England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Less road-bound were the Cheshire Yeomanry, one of the 1st Cavalry Division regiments still awaiting mechanization. Making a virtue of necessity, they had been attached to the Australian infantry to patrol their flanks and explore country impassable to wheeled vehicles. There were about 500 of these horsemen, each equipped with the 1908 pattern basket-hilted thrusting sword, a weapon which had last been used in anger by the yeomanry regiments that had helped drive the Ottoman Turks out of Palestine some twenty years before. The swords had been blackened, as had cap badges, stirrup irons and anything else that might glisten in the sun and give their position away. As well as the cold steel they all carried Lee-Enfields in rifle boots and dangling from some saddles was a brace of Molotov cocktails in case of tanks. Each squadron also had a few Boys rifles, Thompson sub-machine guns (which few had fired) and a heavy machine-gun section with Hotchkiss guns on mules which also carried the big Number 11 wireless sets for keeping in touch with the Australians.

  Two of the Cheshire’s three squadrons were to go as far as Tibnin. But when the Australians followed the bend in the road west for Tyre the yeomanry would head due north, riding the ridge lines of the rough country beyond it up to the Litani river and wirelessing back to Stevens’s brigade headquarters what they could see of the enemy. It was a wonderful opportunity, proof if any were needed, that there was still a place for cavalry on 1941’s battlefield and, in the main, the Cheshire Yeomanry were thrilled. Captain Richard Verdin of B Squadron, a barrister and the son of a former commanding officer, thought their mood resembled ‘that of trespassers about to partake in a picnic on forbidden ground’.

  Dayan never did have any illusions about picnics. He and the Australians had moved away from their ‘indefensible position’ by the bridges. According to his own account, this was done at his urging after he had listened to the Arab guide Rashid Taher who told him of a stone-built two-storey French police station about a mile away that was much easier to defend. It turned out that the police post was occupied by troupes spéciales under a French officer. But a neighbouring orange grove provided ample cover and after a brief firefight, during which Dayan was much impressed by the courage and marksmanship displayed by the Arab Taher, they stormed the building whose small garrison surrendered. Dayan, who had probably clinched the affair by getting a grenade through an open window, helped carry a captured heavy machine gun and a mortar up to the flat roof.

  After a while fresh French troops began to encircle the police station, sniping and closing in. One of the Jews tried to get word back to Brigadier Stevens by swerving through their roadblocks on a motorbike they had found but he was lucky to return with only his tyres punctured. All they could do was hold on until the Australians reached them. On the roof Dayan settled himself behind the machine gun.

  I opened up and drew heavy fire in response. I took my field glasses to try and locate the source of the shooting. I had hardly got them into focus when a rifle bullet smashed into them, splintering a lens and the metal casing, which became embedded into the socket of my left eye. I immediately lost consciousness but only for a moment. I came to and lay stretched on my back. I was also wounded in the hand.

  Dayan was lowered to the ground floor in blankets, his face wrapped in the blood-soaked Palestinian keffiyeh worn by Taher. It covered both his eyes and he tried to follow what was happening from what he could hear, though sometimes, in a lull, he was brought up to date by one of the Palmach.

  I must say it required a considerable effort to concentrate. We had no pain killers and my head felt like it was being pounded with sledge hammers. Fearing that I would not survive the loss of blood, one of the Australian officers suggested that I be handed over to the French so that I could receive medical treatment before it was too late. I refused … We had stout walls and courageous fighters and they kept the enemy at bay. We held out.

  By the time Stevens’s coastal column had reached them they had even captured several French trucks and their occupants who, understandably enough, had driven up to the police station convinced that it must be the British who were doing the besieging. Dayan and two Australian wounded were sent back in one of these vehicles, an agonizingly slow journey bumping along narrow dirt track detours around stretches that been mined or being pulled over by military police to make way for long convoys heading north. Twelve hours after he had been wounded a surgeon in the operating theatre of Haifa hospital informed Dayan that he would live but had lost his left eye. At this point the Australians, for the cost of about twenty killed and wounded, had taken Tyre and were up to the Litani river.

  The Qasimiyah bridge was still intact but not because it was guarded by Commandos. Heavy surf, considered almost certain to capsize blunt-ended flat-bottomed landing craft and drown munitioned and booted soldiery in seconds, had caused the navy to postpone the landing until the weather abated. It had been a last-minute decision taken in the early hours of 8 June after an inshore reconnaissance by the Palestine Police’s Marine section who knew the coast well. Eleven packed landing craft had already been lowered from their mother ship HMS Glengyle and though Lieutenant Colonel Richard Pedder, their gap-toothed commanding officer, pleaded to be allowed to go on regardless they were ordered back to Egypt.

  Eleven Scottish Commando included some of the first men to respond to Churchill’s call in the summer of 1940 for volunteers who would terrorize the enemy ‘on the butcher and bolt policy’. Not all were infantry or Scots. There were gunners from Scottish Command’s anti-aircraft and coastal batteries and a sprinkling of Sassenachs from English county regiments who happened to have a battalion training in Scotland. Lieutenant Eric Garland had won a Military Cross with the Yorks and Lancs just outside Dunkirk and lost his sister Joan, aged 17, to a stray bomb on the family home at Chipstead from where he once commuted, an Imperial Airways management trainee, to Croydon airport. But mostly it was a very Scottish affair with a touch of Scots-Irish from the Ulster plantations.

  Pedder, who was 36, was Highland Light Infantry; Geoffrey Keyes, his second-in-command, in the Royal Scots Greys and both regulars. One of the recent civilians now among them was Lieutenant Blair Mayne from Newtownards, a 6 foot 2 Irish rugby international* and the Irish Universities heavyweight boxing champion who had started as a solicitor with a busy Belfast practice shortly before the outbreak of war. In drink Paddy Mayne, as even the Northern Irish called him despite his impeccable Loyalist pedigree, had an uncertain temper. He had recently been placed under forty-eight hours’ open arrest when a dispute over a bill at a Nicosia nightclub resulted in him emptying a pistol around the manager’s dancing feet.

  The trouble was 11 Commando were bored. Nine months after most of them had volunteered for the special service they were still waiting to go into action. Garland had asked for a transfer to the RAF to fulfil an old ambition to become a fighter pilot. He was not alone. Others were applying to return to their units or to join regiments in action in the desert.

  Their frustration was understandable. In Scotland, their naval liaison officer Admiral (retired) Sir Walter Cowan, who was 70 and had won his first Distinguished Service Order commanding a gunboat on the Nile during the Fashoda Incident,† had described their training as ‘the most vigorous and ruthless I have ever seen’. For seven months on the Isle of Arran they had honed their military and boat handling skills, constantly weeding out the unfit and otherwise unsuitable and becoming increasingly proficient with their weapons and tactics. Route marches had finished with men stepping off the end of a pier into a freezing sea. They claimed to be the first unit in the British Army to have learned to keep their heads down by having live rounds fired over them.

  Yet, through no fault of their own, one operation after another had been cancelled. Then in February 1941 they had sailed to the Middle East with two other Commando units to make up Layforce under Colonel Robert Laycock who would appoint Captain Evelyn Waugh, late of the Dakar expedition, as his intelligence officer. On the trip out Waugh, part of 8 Commando with Churchil
l’s brave but obstreperous son Randolph, found Pedder’s unit very different to his own.

  Eleven Commando were very young and quiet, over disciplined, unlike ourselves in every way but quite companionable. They trained indefatigably all the voyage. We did very little except PT and one or two written exercises for the officers … There was very high gambling, poker, roulette, chemin-de-fer, every night. Randolph lost £850 in two evenings.

  In another part of the ship, perhaps another planet, Piper Lawson composed his Scottish Commando March with a lyric that ended: ‘They’ll ken the “Black Hackle” afore we cam hame.’ The hackle referred to the feathers Pedder had acquired for their bonnets, the inflated berets worn by some Scots infantry regiments. They were wearing them in Cape Town when they broke their long-way-round journey to Egypt there and, while the other Commandos caroused and shopped, their commanding officer took the 11th on a 12-mile speed march. Waugh accused Pedder of being a ‘half mad’ martinet whose young officers lived in terror of him. In his novel Officers and Gentlemen Pedder became Colonel Prentice, ‘a glaring, fleshless figure’ who wore his great-great-grandfather’s woollen Crimean stockings, decorated the mess dining table with the same ancestor’s sabre, and confined his men to barracks until they could swim 100 yards in boots and full equipment. But in his diaries even Waugh, never much interested in being fair about people, conceded that, though Pedder worked his men hard, he ‘saw to their welfare’. And if his austere ways and querulous disposition made him a hard man to like, most of his young officers, whose average age was 21, respected him as an excellent trainer and were longing to show what 11 Scottish could do.

  Layforce, which was about 2,000 strong, had been created for Operation Cordite: the invasion of Italian-held Rhodes. They were in Egypt and well into their training for Cordite when the German armoured thrust through Greece and the airborne attack on Crete obliged the British to reconsider. Once again the Commandos were told to stand down. Then Laycock was ordered to take about half his men to Crete where they provided the evacuating garrison with its rearguard and Waugh with some of his most perceptive fiction.

  Yet for all their keenness the 11th were not included. Just as they had not provided any of the 200 men sent to besieged Tobruk for patrol work and prisoner snatches. Or seen brought to fruition any of the raids that were planned and rehearsed against the enemy’s long and vulnerable line of communication along the Libyan coast. Instead Pedder’s men were sent from their training camp in Egypt to Cyprus. Morale sank. Garrison duty was hardly Churchill’s ‘butcher and bolt’. Occasional Italian air raids did not make it any less of a backwater. Wavell’s staff fretted that Cyprus might be the scene of another Crete-style airborne assault but for the 11 Scottish it was an island too far and if the Black Hackle was feared anywhere it was the bars and brothels of Nicosia and Famagusta.

  Then came the promise of a leading role in the opening act of Operation Exporter, only to have it called off with assault craft already in the water, the enemy coast in sight and Pedder, damning the navy and the surf they were so frightened of, begging to be allowed to go ahead. Few on board the landing ship Glengyle doubted that the jinx on 11 Commando had struck again. On the troop deck the latest graffiti had a Churchillian ring:

  Never in the whole history of human endeavour,

  have so few been buggered about by so many.

  Even if the weather improved, the full moon must have made them clearly visible from the shore and lost the surprise the planners had deemed so necessary for success. Famagusta was hardly more than 100 miles from the Litani estuary but to reduce the chances of being spotted they had not travelled the direct route. Instead the Commandos had left Cyprus the week before on a couple of destroyers which took them first to Egypt’s Port Said and the waiting Glengyle. From there they had doubled back, keeping close to that part of the eastern Mediterranean shore that was firmly in British hands, passing the ports of Gaza, Tel Aviv and Haifa, before the final dash north into Vichy territorial waters. Now the surprise was gone. It was therefore with some astonishment that they heard, within two hours of their return to Port Said, that the weather had improved and, though it must be assumed that the Vichy French were now expecting them, they were going back.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Nahr al-Litani is Lebanon’s biggest river. It is about 90 miles long, its source a little west of Baalbek from where it makes its way south-westwards through the Bekaa valley then turns sharply west to cut a 900-foot gorge through the mountains that stand between it and its entry into the Mediterranean a little north of Phoenicia’s Tyre. Near the coast its fast brown waters, which flow between steep banks lined with cypress trees and thick undergrowth, are still at least 60 feet wide and rarely less than 5 deep. In places there are sun-bleached wooden water wheels feeding irrigation systems older than the Book of Genesis.

  It is a formidable moat and hardly surprising that between the river and the border with Palestine the Vichy French had decided to fight nothing but delaying actions while concentrating their forces in the south-west behind the Litani. These mainly consisted of a regimental group of the 22ème Régiment Tirailleurs Algériens, regulars led by a cadre of dedicated professional French officers amply supported by artillery batteries, big 4-inch mortars, anti-tank pieces and belt-fed Hotchkiss machine guns. In some places they were behind a lot of barbed wire.

  Brigadier Stevens had been told that if he manged to cross the Litani before 4 a.m. he was to signal Pedder’s Commando that they were no longer required to land by putting up four Very flares. By the evening of 8 June the Australians were up to the river but Stevens had no intention of depriving his brigade of the prospect of a 400–strong raiding party causing havoc in the enemy’s rear while they attempted a difficult river crossing. Nor did he want to risk something as complicated as a night attack across a water obstacle. So he timed his assault for 5.30, shortly after first light, when his lead company would try to rush the Qasimiyah bridge. If the French blew it first they would attempt to cross using the British infantry’s standard issue canvas assault boats. Once they had a foothold on the other side his engineers would bring up a pontoon bridge they were preparing, capable of carrying trucks, light armoured vehicles and field guns. It did not have to be strong enough for tanks because, though the French were known to have some, Wavell needed all his to deal with Rommel.

  Colonel Pedder expected that, by giving the French ample warning the previous night, his commandos would no longer arrive in time to secure the Qasimiyah bridge intact and had modified his plan accordingly. Originally they were going to land on both sides of the river. He had intended to use all 500 of his men by having two of Glengyle’s eleven landing craft, which could carry no more than 40 plus equipment’, make an extra trip to the beach, a total of 13 deliveries from the mother craft. Now there was no time for that. They would be lucky to get ashore before dawn and the navy wanted the Glengyle heading back towards Palestine’s RAF umbrella long before the sun and Vichy’s bombers were up. The ship was not even lingering long enough to pick up her landing craft, which would have to make their own way back to Haifa. Two troops, about 100 men, would have to remain on board; 395 would land. One of those being left behind offered Lance-Corporal Noble Sproule, a Scots Canadian from Ontario who had left home to enlist in the British Army shortly before the outbreak of war, a month’s pay to change places with him. Sproule, who was 19, refused.

  In order to inflict maximum disruption deep behind Vichy lines Pedder divided his Commando into three: X Party, 150 men under Major Keyes would land just north of the Litani at a banana plantation called Aiteniye Farm, and try to capture the Vichy positions overlooking the river; a mile and a half to the north Z Party, 96 men and 6 officers under Captain George More, a bespectacled, short-sighted Dunkirk veteran aged 22, were to deny the French the use of the Kafr Badda bridge at the junction of the coast road and the ancient track that ended at the Crusaders’ spectacular Beaufort Castle below Merjayun; Y Party, another 150 men und
er Pedder himself, would land between X and Z parties. Their main objective was a stone barracks, assumed to be used as a command centre, and anything else that came to light by way of artillery or transport. But Pedder also intended that his party would act as a reserve, ready to go to the aid of the other two with whom he hoped to be in radio contact.

  The landing craft parted company with the Glengyle at about 3.15 a.m. when the ship was still about 4 miles off the coast. ‘Waste a lot of time forming up and go in very slow,’ recorded Keyes in a journal he was keeping against standing orders. It took well over an hour to get ashore, by which time it was daylight. As they approached, Keyes tried but failed to make out the river mouth which was obscured by a sandbank. He knew the coxswain was using a large white house as his mark, which must be Aiteniye Farm, but as they got closer they could make out several white buildings. They landed shortly before 5 a.m. and ran, trying not to bunch, to the top of the beach in their shorts and boots. It was then that Keyes saw to the left of him the stationary masts of what could only be moored boats and understood that the navy had landed the most important part of the operation south of the river instead of north. At about the same time the French blew the bridge they were supposed to capture.

  In 1918 Geoffrey Keyes had been a 1-year-old when his father the admiral led the famous attempt to cork the U-boat pens at Zeebrugge with blockships and to some it seemed that he had spent most of his life trying to prove he was a worthy son. At first sight he did not fit the part. Pedder’s deputy at Litani was an acting major about four years older than most of the junior officers – Mayne at 26 was an exception – tall and narrow-chested with an unfortunate clipped moustache, little of his subalterns’ natural athleticism and a style that could be irritatingly Bertie Wooster. On the first leg of the operation, the Cyprus-Egypt trip on the destroyer Isis, Keyes began his diary entry for 4 June: ‘Spent Alma Mater’s birthday going 25 knots to Port Said.’* But if this driven Old Etonian was not universally popular, not least because it was assumed that Daddy’s influence had secured him second-in-command, it was also recognized that Pedder was too ambitious to tolerate the merely well-connected if they were complete duds. Whatever else he lacked, the admiral’s son was possessed of a steely determination to live up to his name.