England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Dawn found the battalion ‘hanging on like flies on a wall’ just below the crest of the smaller hill and under machine-gun and mortar fire from three sides. Corporal Tweedale got a Bren gun section within 25 yards of a machine-gun nest and, too close to be mortared, stayed there making his presence felt while ignoring his wounds. Most of the battalion were using bayonets and mess tins to scrape holes for themselves in any soft space between the rocks: entrenching tools, like heavy artillery, were something else they lacked. All Colonel Barraclough could do was ask for the help of the Indian mountain battery. They moved its guns as close as they dared and sent Lieutenant Raizada Madn Lal Vaid, their observation officer, to join the forward infantry. With a linesman unravelling a field telephone cable behind him, Lal Vaid, a Kashmiri aristocrat, managed to get himself and his party across open ground well covered by machine guns and mortars and set to work. Within a short while the mountain guns’ well-directed fire was thought to have accounted for at least one machine gun and a mortar and had, quoting the citation for the Kashmiri’s Military Cross, ‘an encouraging effect on the morale of our own troops’. An additional bonus was that Barraclough now had a field telephone line to his forward company.

  For almost two days, while Dentz introduced a new intermediary for the Beirut-Jerusalem correspondence in the form of France’s interned Amiral Godfroy on his mothballed battleship in Alexandria, this predominantly North Country English battalion was involved in some of the most bitter fighting of the campaign. French mortar teams could work with impunity from their mountain-top fire bases. The King’s Own discovered their own mortars, even when loaded with extra charges that might have exploded the bombs in their tubes, constantly fell short. The mountain guns certainly had the range but their small shells did not always have much effect against an enemy often encased in stone and concrete. At one point six of the Australians’ Tomahawks made an air strike. But instead of attacking the peaks they concentrated on strafing the French transport and artillery on the other side of the Jebel Mazar where there were plenty of 20mm flak guns. One aircraft was hit and Flying Officer Knowles was lucky to make his crash landing on the right side of Damascus to get a lift home.

  Nonetheless, slowly but surely Barraclough’s men closed with the enemy, though officer casualties, as in any good infantry battalion, were high. Two company commanders had been badly wounded, two subalterns killed at the head of their platoons. Barraclough put in a second night attack with his reserve company against Peak 1455, the slightly bigger of the two. It was led by Captain Sam Waring who won a bar to the Military Cross he had earned during Palestine’s Arab rebellion, getting his men around some barbed-wire entanglements and capturing a line of sangars. One corporal revved his section in a sudden bezerker bayonet charge and was seen to kill four Tirailleurs himself before they began to collect prisoners.

  Then, for the last time in the campaign, the French introduced tanks. This was a shock because nobody had realized that the far side of the Jebel Mazar had slopes gentle and rock-free enough for them to make unhindered progress. But here they were again, the stubby little two-man Renault R35s of the Chasseurs d’Afrique, waddling menacingly towards the British infantry. And this time there was no question of even trying to use Boys anti-tank rifles against them because a Boys was much too heavy to take mountain climbing. All Waring could do was get his company to run away which they did in reasonably good order, taking their prisoners with them and joining the rest of the battalion high up on the smaller peak which was steeper and rockier and definitely not 1941’s tank country. They also had the support of Madn Lal Vaid’s mountain battery though they lacked armour-piercing ammunition.

  The R35s moved off to the 2nd Queen’s sector which they found flatter and much more congenial, quickly cutting off and capturing about ninety exhausted men who were almost asleep on their feet. The Queen’s had been in continuous action much longer than any other of the UK British battalions, and it was beginning to show. More men were being evacuated with heat stroke than bullet or shrapnel wounds. Among the casualties was their commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Bevis Haggard, mentioned in despatches and three times wounded in 1914–18, who had collapsed with a heart attack.

  Having climbed high enough to shake off the tanks the King’s Own spent the rest of Friday, 11 July clinging to the side of their mountain under frequent mortar and artillery fire from the neighbouring peak and sometimes sniped at from the summit of the one they were on. It was a hazy day. Sun spots, those electrical disturbances in the ionosphere that begin with a vortex of gas rising from the surface of the sun, were playing havoc with short-wave radio signals. By midday the outline of the peaks danced in the heat, flies visited the living almost as much as the dead and many water bottles had run dry. Thirst drove men to take the risks the snipers above them were waiting for. Private Pearce, whose platoon was pinned down in a spot devoid of all shade, was killed as he tried to get to the place where water bottles had been dumped by the last man to try to deliver them. Private White, a volunteer from another platoon, was luckier and made the run.

  By late afternoon Barraclough was wondering how much longer he could expect his men to put up with this, though one positive development was the arrival of 25-pounder guns with the RAF acting as spotters for them. Then brigade headquarters passed on the plain language signal that Corporal Donald Pickering, the duty senior Royal Signals operator at Jumbo Wilson’s Jerusalem HQ, had been trying to transmit through the sun spots for the last two hours. ‘All troops in forward areas will cease fire at 0001 hours 12 July. A strict ceasefire will be observed but if fired upon return fire.’

  After five weeks the Syrian campaign was over. Or almost over. For it soon became obvious that the French regarded the interval between announcing the ceasefire and its midnight implementation as an opportunity to ensure that none of their ammunition was left unfired. The Leicesters reported that shell after shell was going over their position though most of them were landing harmlessly in a hillside to their rear. The Midlands’ battalion had just had a hard time in Crete and this demonstration of pique, if that is what it was, did not win the French any admirers. On both sides it was, after all, a generation brought up on tales about men who had died on 11th day of the 11th month 1918. The Leicesters’ regimental history is quite emphatic about it. ‘Everyone naturally felt anxious not to be killed a few hours short of the armistice. Whatever the rights and wrong of the case at the time our soldiers, though they despised the Italians and respected the German fighting man, one and all hated these Vichyites who seemed to have occasioned an unnecessary campaign.’

  It was a view shared by the Hurricane pilot Roald Dahl. He started the Syrian campaign as one of nine of 80 RAF Squadron who had survived the air fighting in Greece. By the time Dentz surrendered only five were left alive. Years later, when he had become a great and distinguished author, he would write: ‘I for one have never forgiven the Vichy French for the unnecessary slaughter they caused.’

  Others took a more philosophical attitude. Shortly after the armistice Gerald Bryan, the Commando lieutenant who gained a Military Cross and lost a leg in the Litani action, was surprised to receive a hospital visit from some of the officers belonging to the units that had been fighting him there. They explained, ‘slightly apologetically’, that they were all regular soldiers and it was their duty to support the government they had pledged allegiance to. ‘I explained that I too was a regular soldier and I was prepared to fight anyone my government declared an enemy. We discussed the Litani river battle as if it had been a game of football … Before they left each officer shook me by the hand and we bade each other au revoir without rancour or recrimination.’

  Chapter Twenty

  At least 2,000 people were killed in the Syrian campaign, an average of 400 a week. The Vichy French lost slightly more than the Allies. After the war Dentz said that 1,092 French officers and men, most of the latter non-French, had died defending Syria. This would include naval and air force losses
and probably locally recruited gendarmerie.

  The Australians, who contributed the bulk of the Allied land forces, had 416 killed in action and 1,136 wounded. Total losses among other participants are vaguer because the only available casualty figures have obviously been rounded off, and killed and wounded are lumped together without saying how many died: UK and British Indian Army 600; Free French 300. It would probably be correct to assume that at least 300 of these were killed which, together with some 50 RAF and Royal Navy fatalities, would put the Allied killed at about 800 of whom perhaps 100 were Free French.

  Civilian deaths appear to have been quite low. Certainly much lower than those inflicted by the late twentieth-century American munitions used by the Israelis against Palestinian and Lebanese militias defending the same turf and often, having little choice in the matter, from densely populated areas. In 1941 the cities were avoided. The Vichy French tried to hold lines before Sidon, Damour and Beirut and Damascus was declared an open city. Anglo-Vichy artillery duels and bombing attacks around Lebanon’s hill villages and market towns such as Merjayoun and Jezzine certainly took their toll of innocents who happened to be standing on the wrong map reference at the wrong time. And troops sometimes saw bodies or heard Arabic keening for the dead but nobody was counting. Only in Beirut, which towards the end was receiving a few bombs around the port and the High Commissioner’s residence on an almost nightly basis, could Commandant Picard’s Lebanese police attempt to cling onto normality and see that a proper record was kept. ‘Night of 29 to 30 June. 0010 hrs. Ashrafiyah area (near the Greek Orthodox Hospital) 3 bombs, 2 dead, 5 wounded, 2 houses destroyed … Rue Lamartine, the courtyard of the Kikano building, Hadji Nicolas Sayegh, a 65-year-old Lebanese, was fatally wounded. Police legal services are taking statements.’ Even so, it is hard to imagine that civilian fatalities throughout Lebanon and Syria in the summer of 1941 could have averaged less than three a day: a total of 105.

  After two days of negotiations High Commissioner Dentz, according to Time magazine looking like ‘a provincial druggist in uniform’, signed the armistice in the Sidney Smith Barracks at the old Crusader fortress of Acre, Mandate Palestine’s most northern harbour. It was Monday, 14 July: Bastille Day. Most of the world’s English-language press did not miss the opportunity to point out that signing on the anniversary of the founding of the French Republic was an added humiliation for Dentz. For good measure Time’s correspondent gloated that last year the same man, as commander of the capital’s garrison, had ‘signed Paris away to the conquering Nazis’. (It was not strictly true. It had been declared an open city.)

  This year’s surrender document was entitled the Armistice of Saint Jean D’Acre, the name the knights of the First Crusade had given their first landing in 1104. The venue, Sidney Smith Barracks, was named after the admiral whose frigates ended Napoleon’s Levantine ambitions in 1799. Reporters and newsreel cameramen with a considerable amount of electric cable trailing after them were allowed in to record the historic occasion which took place after dark in the dining room of the officers’ mess.

  Unfortunately an Australian photographer, ‘somewhat over refreshed’ thought Jumbo Wilson, got entangled in one or perhaps several of the leads and fused every light in the barracks. As a result the final signing was lit by hurricane lamps and the headlight of a despatch rider’s motorcycle wheeled into the doorway and kick-started into life. Somebody took advantage of the confusion to visit the car being used by Georges Catroux, the leader of the Free French forces in Syria, and remove from one of its seats his général’s oak leaf kepi with its generous arrangement of gold thread embroidery on the crown. Catroux suspected the Australians (who vehemently denied it) and, in his memoirs at least, seemed to share the joke though he added: ‘When the incident became known to the Vichy delegation the whisper went round that I was a deserving victim of the bad company I kept.’

  If it had not been for Catroux’s presence Dentz might have been spared the pain of signing on Bastille Day. But he could not stomach the idea of a face-to-face meeting with the Gaullist traitors sitting on the same side of the table as Wilson’s delegation and, refusing to attend in person, remained in Beirut until his signature was required. His representative at the negotiations that preceded this awful moment was to be Raoul de Verdilhac, old friend of Legentilhomme, and his adversary in the fighting around Damascus. All his fellow professionals at the table recognized that Général de Verdilhac had conducted a brilliant campaign and, to the very small extent that it had been a civil war, was ending it with all the good-natured aplomb of one of Lee’s senior Confederates.

  Wilson saw his next task as preparing defences in Syria to stop the ever successful Germans if they should decide to turn south from the Russian Caucasus and enter the Levant through Turkey. With this in mind he wanted to remove all Vichy troops who did not wish to join the Free French as soon as possible. This had contributed to generous terms and infuriated de Gaulle. His response was to pretend that his forces had been an equal partner in the invasion of Syria instead of a failed fig leaf that had not for one moment concealed the naked Britishness of the project let alone procured a single act of mass defection. But having miserably failed to seduce the Armée du Levant on the battlefield, de Gaulle was appalled by how little access his recruiters had to this captive audience now that the shooting was over.

  Everything was going on as though nobody owed us anything. Dentz, with full agreement of the English, had concentrated his troops in northern Lebanon around Tripoli. The units, with their leaders, their arms and their flags, were encamped side by side, showered by Vichy with decorations and mentions in despatches, receiving no information except what came to them through the channel of their hierarchy and basking in an atmosphere of imminent repatriation. Indeed the ships which were to take them away wholesale were already announced from Marseilles, for Darlan was not wasting a day before getting them on their way nor the Germans before letting them leave.

  An attempt was made to appease de Gaulle by allowing Free French units to be quartered close to Vichy troops. This led to an election atmosphere with speeches, slogans and banners proclaiming ‘Pétain, Maréchalnous voilà’ and ‘France Libre – de Gaulle’. A Gaullist sergent shot and badly wounded a Pétainist officer as he was boarding his ship but overall there was little violence, though the Vichy officers had been allowed to keep loaded pistols. It was becoming increasingly obvious that the Gaullists were losing the election and the British could not fill the repatriation ships fast enough. This led to a serious error when on 16 August 600 delighted German Foreign Legionnaires, who included some of the Palmyra garrison and had been carefully sifted from other nationalities, discovered they were not bound for a POW camp but were a Mediterranean cruise back to France and no doubt the welcoming arms of the Wehrmacht. Churchill was furious. ‘I am not prepared to let this lapse be slurred over, or fall into oblivion. More than admonitions are required when 600 German Legionnaires are allowed to go back to France for further use by Germany against us. It might take 600 British lives to deal with these men so casually and incontinently allowed to slip through our fingers.’

  Undoubtedly Wilson was ultimately responsible. He was punctilious about keeping to the letter of the Acre armistice which did not discriminate against French troops who happened to be of German nationality. No action was ever taken, partly because it was discovered that the Free French were aware that the German Legionnaires were about to be being shipped out and raised no objection. In return Wilson expected the Vichy French to keep to their word and when they did not took decisive action.

  At Acre it had been agreed that there would be an exchange of prisoners. Three weeks after the ceasefire had been signed there was still no sight of sixty-six Australian, British and Indian officers and NCOs who, it had been learned, were no longer in the country. Among them were most of the officers from 5th Indian Brigade captured in the one-sided fights against the Renault tanks at Kuneitra and Mezze. Late in the campaign, presumab
ly with bargaining chips in mind, fifty-three of them had been flown or shipped to Salonika in northern Greece where the German military had allowed Vichy to set up logistics support for their Syrian operation. The other thirteen had ended up in Italian hands on Rhodes, shipped there from nearby Scarpanto where their air transport had made a worrying emergency landing with an engine on fire. Général de Verdilhac had been warned that if these men were not returned by 5 August thirty-five senior Vichy officers, including Dentz and himself, would no longer be free to await repatriation in circumstances that were little different from those they enjoyed as a peacetime garrison. They would be detained until they kept to the agreement.

  The arrests took place on the afternoon of 7 August and the hostages were all moved to quarters in Jerusalem where they were held under armed guard. Dentz had at first pleaded he was too sick with dengue fever to travel but eventually, accompanied by his ADC and two servants, was driven there in his own car. Wilson, whose headquarters were nearby, informed them that ‘they would not leave for France until our officers set foot in Beirut’ and Vichy was apprised of their situation. By the end of the month all sixty-three British prisoners had returned, the last leg of their journey by ship from Toulon to Beirut completed in some style in first-class cabins with waiter service.

  They came back with a strange tale of a long but not uncomfortable seven-day rail journey across Hitler’s Europe under French guard. After Salonika the first stretch had been through German-occupied Yugoslavia passing through Belgrade and Zagreb. Then, by its Alpine scenic route, they had entered the Reich itself with glimpses of Graz, Salzberg – where they were shocked to see holidaymakers on the platform and no attempt to enforce a blackout – and Hitler’s beloved Berchtesgaden before they descended by way of Munich and Ulm and across annexed Alsace to enter the new shrunken France shortly before Dijon. The Demarcation line between the occupied and unoccupied zones had been crossed just north of Vichy itself, after which they had proceeded through Pétain’s brittle kingdom to Marseilles and Toulon.