England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Three weeks later, dash, bombs and bluff had done their work, the Iraqi surrender being accelerated by a report that tanks were already on the capital’s outskirts and carrying all before them. There was not a single British tank in the country. Wavell needed all he had to try to stop Rommel. The report had been planted by an intelligence officer’s Arabic-speaking interpreter via a telephone connection discovered in a newly captured police post. Sonderkommando Junck suffered an ignominious departure by road into Syria having lost all its Heinkels and Messerschmitts and most of its Junkers 52s, the majority to ground attack or destroyed because they could not be repaired *

  A squadron of Fiat CR42 fighters might have suffered a similar fate had their arrival not been delayed by hindrances devised in Vichy Syria by French officials who, after Mussolini’s mugging of a mortally wounded France, found it hard to stomach any cooperation with the Italians even to please the Germans and annoy the English. Eight out of the twelve Fiat biplanes returned to their base on Rhodes: one was lost in an accident; two destroyed because minor gunshot damage could not be repaired on the Kirkuk airfield they used; and the fourth shot down by a Gladiator and Sottotenente Valentini, who bailed out, was captured at rifle point by the Household Cavalry’s intelligence officer, the man who had invented the story about British tanks.

  This was none other than Captain Somerset de Chair, Tory MP for Norfolk South-West, acolyte of Churchill and aspiring man of letters who rather inadvisedly published his verse, though his literary tastes were definitely more T.E. Lawrence than D.H. The same de Chair who in England, almost a year before these events, had been discovered by de Gaulle advising the French troops he had just invited to join him to consider that, if they did so, they would be regarded as traitors at home. Along with the rest of KingCol, the MP would shortly be meeting in Syria some of the troops he had encouraged to reject de Gaulle and would find them a very different proposition from the Iraqi Army.

  Wavell was the first to admit that he had been wrong about Iraq and Churchill had been right. ‘A bold and correct decision, which I really felt I ought to have taken myself.’ Even so, there was no doubt that he harboured similar reservations about Syria. How could he not? His command was more over-stretched than ever. Crete had cost him another 15,000 men, about 12,500 of them prisoners and among them some excellent fighting battalions abandoned when too many ships had been lost to rescue them.

  To date, as far as Syria was concerned, all that had been done was purely defensive: border bridges in northern Palestine prepared for demolition and horsed yeomanry patrolling the frontier with beer bottles filled with petrol clanking from their saddles, the street fighter’s Molotov cocktail and their only anti-tank weapon. ‘C’est magnifique mais … it’s bloody silly,’ gasped one astonished officer survivor of the Greek campaign who doubted whether a Vichy tank crew would be as generous as the French general who watched the Light Brigade at Balaclava.

  But now, alarmed by the almost casual way the Luftwaffe had used Vichy Syria for their Iraqi adventure, London was determined to take it over before Germany had recovered from its Crete losses and established itself there in a more ambitious fashion. What Churchill could not know, for it was not the kind of stuff that ULTRA picked up, was that Crete had been a kind of triumph after all. As far as Hitler was concerned almost 4,000 dead, the majority from a young and highly motivated élite arm, plus the loss of 151 of the valuable yet so vulnerably slow Junkers 52 transports had been too high a price for what he regarded as a side show. The Balkans campaign was over, Yugoslavia and all of Greece secured, and unfinished business in the Middle East could wait.

  His eye was now fixed on Russia. With amazing discretion 3.2 million men, the biggest army poor blood-drenched Europe had ever seen, was assembling along a front that ran from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Some units were under the impression that they were about to participate in an enormous exercise for the invasion of Britain with only the enemy and a decent water barrier being left to the imagination. Nor had Mussolini been let into the secret. While Soviet border guards were beginning to report ‘unusual troop movements’ Il Duce was advocating a new airborne operation against Cyprus that would give the Axis a firm foothold in the eastern Mediterranean, hardly 100 miles from the Syrian coast. But all he got were German Crete veterans to help create the Italian parachute division he lacked.

  Perhaps London had picked up some of this, because Bletchley Park sometimes broke Italian diplomatic cyphers. By the end of May 1941, with the Iraqi and Crete campaigns drawing to their very different ends, Wavell was beginning to organize his invasion of Syria. To do it he was going to have to weaken his front against Rommel in Egypt’s Western Desert, for a major component was to be two infantry brigades, about 10,000 men, of the 7th Australian Division under Major General John Lavarack who belonged to Australia’s small professional officer corps.

  Lavarack had recently been in command of the besieged Tobruk garrison which was where his division’s 3rd Brigade was serving. Otherwise, most of the 7th, which had not been in the Middle East long, were as yet unblooded having spent their short time in the Western Desert in reserve at the port of Mersa Matruh where they had been bombed for the first time but had not as yet seen any kind of infantry fighting. This deficiency was being partly made up with drafts from Australia’s scattered 6th Division, veterans of the good days against the Italians in Libya, who had tasted blitzkrieg in Greece then had the luck to get onto ships bound for Egypt rather than Crete though some had got back from there as well.

  On 28 May the Defence Committee in London sent Wavell a signal saying that, though victory over Rommel in the Western Desert must remain his priority, he should settle the Syrian problem as soon as he was prepared. Wavell told them he could do nothing before 7 June. It started on the 8th.

  Chapter Sixteen

  At the Beirut headquarters of the Armée du Levant they had suspected it was coming, for the same Arab clans straddled the frontier between British Palestine and French Lebanon and some bits of the intelligence jigsaw were easily acquired. ‘Concentration of Australian and English troops in Palestine frontier area north-west of Safad,’ Général de Verdilhac reported to Vichy on 28 May. ‘Strength 6–7,000 men with artillery, trucks, armoured cars. No tracked vehicles.’

  In all, Operation Exporter, as it was called, involved about 35,000 men. Jumbo Wilson, commanding from Jerusalem, had decided on a three-pronged attack. One of the two Australian brigades would take the scenic route along the good metalled coast road with its breathtaking views of the Mediterranean all the way up to Beirut and beyond to the northern city of Tripoli and its port El Mina. The other would enter Lebanon from Palestine’s Metulla salient and head north towards the old Greek Orthodox town of Merdjayoun and the serious hill country beyond it.

  The third prong was to be a thrust through the Golan Heights started by the 5th Indian Brigade Group which included a UK infantry battalion, the Cockneys of the 1st Royal Fusiliers. Their task was to capture Kuneitra and Deraa and open the door for Gaullist units under Major General Paul Louis Le Gentilhomme to pass through them and capture Damascus. In addition 11 Scottish Commando, presently in Cyprus in case of a German airborne leap from Crete, would assist the Australians’ coastal thrust by making an amphibious landing and seizing the arched stone bridge over the Litani river at Qasimiyah. That was the plan.

  It was hoped, in some quarters expected, that the French would put up no more than a token resistance. The well-publicized defection less than three weeks before hostilities began of a Colonel Collet, who had dashed across the border with 1,000 splendid-looking Circassian Cavalry, had encouraged the notion that Vichy’s Syrian veneer was cracking. But 600 or so of Collet’s horsemen returned when they realized their colonel had thrown in his lot with the Gaullist renegades and their English paymasters without a thought for their own pensions. Collet himself was convinced that Dentz and his senior officers would do their utmost to resist an invasion and lost no time telling the Britis
h this but his opinion was not widely aired. Instead, the Australians were urged to wear their famous slouch hats rather than steel helmets in the belief that the wild colonial boy was more to current French taste than the Tommy and would win over the floating voters.

  Unfortunately for the Anglo-Gaullists once again, just like Dakar, European troops were vastly outnumbered by well-disciplined colonial regulars. Only 8,000 of Dentz’s 40,000–strong garrison were estimated to be Metropolitan French. Some of these were army and air force technicians but the majority were the professional officers and non-commissioned officers who commanded France’s North African Arabs, Senegalese and mysterious men of the 6ième Régiment de la Légion Étrangère where English and German speakers served alongside each other and, usually pretending to be Belgian, the only French riflemen could be found.

  The allegiance of Arabic-speaking civilians and locally raised home guard units, troupes spéciales, was a different matter. And the British had urged the Free French to play what they believed was their trump card. In a bid to win their support, perhaps even create a useful fifth column, Général Catroux made an eve-of-battle broadcast from a British radio studio in Haifa in which, speaking as de Gaulle’s Levant representative, he announced: ‘This is an important moment in your history. I have just ended the regime of Mandate. France, by the voice of those of its sons who fight for its life and the freedom of all the world, declares you to be independent.’

  Zero hour was 2.30 a.m. but on the coastal sector forty-two Australians accompanied by Jewish and Arab guides crossed five hours before this. Their task was to try to secure bridges and disarm demolition charges in those places where the coast road was a ledge carved out of a cliff face easily dynamited onto it.

  The Jews were members of the Palmach, the full-time professional arm of the Haganah, the Zionist settlers’ underground militia which had recently negotiated a truce with the British in Palestine for the duration of the war against the Nazis. Their leader, three months out of Acre jail, was born in 1915 on a kibbutz near the shores of the Galilee, the son of Ukrainian immigrants from the leftish side of the Zionist dream. His name was Moshe Dayan and he had been in the Haganah since he was 14.

  Almost all the Palmach had served apprenticeships in the Special Night Squads founded during the 1936–8 Arab revolt over Jewish immigration by the eccentric gentile Orde Wingate, a Wavell protégé and now a full colonel making life miserable for the Italians in Ethiopia. Dayan was keen that they prove their worth. Since London had decided to review its earlier rejection of the Jewish Agency’s plea to allow Jews in Palestine to join its fight against Hitler this was the third time Zionist fighters had been involved in clandestine operations and the first two, through no apparent fault of their own, had both been total failures.

  The previous month David Raziel, military leader of Haganah’s rightwing rival Irgun Zvei Leumi who had offered his formidable services as a saboteur from prison, had been sent to Iraq with three of his comrades. They got there towards the closing stages of the campaign as the British grip on Baghdad was beginning to tighten. From one of the flooded bunds on the city’s outskirts Raziel and a British major escorting him saw off two of his group for a reconnaissance in a small boat. Then they returned to their car and Raziel had just asked for a cigarette when he and the major were killed by a direct hit from one small bomb dropped by one of Oberst Junck’s aircraft.

  Haganah’s casualties had been even more grievous. On 18 May, as it happened the day after Raziel’s death, twenty-three of their volunteers accompanied by Major Anthony Palmer, a well-connected young cavalry officer, had left Haifa on the Sea Lion, a converted fishing boat carrying a number of small craft for beach landings. Palmer, who was 26 and one of four brothers on active service, was a Royal Dragoon Guards officer who had left its armoured cars for Special Operations Executive, the secret sabotage organization formed for work in Axis-occupied countries.

  Palmer’s Operation Boatswain, a rapid reaction to the first sighting of German aircraft over Syria, was intended to destroy the French oil refineries in northern Lebanon to which Rashid Ali was pumping the Iraqi oil denied France since the armistice. Employing Palestinian Jews for a raid that could be portrayed as a fanatical Zionist response to a sudden Nazi presence so close to the Yishuv was no doubt an added attraction for the British, who could deny any involvement with a relatively straight face. But there was never any black oil smoke over Tripoli to explain away.

  Sea Lion, Palmer and all twenty-three Haganah volunteers, three of them crew, disappeared as if they had never been. Reports that the French had been burying bodies washed ashore on the Tripoli coast were never confirmed. No commander of a ship, submarine or aircraft, whether French, German, Italian or British, ever publicly admitted to sinking a vessel resembling Sea Lion in that time or place. The best theory is that they touched off a mine or their demolition charges exploded or both.

  For some days afterwards Dayan and his comrades had sat on the flat roof of Haifa’s tallest building looking north across the bay with their field glasses, hoping for their first glimpse of the missing boat. In all their skirmishes with the Arabs they had never had casualties like this and these men were some of the best they had. Even the hope that the missing men might have been taken prisoner was sullied by the fear that their fellow Jews might somehow end up in Nazi hands. It was a chilling reminder that the British were not invincible and that the Vichy French might be capable of some nasty surprises.

  Dayan was not given much time to brood. After several scouting expeditions into the tobacco fields of southern Lebanon, Operation Exporter began with ten Australians, five Palmach and Rashid Taher, their Arab guide, striding out under a full moon until they reached the ridge above Iskanderuna. Here they paused to eat chocolate and take in this coastal village on its silvery edge of sea and the bridges north and south of it they had come to secure.

  They had been expecting a fight but when they walked down to it they discovered to their intense relief that there were no guards and the bridges were free of demolition charges. A good start. The Palestine border and the Australian 21st Brigade were 7 miles away. All they had to do now was wait until it reached them. If they were on schedule that would be at about 4 a.m. with a little over an hour left until daybreak. They took up an all-around defensive position around the bridges and then Dayan and the others who were not on sentry stretched out in the roadside ditch and tried to get some sleep. It was a warm night with a gentle sea breeze and Dayan had soon nodded off. ‘I awoke to daylight. The sun had already risen, and there was a sound of firing in the distance. I looked around me and was uneasy. The invasion vanguard was nowhere to be seen. But we were very visible indeed. We were in an indefensible position, near the bridge in a deep valley, easy prey to anyone in the hills above.’

  The commander of the men Dayan and the others were waiting for was Brigadier Jack Edwin Starwell Stevens, the son of a Scots draper and his English wife who had settled in the small spa town of Daylesford where moneyed Melbourne took the waters. Even by the meritocratic standards of Australia’s amateur officer corps Stevens, a small man dwarfed by most of his soldiers, was unusual. He had left school at 12 to work in a cigar factory, joined the Post Office and started weekend soldiering with its militia, then in 1915 had gone off to war as a 19-year-old signaller and returned from France three years later an officer and a gentleman having been commissioned in the field. Back in the Post Office but rather more elevated, married and about to start a family, he had rejoined the militia, whose officers maintained a discreet social cachet, and when he came to the Middle East in 1940 was a full colonel in charge of 6th Division’s signals.

  In the last five years of peace Stevens had commanded a militia rifle battalion but though he had come under fire often enough in France, he had little experience of infantry fighting let alone directing a large mixed force in battle. Nonetheless, his superiors thought they detected in him leadership qualities that were something more than those require
d of a good technician and administrator. ‘Waspishly aggressive and persistent,’ said one. He was switched from signals and put in charge of the new 21st Brigade: three infantry battalions plus support arms, about 5,000 men in all.

  The brigadier had divided his command into two columns. What Dayan and the advance party holding the bridges around Iskanderuna had not been told was that they were almost a diversion. Stevens had decided that the 17 miles of narrow coast road from the frontier to the Litani river estuary were too easy to defend and they were bound to be slowed by broken bridges and landslides blasted out of cliff faces. But there was another way. Two lateral roads ran eastwards from the coast. One hugged the border on the Palestine side. The other started from the ancient port of Tyre, a good 10 miles north of Iskanderuna, then turned south to Tibnin with its Ottoman castle built on French Crusader ruins until, about 20 miles east of the Mediterranean, it came within a mile of the Mandate Palestine border road.

  Working by moonlight with picks, spades, axes and a steamroller on loan from Haifa municipality, it took an Australian pioneer company about two hours to bridge this gap with the makings of a short link road that was tamped down by the first traffic to move on it: thirteen of the little tracked Bren-gun carriers, some of the Royal Dragoon Guards’ armoured cars, towed artillery, and trucks carrying Lieutenant Colonel Alan MacDonald’s 2/16th Battalion. MacDonald was one of Astralia’s small cadre of regular officers and Stevens thought his West Australians, a number of them British immigrants who had arrived in the 1920s under the Group Settlement Scheme,* the brigade’s best battalion. So the name of the column making the dash for Tyre became DonCol after its commander.