England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  ‘We eventually succeeded in surrendering,’ wrote Lieutenant Eoin McGonigal, ex-Royal Ulster Rifles and a close friend of Paddy Mayne, in his report to Keyes, leaving their desperate cries of, ‘Cessez le feu! C’est fini,’ and all the terror, anguish and humiliation that went with them to the imagination of the reader. One man, a Lance Corporal Tait, who earlier in the day had distinguished himself against the armoured cars with an anti-tank rifle, somehow managed to crawl out of the barbed wire and abandoning weapon, boots and helmet swam almost naked to the Australian lines.

  The French tended to the wounded. There was no chance of getting them to a doctor because the port was virtually cut off. But they had repulsed an Australian attempt to exploit this with a night attack that had fallen back onto Keyes’s small garrison in the redoubt in some confusion. ‘They all sat in the bottom of the communication trench letting off rifles at nothing,’ he noted. ‘We make them desist. Then rather bitterly retire to bed, still odd shots landing about the place so have to find uncomfortable spot in trench.’*

  It was broad daylight when Keyes awoke and by then all had changed. No shots had been fired in the immediate area since shortly after dawn when Australian Bren-gun carriers, heading north towards Kafr Badda, had rattled over the pontoon bridge and bypassed the Aiteniye Farm buildings. Now some figures waving a white flag were walking towards them from this machine-gun nest that only a few hours before had sent the Australians scurrying back and done such execution among the Commandos entangled in the barbed wire on the beach. As yet Keyes knew nothing of this but as he got his field glasses onto the white flag he recognized, ambling alongside the French officer carrying it, George More. Once they saw the Bren-gun carriers moving behind them, his recent captors had returned his pistol and asked him to negotiate the surrender of their isolated post.

  Litani was a costly affair for 11 Commando who lost far more than the Australians. Almost a quarter of the men who landed became casualties: forty-five killed and seventy-eight wounded, some of them so badly that, like Gerald Bryan, their front-line soldiering was over before it had properly begun. As they went about finding and burying their dead and salvaging as many of their weapons as they could find, at one point every man on his feet was carrying at least two rifles. The Australians made a great fuss of them delivering hot bully beef stew with fresh bread and whisky to wash it down with, though, much to Keyes’s annoyance, while his men slept it off the Aussies spoilt it by purloining some of their precious Brens and Thompsons.

  The Commandos would eventually be given a lot of medals for the Litani operation. Regimental Sergeant Major Tevendale, who took over Y Party after Pedder and all the other officers were down, got a Distinguished Conduct Medal. The Canadian machine gunner Sproule, who had calmly dismembered his captured Hotchkiss before departing, and the anti-tank rifleman Tait were among several Commandos to receive Military Medals for their courage. (Like Tait, though at a different time, Sproule had swum to the Australian lines almost naked though wearing his helmet in which he kept his wallet.) Military Crosses went to Keyes and More for exemplary courage and leadership; the wounded Bryan for initiating the successful attack on the 75mm battery and Garland got a bar to the one he won at Dunkirk for his work at the redoubt and an earlier incident when he located and shot a successful sniper by offering himself as bait. Mayne received a Mention in Despatches for bringing all his prisoners south of the Litani, some of them carrying the parts of their own heavy machine guns. Pedder did not receive a posthumous award except from his men, for the regimental march Piper Lawson had composed on the voyage out from Liverpool was renamed ‘The Colonel Pedder’.

  Twenty-four hours after Keyes had watched More emerge from the Aiteniye Farm the two young officers found themselves in the cooler climes of Wilson’s Jerusalem headquarters where they had been invited to tell him and his staff all about it. ‘Everyone very kind and interested,’ noted Keyes. ‘Jumbo asks some shrewd questions then compliments and thanks us.’

  Wilson probably felt the need to hear something uplifting. Elsewhere things were not going too well at all.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Lieutenant General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, Knight Commander of the Bath, Distinguished Service Order, thrice Mentioned in Despatches and the holder of the Queen’s and King’s Medals, each with two clasps, was about the same age as the young Commando officers he had just met when he won the last two decorations in South Africa fighting the Boers. Wilson was now 60 and for years friends and contemporaries had used the Jumbo nickname to his face, for he was as fat as he was popular.

  ‘General Wilson has a twinkle in his eye,’ noted Hermione, Lady Ranfurly, secretary to the boss of Special Operation Executive’s Cairo station, whose husband, Lieutenant the Earl of Ranfurly, had recently been captured by Rommel’s newly arrived Afrika Korps along with generals Neame and O’Connor. (Ranfurly was Neame’s aide-de-camp.) She first met Wilson over tea at the Wavells. ‘He is so large that he looks silly holding a cup and saucer. He puffs when he sits down and he puffs when he gets up again.’

  But if his girth and height made the general a Jumbo he was not a Blimp. In the inter-war years he had been on the side of the angels as far as mechanization was concerned, playing a leading role in the revolutionary concept of motorized infantry battalions working alongside tanks. At the time much of this had been notional. Trucks and tanks were scarce in an army that had shrunk back to the size of an imperial gendarmerie. Between jobs and postings a frugal War Office had sometimes put Wilson on half pay. In these reduced circumstances, it was hardly surprising that during his time as an instructor at Camberley Staff College there was some emphasis on the threadbare campaigns waged in Civil War Virginia by the Confederates Robert E. Lee and Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, both masters at making a little go a long way. It was a talent Wilson had most recently demonstrated raising the ad hoc Habforce that had ultimately bluffed its way into Baghdad and driven Rashid Ali into Berlin exile.

  But in Syria it was beginning to look as if Jumbo might have bitten off more than he could chew. For there was no doubt that Vichy’s troops, for a variety of reasons, were determined to resist. ‘You thought we were yellow, didn’t you? You thought we couldn’t fight in France,’ a captured French sergeant told Alan Moorhead, the Australian who had become Fleet Street’s leading war correspondent. ‘You thought we were like the Italians. Well, we’ve shown you.’

  By the end of the first week the only part of Wilson’s three-prong attack to penetrate the Vichy defences to any significant tactical depth had been the Litani crossings staged by the Australians and 11 Commando. In the centre the other Australian brigade had advanced less than 10 miles into the easily defended hill country and was trying to hold onto positions around the town of Merjayoun.

  On Syria’s Golan Heights, the third prong heading east towards Damascus had started well enough. Near Tel Shehab station, from where the railway branched down to Haifa, there was an important bridge over the Yarmuk river, a tributary of the Jordan. In November 1917 Lawrence had failed to blow it up when one of his Bedouin raiders dropped a rifle and alerted its Turkish guards before they could kill them. Some twenty-four years later Captain Adam Murray and Havildar Goru Ram of the Rajputana Rifles had better luck or were possibly more professional than that strange Englishman who had so mesmerized Murray’s generation of schoolboys.

  In their case they were attempting to save not destroy the bridge, which the French had prepared for demolition, though their main task remained the same as it had been for Lawrence: remove the sentries. Murray, a Belfast-born regular Indian Army officer aged 24, elected to do this by equipping himself and his havildar (an Indian Army sergeant) with Thompson sub-machine guns fitted with Al Capone-style drum magazines. Then, shortly before 2 a.m., they crawled with infinite patience up to the sandbagged guard post and once they were close enough to make out the shadowy figures within, emptied the best part of 100 rounds of .45 into it. The rattle of these bursts across the night air
was the signal for thirty or so of Murray’s Rajputs to rush the bridge and start looking for the demolition wires.

  Capturing the Shehab bridge was the first act in the advance towards Damascus of some 3,000 men of the 5th Indian Brigade, of whom Indians probably numbered just over half. Their job was to pave the way for the entry into the Syrian capital of the Free French contingent under Général Paul Legentilhomme, the former governor of Djibouti who had fled to British Aden and rallied to de Gaulle. London was anxious to show that this campaign was not, as Vichy was bound to allege, its old imperial rival exploiting France’s misfortune to grab an overseas possession.

  From the British territories south-west of Damascus there were two roads to the city, both built on ancient caravan trails. One could be reached by crossing the Shehab bridge on Transjordan’s north-western frontier with Syria then turning right and picking up the main road that ran due north from the border town of Deraa to the capital 60 miles away. The other began in Palestine’s north-eastern corner just above the Sea of Galilee, crossed the border and went through the Golan’s important crossroads town of Kuneitra. This route, which is a few miles shorter, is over the flatter, more monotonous, more windswept part of the Golan plateau: better tank country.

  Brigadier Lloyd had decided that 5th Brigade’s two Indian battalions, the 4/6th Rajputs and 3/1st Punjabis, would make the main thrust to Damascus along the Deraa road. His London infantry, the 1st Royal Fusiliers, would put in a diversionary attack along the northern road to Kuneitra, crossing the river Jordan from Palestine into Syria at Jisr Bennt Yacoub, which means the Bridge of Jacob’s Daughter. Allenby’s Australian Light Horse had taken the same route in 1918 when they too were on their way to Damascus and their numbers included a symbolic contingent of French cavalry because it had already been agreed that, once the Turks were defeated, Syria would go to France.

  By the night of 9 June, as planned, Lloyd had his three battalions astride the approach roads to Damascus. The Fusiliers’ Free French liaison officer, a Capitaine Moreau, had advised them to approach Kuneitra from the north and east where it was less strongly defended, something Moreau was in a position to know being a very recent rallier to the Gaullist cause who had served in a Vichy unit there only two weeks before. But the Fusiliers had taken Kuneitra without firing a shot, entering at first light to be informed by its inhabitants that the garrison had declared a curfew then clattered out with its trucks and horses in the middle of the night. Moreau insisted that they establish the officers’ mess in the house of the District Commissioner who, it turned out, was justly famous for his wine cellar. Cautiously, hardly believing their luck, the Fusiliers began sending patrols down the road towards Damascus 40 miles away.

  Deraa put up a bit more of a fight. A pourparler party in a small car flying a large white flag was stopped by an anti-tank shell which wrecked its engine but failed to explode. Abandoning their transport and waving their flag in a determined manner, the shaken emissaries were allowed close enough to deliver a prepared script about the justness of their cause and the foolishness of resisting ‘superior forces’. This advice was rejected but an hour later, after bombardment by a battery of twelve 25-pounders, the Punjabis took the town unopposed. Its garrison had escaped by train before the Rajputs, who had made a circuitous march to their rear, were in place to cut them off. Having dispersed with gunfire Arab looters trying to find some profit in this carnage, most of the Indian battalions, accompanied by artillery and a few anti-tank guns, then headed north to Sheikh Meskine.

  This hilltop village, where machine gunners and 75mm field guns were hidden among some striking bits of overgrown Roman ruin, was the scene of the Rajputs’ first taste of serious French resistance and despite artillery support their initial attack, put in at 4 p.m., was repulsed with losses. But the quality of these Indian professional soldiers, recently returned from an arduous campaign in Eritrea where Italian colonial regiments included a locally recruited warrior elite often as good as themselves, eventually showed. One Sikh naik (corporal), who found himself the most senior man of his platoon still standing, paid particular attention to the shadowy places of archaeological interest then, with three others, was estimated to have killed over forty men.

  By 12 June, four days after it started, Brigadier Lloyd had good reason to be pleased with his progress to date. Along both approach roads to Damascus his forward patrols were now within about an hour’s drive of the city. His right flank off the Deraa road, the desert flank, was well covered by Legentilhomme’s Free French with Colonel Collet’s Circassian cavalry, which had both horses and vehicles, on the outer, sandy edge. A Free French battalion, admittedly the same Infanterie de Marine that had put up such a dismal performance at Dakar, was being loaned to 5th Indian. As planned, in preparation for a Gaullist-led entry into Damascus the entire eastern thrust was coming under Legentilhomme and would henceforth be known as Gentforce.

  Then three Vichy Dewoitine 520s strafed some vehicles at Sananein on the Deraa–Damascus road and almost scored a bull’s-eye. Among the wounded, with a broken arm and flesh wounds, was the Free French commander. Legentilhomme was taken back to a field dressing station at Deraa for treatment where he insisted that a sling and a few stitches should not stop him working. But the doctors were adamant that he needed a rest and Jumbo Wilson put Lloyd in temporary command of Gentforce which continued towards Damascus.

  Dominating the main road, 10 miles south of the city, there was a well-defended Vichy position at the village of Kissoué. About an hour before first light on 15 June, Lloyd’s two Indian battalions moved through the darkness towards it carrying thirty rough wooden ladders hammered together a few hours before in order to get over the outlying anti-tank ditches. Covering their left flank were the Royal Fusiliers’ C Company, about 150 men in all who had been detached from the battalion at Kuneitra along with its anti-tank platoon. As it happened, the French were also fully awake and using the cover of night to rotate most of their garrison. Some of the departing Moroccans were already seated in their transport while the newly arrived Senegalese were moving into their trenches and foxholes. There could not have been a better moment to attack and afterwards many of the Vichy French refused to accept that they were merely the victims of bad luck and not treachery. For over four hours, Kissoué’s orchards and gardens saw sudden confrontations with grenades thrown and shouting men with fixed bayonets firing from the hip while, in the lulls, snipers on both sides searched for the white faces in command.

  But by 8.30 a.m. it was all over and the Punjabis, who had borne the brunt of it, collected their casualties and rested while 200 or so Rajputs walked through them to complete their victory with an assault on Tel Kissoué, an overlooking hill. Since by now surprise was out of the question this was preceded by an artillery bombardment and by the time they got to the top most of its defenders still able to do so had left. Some of the French professionals who had found themselves at the sharp end and survived expressed admiration, as one officer to another, at the performance of the Punjabis and Rajputs. ‘Ce que vous avez fait, c’est incroyable. Vos Indiens sont vraiment formidables,’ one told Brigadier Lloyd.

  On the Indians’ left the detached company of Fusiliers assisted by the Free French marines had cleared a village and secured that flank. In a few months it would be twenty-three years since Lord Allenby followed his Australian Light Horse into the city and began the delicate business of explaining to the Arabs that France was going to rule there. Now it looked like Lloyd was going to be the man to end that chapter.

  Then Raoul de Verdilhac, who had been in the same year as Le-gentilhomme at St Cyr and staff college and regarded him as a friend, started his counter-attack.

  At the end of the first week’s fighting the commander of the Armee du Levant, despite the setback at the Litani, had still not committed all his troops. In particular he had made little use of the eighty or so Renault-R35 light tanks manned by his European troopers of the Chasseurs d’Afrique. For the first few day
s de Verdilhac and his staff had been trying to work out which of Wilson’s three places of attack were feints and which one – it was assumed it would only be one – the real thing. Initially, the favourite had been the Deraa road push towards Damascus by the Indians, with the Fusiliers at Kuneitra correctly judged an obvious feint and the Australians problematic because they had already been stopped at Merjayoun and the further north you went the easier Lebanon was to defend. Then, as the week wore on, they concluded that they were all feints.

  The British, it seemed, had attacked French Syria with an almost insultingly small and under-equipped little army, apparently expecting a show of force and the blandishments of the Gaullists renegades would do the trick. Intelligence reports of armour massing at the border had either been the work of agents who could not tell the difference between a tracked Bren-gun carrier and a panzer or clever British disinformation. All they had by way of tanks were a few Australian manned light reconnaissance models which had no cannon only machine guns and could almost be opened with a tin opener. Nor, according to the Armée de l’Air de Vichy, was the RAF’s deployment bigger than theirs. If anything it was slightly smaller and on the defensive. Protecting the British ships bombarding the coast, which were not only being attacked by French aircraft but by the Germans using Junkers 88s from Rhodes, had reduced their fighter strength above the battlefields.

  De Verdilhac chose to hit the British in the three places where they were weakest: the Fusiliers at Kuneitra, the Australians at Merjayoun and the Indians and the Free French by having a bypassed garrison in the rounded lava hills of the Jebel Druse, close to the Transjordan border some 35 miles to their rear, sally out and cut the Deraa–Damascus road. By creating mayhem along the invaders’ fragile main supply routes, perhaps even raid the rear of the British baggage train in Palestine itself, he hoped to do two things: throttle the attack on Damascus and buy time to reinforce his eastern desert flank with Iraq from where a British thrust was expected as soon as they judged it expedient to turn their backs on the natives.