by Colin Smith
As far as the Fusiliers were concerned, the first irrefutable evidence that something nasty was heading their way came in the early hours of the 15th. At the hamlet of Tel El Cham 16 miles north of Kuneitra, their forward company was straddling the Damascus road with orders to harass the French with fighting patrols ‘but not to become seriously involved’. Apart from their truck transport, they were accompanied by several of the little Bren-gun carriers and two of the Royal Dragoon Guards’ armoured cars, one with a captured Italian 20mm Breda heavy machine gun for which allegedly armour-piercing rounds were available.
Then at 2.30 a.m. tanks, armoured cars and infantry in trucks emerged from the nearest enemy position at Sassa about 4 miles down the road and very nearly overran them. In the dark the Royal Dragoons’ Breda gun sought out the intruders and the Bren-gun carriers provided what cover they could but less than half the Fusiliers found their transport and escaped. A head count on their return to Kuneitra revealed more than fifty were missing. At first light the armoured cars went to look for them but 5 miles out of Kuneitra they found that the enemy had moved up overnight and were assembling around the ruins of an old Turkish caravanserai at the village of Khan Arembeh. Most of the missing men had been captured, though a few evaded the French and made their way back to their own lines, often with hair-raising tales of the number of tanks they had seen on the way.
Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Orr DSO was the 1st Royal Fusiliers’ third commander in the last seven months. The first had been killed at the beginning of December when the battalion was part of the surprise attack against the Italians in Egypt’s Western Desert. The second had lasted until April when he received a bad head wound in Eritrea during the costly mountain fighting around Keren. It had taken them six weeks to push the Savoy Grenadiers off those peaks. On their worst day the Fusiliers had lost 130, killed and wounded. They had expected a rest. Instead, they had gone back to Egypt’s Western Desert for a month, kept in reserve digging defences that were never used until Wavell was satisfied that Rommel had been held.
Then, in the middle of May, they had been sent to Palestine where the battalion had been brought up to strength with a draft of 9 officers and 230 men recently arrived from England. Most were conscripts. The 1st Royal Fusiliers, despite a professional cadre, was no longer quite the regular battalion, in India since 1937, where even the dimmest fusilier soon learned that Abhora Day was celebrated because that was the place in Spain where the regiment last put it over the French in 1811.
Orr had arrived eight days before the Syrian invasion, taking over from the major who had led them through the rest of the Keren fighting and now reverted to being second-in-command. This sort of thing often happened and there is unlikely to have been much resentment apart from the initial wariness a new boss brings to any enterprise. And Orr, whose parent regiment was the Royal Scots Fusiliers, had the cachet of a DSO and recent service in the Sudan Defence Force, which the empire regarded as the most exclusive of its frontier policemen, home of the bright as well as the brave. Shortly after they entered Kuneitra Orr had impressed his officers by presiding over a meeting of the town council in Arabic.
The Fusiliers had advanced on Kuneitra supported by a battery of 25-pounder artillery and their own anti-tank platoon’s three small 37mm guns made by Sweden’s Bofors who were better known for their anti-aircraft wares. Britain’s newer and better 2-pounder anti-tank guns were not yet available to the Indian Army. Once they had taken the town, all the guns including their Bofors had been withdrawn because Lloyd wanted them to support the real attack on Damascus by the Indians and the Free French. Orr, with Vichy armoured cars already reconnoitring his defences, sent an urgent message to brigade headquarters asking at least for his Bofors back but to no avail.
The trouble was Kuneitra was not yet under attack and might never be. The tanks down the road could turn out to be a Vichy feint to counter a British feint and draw off scarce resources. Whereas, almost back on the Jordanian border, 5th Indian Brigade was facing an all too real threat. Sheikh Meskine at the southern end of the Deraa-Damascus road was threatened. Verdilhac had ordered a Colonel Bouvier, who commanded a bypassed Vichy garrison lurking in the volcanic fastness of the Jebel Druse, to raid the British rear and cut the road. His first move had been to chase a small detachment of the Transjordan Frontier Force, British-officered bedouin, out of the railway halt of Ezraa. Lloyd, commander of Gentforce while Legentilhomme recovered from his wound, had sent about 150 Free French Senegalese under a Colonel Genin, all he could spare, back south to deal with it. Orr’s missing Bofors anti-tank guns would be joining them. There was simply not enough of anything to go round. It was all make do and mend. Some of the commandeered transport in use were Jewish-owned citrus trucks from Palestine ‘still slippery with orange peel’.
Meanwhile, on the Kuneitra front the French were taking their time. For all of Sunday, 15 June they built up their tanks and infantry at Khan Ambreh while through their binoculars their scouts watched the Englishmen, in their long shorts and sometimes stripped to the waist, prepare their defences with pick and shovel. The main fruit of the Fusiliers’ labours was a horseshoe-shaped anti-tank wall of earth and loose stones about 4 feet high and 3 feet thick which crossed the Damascus Road and took in all the crossroads that made Kuneitra such a nodal point. In the southern part of the Fusiliers’ perimeter the horseshoe wall became a ditch considered deep and wide enough to stop a tank.
At regular intervals ten-man platoon section posts covered the anti-tank wall and the ditch from buildings or holes in the ground. Most of the Boys anti-tank rifles were in the blocks that had been set up where one of the four major roads met the defence perimeter. The Damascus highway’s northern entrance had the additional firepower of the armoured car with the 20mm Breda, the heaviest gun they had. Four visitors who turned up unexpectedly by car from Middle East Command’s Staff College at Haifa took one look at these preparations and declined Orr’s invitation to stay, explaining that they were ‘only interested in the theory of it’.
Orr had about 475 men under him at Kuneitra, the battalion already reduced by the losses incurred when the French fell on his forward company outside Sassa and the earlier detachment of C Company and the anti-tank platoon. Artillery and air strikes on Khan Ambreh would at least have slowed the methodical French build-up there and, despite their shortages, something could have been managed had there been the will to do it. But Brigadier Lloyd, who does not seem to have grasped how vulnerable his Kuneitra feint had become, was using most of his guns to support the Free French advance on Damascus. And the RAF was busy trying to cut L’Armée de L’Air down to size by attacking its airfields. Allied troops saw so little of them that twice that day they had shot down and killed Hurricane pilots flying low-level reconnaissance, one at dawn and the other at dusk. Flying Officer Holdsworth survived a forced landing in fading light, though not the Free French Senegalese waiting for him. Dewoitines and Hurricanes looked almost identical and both air forces, which had never before been anything other than allies, displayed red, white and blue roundels with the colours in different orders.
Yet despite the air superiority they were enjoying in this, the only war they had got, Vichy made no attempt to harass the British battalion with bombing or artillery fire. Perhaps they simply did not feel the need. For some years, spring manoeuvres had included an exercise in which Kuneitra was attacked from the north with tanks and infantry. Having spent all of the previous day getting ready, shortly before dawn on the 16th their attack was heralded by the insistent and growing roar of 85–horsepower engines as the small two-man Renault R35 tanks of Colonel Lecoulteux’s 7th Chasseurs d’Afrique came towards them along the Damascus Road. At first the Chasseurs stayed back waiting for it to get properly light because 1941’s tanks, their vision restricted enough once the turret hatch was down, did not fight in the dark if they could help it.
The first glimpse the Fusiliers had of the enemy was not the tanks but small parties of Senegalese i
nfantry coming over a low ridge about 400 yards from their perimeter. When they opened fire on them they went to ground and worked slowly towards them, occasionally trying to snipe from the prone position. Then, at about 5 a.m., the tanks began a cautious advance overtaking the infantry who let them go on unaccompanied. Once they were within range the armoured car with the Breda gun opened fire but after five rounds it stopped and, a few minutes later, withdrew. A vital spring, an essential part of the gun’s innards, had snapped and could only be repaired in a workshop. This did not cause great despair. Help was surely on its way.
Meanwhile, before the anti-tank guns turned up, they could probably bag a couple themselves with their Boys anti-tank rifles of which they had about fifteen. This was an elegant-looking weapon, a bit like a match rifle with its long barrel resting on a bipod and a padded butt to take the recoil of its high-velocity .55 bullets. Its overall length was 5 foot 2 inches and it weighed the equivalent of four ordinary service rifles. In France it had rarely been effective against the panzers, but in the early days of the North African desert fighting and in Ethiopia the Boys had coped well with the more lightly armoured Italian tanks. Its huge bullets had drilled neat holes through them then made frightful wounds ricocheting around their cramped interiors exactly as intended by Captain H.C. Boys, the Assistant Superintendent of Design at the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield in Middlesex. And even as the Fusiliers were approaching Kuneitra, north of the Litani 11 Commando were wrecking French armoured cars with them. Sometimes it could also be useful against an enemy in rocky ground where a round in the right place made nasty slithers of stone shrapnel. Because of its kick the Australians called the Boys ‘Charlie the Bastard’ but this was a compliment.
Today, however, the Boys rifles turned out to be all but useless. Renault’s R35 light tank, which carried a crew of two, was small (1.87 metres across and 4.02 long) and slow. On a decent surface it could manage no more than 20 kilometres per hour. Its fully laden battle weight was 10.6 metric tons. But some of its armour plate was 40mm thick. That was 10mm more than the panzers had carried when they swept through France. Impressed, the Germans had removed their turrets and converted many of the 843 R35s they had captured intact into mobile anti-tank guns and artillery tractors.
Against the Italians the Fusiliers had never had the chance to use their Boys for their intended purpose because British tanks or artillery had always been around to deal with Italian armour. Now from turret to tracks they were hitting the squat R35s with shot after shot and all they achieved was screeching ricochets as Renault’s most lucrative military contract went remorselessly about its business. Captain Tom Wilson, who had won a Military Cross during the Eritrean fighting, watched as the Vichy tanks shot holes in their anti-tank wall with impunity.
NOTHING could put these tanks out of action. I found about 80 fired cases of .55 anti-tank rifle ammunition in the nearest post to the Damascus Road of A Company. These had been fired at ranges down to five yards and had had no effect. Molotov cocktails were unsuccessful and grenades also. At first when the tanks came the defenders would jump over the wall and shoot at it from the far side. The French got wise to this however and sent tanks down both sides of the wall simultaneously.
Since his wireless appeals for anti-tank guns had been turned down, as a last resort Colonel Orr decided to send an officer to make a personal appeal to Lloyd who, as acting commander of Gentforce, was at the Free French headquarters at Ghabagheb which the British, who found the Arabic name unpronounceable, called Rhubarb. Orr chose as his messenger a man who had served in the battalion for over twenty years and had been one of its best company sergeant majors before receiving a commission. It was a good 60 miles to Rhubarb and in the immediate vicinity Vichy patrols had to be avoided, for they were attempting to surround Kuneitra by cutting the lateral road that joined the other highway to Damascus at Sheikh Miskine. The officer, who travelled in a small truck with an escort and driver, got through and put his request to Major Bernard Fergusson of the Black Watch, a French-speaking Old Etonian and one of Wavell’s aides temporarily assigned as a liaison officer to Gentforce HQ. Fergusson turned him down flat.
He begged me almost tearfully for some anti-tank guns but I refused to even submit his request and for strong reasons. We would need our four anti-tank guns – all we had – to help blast our way into Damascus and, once we had got Damascus the problems of Kuneitra, I thought, and its garrison would be solved. If we were to detach these precious guns from the Damascus battle and send them lumbering round to Kuneitra by way of Sheikh Meskine, they might well arrive too late to help the British battalion and would be lost to both flanks of the battle at the moment of its climax … I hardened my heart and in retrospect I am sure I was right; but I felt like a butcher. I had known that battalion all my service and had many friends in it … The officer looked at me as though I were Judas and set off on his long, unhappy journey to Kuneitra.
It must have soon become obvious to Colonel Lecoulteux, who appears to have had about twenty of the R35s at his immediate disposal, that the English lacked effective anti-tank weapons. Yet he was painfully slow to grasp his prize. For something like three hours, perhaps longer, his tanks cruised the northern part of Kuneitra at will, enforcing a sort of curfew on the Fusiliers who mainly took cover on the floors of its stone houses. Not until 10.45, seven hours after his attack had begun, did Lecoulteux send his infantry and armour in together, though when he did Wilson’s description of his tactics indicates that he at last understood that Orr’s battalion was entirely at his mercy.
About five tanks were lined up nose to tail on the Damascus Road and concentrated their fire, both machine-gun and cannon, on one section post. Armoured cars from further out neutralised the fire of supporting sections. Under cover of this fire enemy infantry advanced and took the post. They then made it their base and advanced along the line with tanks threatening both sides of the wall and the infantry on the blind side. They cleaned up our section posts in detail, one by one.
It was by no means a massacre. Most of the Fusiliers, almost 300 all told, had had enough and surrendered. But some seventy men from the rifle companies, among them Captain Wilson, risked the tanks’ machine guns finding them in open ground to reach the three adjacent granite houses in Kuneitra’s southern end that was battalion headquarters. At about noon an encrypted Morse message from there was received by 5th Brigade HQ’s radio operators saying: ‘Withdrawing from outer perimeter – situation critical.’
This was undeniable. Even so, reinforced by those Fusiliers who had dared to run the gauntlet of the R35’s Reibel machine guns, there were now about 180 men around headquarters. Despite a shortage of .303 ammunition for his rifles and Brens, much of which had been lost when the sections posts were overrun, Orr was determined to hold out until help arrived. Perhaps there was an element of natural selection about those who found themselves with him. A Corporal Harry Cotton, who had won a Distinguished Conduct Medal for a lone charge against a machine-gun post in the Western Desert, brought with him a Hotchkiss machine gun and 1,300 rounds of ammunition he had found when they first entered deserted Kuneitra. Then the Hotchkiss broke down and Cotton was killed stalking a tank with a Boys, probably not the only regular soldier to die that day because he believed that all the anti-tank rifle needed was proper handling. Casualties, which had been light, began to mount. Orr himself crawled out to bring in a mortally wounded Bren gunner who had been taking on snipers. A second lieutenant who had been sticking his neck out all day became the second subaltern to be killed.
The first indication Orr seems to have given that he even considered the possibility that there might not be a happy ending came when he sent away with a three-man escort his battalion’s two Free French liaison officers who were likely to be shot as traitors if captured. Major Relanger and the bon vivant Capitaine Moreau, who had led them like a homing pigeon to the District Commissioner’s wine cellar, left on foot for the Jordan river bridge at Jisr Bennet Yacoub on t
he Palestine border some 20 miles away. Evading Vichy cavalry and armoured car patrols they were picked up some way before the bridge by three Australian trucks towing a brace of 2-pounder anti-tank guns towards Kuneitra.
These Australians were part of a force under a Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Blackburn, one of Australia’s best known 1914–18 heroes who had been commissioned in the field fighting the Turks at Gallipoli then gone to France and won a Victoria Cross storming German trenches on the Somme. Blackburn, a small, wiry man with an unlikely pair of pince-nez spectacles perched on the end of his nose, was in civilian life a lawyer and Adelaide’s city coroner. For his second war he was commanding a machine-gun battalion, a peculiarly British concept that concentrated forty-eight of the old Maxim-style belt-fed and water-cooled Vickers into one unit though they were almost invariably dispersed in four-gun packages as the need arose.
This had already started to happen to Blackburn’s battalion, which was part of 7th Australian’s divisional reserve in northern Palestine and not intended for the Gentforce expedition to Damascus. But as Orr’s radio messages became more desperate he had been ordered to take the rump of his command and, much more appropriately, twelve idle 2-pounders from the Australian 2/2nd Anti-Tank Regiment and secure the Jisr Bennet Yacoub bridge against a possible Vichy raid on Palestine. What those guns might have achieved had they been in place in Kuneitra on the dawn of the 16th must have haunted Orr, when he eventually got to hear about them, to the end of his days.
