the navy had already sunk some and driven others away. By the time he grasped the significance of losing Maleme airfield and the steady shuttle of Junkers 52s ferrying in fresh troops there it was too late.
A week after the battle started, the navy once again found itself in the evacuation business and eventually removed about 16,500 of the island’s garrison, slightly under half, to Egypt. Since the RAF had neither the aircraft nor the bases to intervene the Luftwaffe’s dive bombers had a field day. In all they sank three cruisers and six destroyers. Another seventeen vessels, including the battleships Warspite, Barham and Valiant, were damaged. The new aircraft carrier Formidable, hit taking aircraft to Malta, which along with Cyprus was also suspected of being on General Student’s agenda, was put out of action for six months. According to some statistics, slightly more British sailors died in the Battle of Crete than British soldiers: 1,828 compared with 1,751.
These losses put an end to the British naval ascendancy in the Mediterranean that had been established by the victories over the Italians. Furthermore, they came after a string of defeats that had erased much of the optimism, starting with the Battle of Britain, which had brought in the New Year on such a surge of hope and cast down the Vichy French leadership. Since then setbacks in Greece, Libya and Crete had been matched by the Blitz’s worst night raid to date. On 10–11 May, in the space of about five hours, 1,483 Londoners were killed including the mayors of both Westminster and Bermondsey. The debating chamber of the House of Commons had been reduced to its medieval rubble and Big Ben wore a knowing scar on its face. The raid brought the total number of civilian deaths since the night attacks on ports and cities had started the previous September to about 40,000 with three times as many injured. At this point the British were the most bombed people on earth.
On that same evening Rudolf Hess, who had learned to fly in the First World War, navigated a Mess
erschmitt 110 fitted with long-range tanks to Scotland and parachuted himself into forty-five years of mainly rigorous imprisonment. The astonishing one-man peace mission of the Nazi Party’s weird deputy leader was born out of a determination that Germany should not find itself fighting a two-front war once the invasion of Russia started. At the time Hess did not reveal the real reason for what Churchill called a ‘deed of lunatic benevolence’. But one of the things he did display to his interrogators was a sympathy for Arab nationalism. It appeared to be something more than just the normal Nazi desire to exploit their Jewhating credentials in the Arab world and was presumably the result of spending the first fifteen years of his life in Alexandria where his father was a trader. Any Anglo-German peace treaty, insisted Hess, would be dependent on a British withdrawal from Iraq.
As it happened, this was the only place where things had gone from bad to worse for the Germans. By the end of the month, just as Crete was falling, so was Rashid Ali who fled first to Persia then, rightly fearing that the British might next punish the Shah for his pro-Nazi ways, moved to Turkey before finding sanctuary in Berlin. Despite an effective counterattack at Falluja when almost twenty of the King’s Royal Regiment died under heavy mortar fire, the defence of Habbaniya had set the style and Churchill had been quick to recognize it. ‘Having joined the Habbaniya forces, you should exploit the situation to the utmost … running the same kind of risks the Germans are accustomed to run and profit by,’ the Prime Minister had urged Wavell on 9 May.
