England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  The colonel pondered them, looking at his own map, consulting his pencilled notes. At last he looked direct at Lloyd and: ‘I think you’re condemning my men to death, Sir.’ Lloyd looked back at him and said: ‘If you won’t do it, I’ll have to find somebody who will.’ There was a long pause; there was not a sound; my heart was bleeding for the colonel. At last he said: ‘In that case, of course I’ll do it.’

  On the eve of battle most of the Indian infantry were concentrated on the Jebel Madani, some low hills with good fields of fire between the two main roads. Now for the first time binoculars revealed, beyond the green of the Ghouta Gardens, Damascus’s minarets dancing in the heat haze. Vichy troops had made three attempts to probe their positions: twice with armoured cars and finally with a cavalry action Lord Cardigan might have arranged involving a couple of hundred Spahis with appropriate musical accompaniment. Fergusson had just finished visiting forward positions when he heard the North Africans’ bugles. He dashed back to the skyline in time to view the immediate aftermath of this uncharacteristically unprofessional behaviour.

  The scene was like that of an old print with riderless horses and running men making back for the shelter of the Ghouta and others twitching on the plain, horses and men alike … It was a spirited performance but they hadn’t a hope of reaching their objective even though the Indian troops, unable to believe their eyes, had withheld their fire for an appreciable time. I have never discovered who ordered it – if it was ordered – or who led it.

  It was the hottest time of the year, nearly summer’s longest day, and well over 100°F at midday. Young men from the Punjab wearing steel helmets sat in sangars of scorching stone and observed Indian Army water discipline never to drink unless their water bottles could be immediately replenished. Then they died of heat stroke. Fergusson recalled ‘several cases’.

  In the afternoon, having been relieved by the Free French Marines, the Indians came down from their positions, cooled off in the stream at the foot of the hills, prepared and ate some chapatis then sat about drinking sugary tea and smoking while they checked their weapons and primed grenades. The wise tried to grab some sleep. The plan for the assault on Mezze was that they would keep off the road itself and night march for about 12 miles across the country to the west and parallel to the highway. Meanwhile, their towed anti-tank guns and transport carrying ammunition, rations and all the brigade’s radios and their operators, which had to stay on the road, would crawl behind them hoping that Mezze would be taken long before the Vichy air force was up.

  They set out at about 8.30 p.m. heading more or less into the setting sun. Their first contact with the enemy came some ninety minutes later near the fortified hamlet of Mouaddamiya. In the pitch dark of a wood about sixty Punjabis surprised a mostly sleeping R35 laager, scattered or killed their crews and destroyed several unclosed and unmanned tanks by introducing grenades to their full 37mm cannon magazines. Punjabi casualties, killed and wounded, mounted as the French got over their shock, and fixed positions had to be stormed. ‘Only 27 reached the end of the wood but the enemy was obliterated and the main column able to move on,’ wrote the novelist Compton Mackenzie in Eastern Epic, his monumental history of the old British Indian Army’s war.

  Mezze was reached at 4.15 a.m., shortly before dawn and once again surprise was complete. ‘There was a French barracks lit up like a Christmas tree,’ remembered Frank Caldwell, an attached sapper lieutenant just turned 20 who had won a Military Cross in Libya for the mine clearing that cut the Italians off at Beda Fomm. After just over an hour of hard fighting through its high walled streets, during which a Punjabi subadar led a charge that captured two 75mm field guns, the village was in British hands.

  Colonel Jones set up his headquarters in the northern part of the village at Mezze House, formerly the home of the British representative of the Iraqi Petroleum Company. This was a big two-storeyed, double-fronted villa of dark pink stucco with large shuttered windows in its high-ceilinged rooms, built in about half an acre of garden. It was surrounded by a high wall that made it almost invisible. On one side were dense citrus orchards and on the other a street leading directly from its blind drive to the village square. It had running water, there was a pump in the kitchen, beer and wine in its cellar and in the garage a good supply of canned petrol for its missing car. With Jones’s brigade HQ personnel were the battalion headquarters of both 3/1 Punjabis and 4th Rajputana Rifles and a rifle company each from both regiments. Assuming by now they were all a bit under strength this would be about 250 men, perhaps a little more. They had ushered some fifty prisoners into the garden.

  As planned, two companies of the Rajputs had circumvented the village, beaten off an attack by some Vichy cavalry, secured the place where the road and rail links to Beirut met at a level crossing and began raising merry hell. Reports came back of a train, packed with civilians, sent back to Damascus and the line blown behind it; a seven-truck convoy destroyed. Soon a black column of smoke showed they had added a fuel dump to their score.

  At this point Jones may well have been regretting his outburst to Lloyd about ‘condemning my men to death’. Casualties were light for what had been achieved. All he was waiting for now was the rest of the brigade to catch up and consolidate Mezze to prepare for the inevitable counterattack. Two Punjabi companies, including the one that had surprised the tank crews at Mouaddamiya, were clearing the high ground to the west and bringing up the rear were his Bombay Sappers and Miners, the detached Fusilier company that had not been at Kuneitra, and a battery of 25-pounders. There was also the brigade’s transport column with their ammunition and rations and, above all, the 2-pounder anti-tank guns. They had lost contact with them, though that was not all that surprising because as they neared their objective they had moved well away from the road. Colonel Jones would have liked to be able to radio Gentforce to confirm that they were on schedule, but the radios and their operators were with them.

  According to Fergusson, the first news they had that Jones’s transport was in trouble was when a wounded British officer, ‘pale and with five bullet wounds’, staggered into their headquarters and explained what had happened. Although they thought they were driving slowly enough, they had overtaken the entire column and only come to a halt when their lead trucks had been wrecked by the anti-tank and heavy machine guns of a Vichy ambush. Those vehicles that could still move had gone back and were hoping to find a navigable track through the foothills west of the road.

  Meanwhile, de Verdilhac had sent some of his R35s to clear the Rajputs’ roadblock on the Beirut road. The Indians had fallen back on Mezze in good order expecting that their anti-tank guns would be in place and the Vichy armour lured onto them. Instead, as the infantry melted into its side streets, the R35s entered the straggling village unheralded and almost unopposed apart from the occasional crack and screaming ricochet made by an optimistic Rajput with a Boys rifle. Caldwell was standing outside the high garden wall at brigade headquarters chatting to two other young officers when the first tank announced its presence with a burst from its Riebel which broke the leg of one of his companions. The sapper crawled over and helped drag him into cover. The siege of Mezze House had started.

  Jones was holding a smaller perimeter than Orr had started with at Kuneitra: the villa and its walled garden, where in places the brick was soft enough to make loopholes, and some of the orange orchards to the rear. One of the retreating Rajputana companies from the Beirut roadblock was cut off in a small house and forced to surrender when the tanks began to dismantle it with cannon fire. But the other got back to Jones who now had almost 400 men to defend his headquarters, and he and his officers, British and Indian, made it plain with every order they gave that help was on the way and there would be no surrender here.

  Slit trenches were dug in the garden, Boys rifles sited where it was hoped they might do the most damage. Bed sheets were torn up for bandages in case field dressings gave out. Oranges were gathered from the orchards and a few vegetabl
es from the garden, for it was nearly twenty-four hours since they had last eaten anything. Up from the cellar came the absent oil man’s wines and beer, down the kitchen sink went their contents, or perhaps some of their contents. Into the bottles went the petrol from the garage, then the necks were crammed with the doused rags that made the fuse of these crude Molotov cocktails.

  As at Kuneitra the tanks were accompanied by West African riflemen. Mackenzie tells how the veterans of Eritrea ‘kept the infernal Senegalese from getting close’. But not always. One managed to get a rifle grenade through the window of an upstairs room where Jones was holding a conference. Jones was unscathed but shrapnel mortally wounded Lieutenant Colonel Henry Greatwood, commander of 3/1 Punjabis, leaving Captain John Robertson in charge of those elements of his battalion at Mezze House. Robertson, aged 30, was not a professional soldier but a Darjeeling tea planter who had been wounded at Sidi Barrani during the first flush of victories against the Italians and had missed Eritrea. Now he went round encouraging his men in the Urdu he had learned as a child, making sure the Molotovs were equally distributed and, above all, seeing that they tried to make every shot count. Most of the riflemen were probably about a third of their way through the 160 rounds they had started with and all the reserve ammunition was with their missing transport.

  By dusk, which came at about 8.30, there was a lull. Unlike the Fusiliers they had managed to destroy at least one of the R35s with their Molotovs, possibly once their crew had abandoned it after a track had been broken with a Boys. At one point the Senegalese had entered part of the garden and been repulsed with Brens, grenades and a bayonet charge. The well-led Indians do not seem to have been physically intimidated by the larger Africans.

  They could hear the sound of artillery and machine-gun fire from Mezze airport about a mile away but there was still no sign of the rest of the brigade. For all Jones knew Gentforce had assumed they had surrendered and decided to concentrate on the Free French sector. Mezze House was more or less encircled and he had two choices: abandon the wounded and try to fight his way out or hold on. Meanwhile, three officers were to try to slip through the cordon and get word of their plight to Gentforce. One was his Gaullist liaison officer who might be able to bluff his way past sentries. The other two were an Indian jemadar and the sapper officer Caldwell.

  They left as soon as it was dark, crawling through a hole in the wall at about 8.45. Caldwell had a compass and led the way. Gentforce headquarters was no more than 15 miles away and, with any luck, provided they evaded the Vichy French in the immediate vicinity, they might meet up with a British patrol long before they reached it. As it happened it took all night. They walked every step of the way, getting out of Mezze by way of its flat rooftops, climbing walls, wading steams and, worst misery of all, scrambling through hedges of prickly pear cactus. It was 5.30 before senior officers were being gently woken from their slumbers to listen to the exhausted trio relate the latest calamity to befall 5th Indian Brigade.

  Far from shifting the emphasis of the attack to the Free French sector the British were experiencing a good deal of foot dragging on the part of the Gaullists who had begun to display a marked reluctance to fight other Frenchmen. The rot had started with Colonel Magrin-Vernet, the Foreign Legion firebrand who had adopted the nom de guerre Monclar and commanded the Narvik veterans of the Legion’s 13th Demi-Brigade. Monclar had resigned as Legentilhomme’s overall infantry commander, unable to stomach another clash with old comrades of the 6th Foreign Legion cast by the fortunes of war on the Vichy side. Much to Lloyd’s disgust, instead of taking the pressure off the Indians with the planned attack down the DeraaéDamascus road the Gaullists had stayed put at Kissoué. ‘It is doubtful whether they can be persuaded to advance against even feeble resistance,’ reported one senior British officer.

  At this delicate moment Legentilhomme, his arm in a sling, resumed his leadership of Gentforce and Lloyd reverted to command of what was left of 5th Indian Brigade. A relief column was immediately despatched to Mezze under Major Patrick Bourke, a gunner officer who, as an answer to de Verdilhac’s tanks, was bringing with him a battery of twelve 25-pounder guns. His command would also include the three infantry companies – two Punjabi and one Fusilier – that were not with Jones plus the missing antitank guns.

  Now occurred on the battle maps another of Fergusson’s puzzling concentric circles. At Mezze House the fighting had resumed at dawn as the thin wisps of wood smoke rose from the fires in the garden where the Indians were brewing tea. It had started a bit like an orchestra tuning up: the crack of single shots followed by bursts from the various automatics, then the heavier sound of the R35’s stubby little cannon and afterwards, if the tank had ventured close enough, the soft whumph of a petrol bomb. By noon the battle noise was much fiercer. It had been joined by the sound of Bourke’s towed 25-pounders. They were not behind the infantry but alongside them and sometimes even in front of them as they advanced, unlimbered, and fired until they were close enough to do it over open sights. To counter this de Verdilbac sent in fresh troops from the sector facing the Gaullists. These fought back to back with the Senegalese and the tanks trying to finish the stubborn resistance at Mezze House.

  Then Lloyd turned up with some reinforcements of his own: Australian infantry of Lieutenant Colonel David Lamb’s 2/3 Battalion, an under-strength unit that had been in Egypt recovering from Crete and had been sent to replace Orr’s Fusiliers. The newly arrived Vichy troops began to fall back. Around Mezze House there was renewed determination to finish the siege and two 75mm field guns, which might well have been better employed against Bourke’s battery, started firing down the street from the village square that led directly to the house. A shell collapsed a roof section over one of the shuttered rooms where the wounded were lying and while a rescue party were trying to extract them from the rubble some of the Senegalese dashed through a hole in the garden wall. Robertson emptied his revolver at them and led the bayonet charge that drove out those who could still stand, but to Colonel Jones it was obvious that his exhausted men, short of sleep, food and ammunition, could not hold out much longer.

  With Lloyd’s relief force no more than a mile away he decided to play for time and sent a captured Vichy officer out with a white flag to parley for a truce so that he could evacuate his wounded and bury the dead in the garden. But as soon as they saw the flag the Senegalese rushed in, shooting two Rajputs who tried to bar their passage with fixed bayonets. Only the hasty intervention of their French adjutant-chef prevented them from killing Jones and the other surviving officers who were gathered in a corner of the garden. It was all over.

  Four hours later, at about 6 p.m. Fergusson reached Mezze House with Major Bourke and Brigadier Lloyd.

  One side of the house had collapsed; within the walls were just over 100 bodies. Three burned-out Vichy tanks lay just outside the garden. We found in a hospital afterwards an Indian medical officer who had been left behind with the surviving wounded and he told us the rest of the story … They had not so much surrendered as been overwhelmed.

  Yet, as far as Jumbo Wilson was concerned, this dismal scene marked the turning point of the battle for the city because it had sucked in so many of de Verdilhac’s troops. ‘It shook the French defence,’ he wrote in his memoirs, where he also has Jones’s Indians fighting ‘to the last man and the last round’ which hardly ever happens though, if it did not quite end in a banzai charge, there was heroism almost of that order.

  That night Lamb’s Australians swept through Mezze, began to capture the forts on the ridge above the airfield and cut the Beirut road a little lower than the Rajputs had two days before. Telephone poles were pulled down for a roadblock and soon they had captured so many vehicles they were complaining of a parking problem. But most of de Verdilhac’s garrison, taking their Indian prisoners with them, escaped north to Homs. Some stayed there. Others went, via the northern port of Tripoli, the roundabout way to Beirut then climbed almost back to Damascus to the Barada gorge
in Hermon range. Their task was to stop the British descending the winding road from the Syrian capital to the Lebanese coast.

  Vichy France quit Damascus on the morning of 21 June. General Leg-entilhomme, its new military governor, made his entrance in the afternoon though not with all the pomp and circumstance he would have liked. Blackburn’s machine gunners, irritated by the lacklustre performance of the Free French forces they had been supporting, were determined that they would be first into the city. Just as the Gaullists were about to get into the limousines provided by the city fathers the Australians, packed into open trucks and waving Digger hats, spoilt Legentilhomme’s parade by overtaking it with whoops of triumph and a cloud of dust. The wounded general, his arm still in a sling, made a valiant attempt to interpose his body then leapt aside.

  ‘I didn’t have the guts to try,’ recalled Fergusson. ‘We brushed each other down and got back into the cars. The Vichy troops had fought with skill and courage, and our victory, if it could be so described, was rather hollow; but all the same Damascus was ours.’

  The next day, on a front that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, 3.6 million German and other Axis troops invaded Russia with about 3,600 tanks and 2,700 aircraft and the news from Syria fell off the front page.

  Chapter Nineteen

  One of the duties of Beirut police headquarters, that seemed able to maintain an Ottoman sufficiency of informers at small expense, was to provide Dentz’s office with a daily report on the mood in the street. After Damascus fell they informed the High Commissioner that there was ‘uncertainty and unease’ and food prices were soaring though the price of gold remained stable.