England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Almost immediately the French gunners on the Joffre line, loading solidshot armour-piercing rounds, returned fire with their 75mm guns. One of their first shots killed Whitaker’s driver and knocked off a track. Then more hits ruined the turret’s rotating mechanism and the Valentine was effectively disarmed because it was impossible to shoot in the right direction. At this point Whitaker and his gunner bailed out, though by the time they had scrambled into cover the gunner had been wounded by machine-gun fire.

  Jocelin Simon, who was about 50 yards or so behind Whitaker’s Valentine, had worked out that there were two guns that were really doing the damage: one firing directly down the road and the other from the Fort Bellevue blockhouse on the right. The major ordered his driver to get off the road in the same direction and at the same time opened fire with the 2-pounder though he could not actually make out a target. But when the driver tried to leave the road he discovered there were too many boulders so he turned back. Then they were hit in the front where, at almost 3 inches, the armour plate was at its thickest. The French solid shot could not penetrate but made a large area of the hull glow dull red inside. It also knocked the driver senseless though hands and feet still operated the controls.

  As the Valentine advanced relentlessly towards the enemy, Simon was screaming down the intercom at him to get off the road. Another hit damaged the gear-change mechanism and the tank slowed but did not come to a complete stop. Then a round jammed the turret ring which meant they could no longer traverse their guns. Simon told his crew to get out. The driver, who had come round, struggled head first through his forward hatch but he was obviously still concussed. Once he had extracted himself, instead of rolling clear, he somehow fell face down onto the soft red earth in front of the tank so that one of its still moving tracks rolled over him as casually as if he had been a log. Crushed and broken and screaming in agony he begged Major Simon to shoot him and this may have happened. In any event, he died.

  Horror piled on horror. Next the three Tetrarchs behind the Valentines moved forward and began to lay down covering fire. Simon was delighted by their ‘great gallantry’ but, since there were no longer any roadside boulders to stop them, expected them to move off the road to the right where the ground dropped and would lower their profile, exposing no more than their turrets. Instead they stuck to the road and came straight on.

  At least the Valentines had not caught fire. Within seconds the first two Tetrarchs had burst into flames. Corporal Watkins was killed and his gunner so terribly burnt he would die in a naval sick berth a few days later and be buried at sea. Their driver could just about walk away from the flames but was also badly scorched. Behind them in Lieutenant Carlisle’s machine both the driver and gunner were wounded. But Carlisle himself was more or less unscathed and Simon saw him first help his driver out of the smouldering wreck and then, ‘disregarding the fire from the 75s and machine guns and rifles’, he detached the Tetrarch’s Bren gun from its antiaircraft mounting and ran over to the rest of them.

  Astles’s Tetrarch bore a charmed life. Partly covered by the broken or burning tanks in front, it expended a lot of ammunition in the general direction of the enemy, whose exact positions were hard to spot, until Simon ran over and ordered him back to brigade headquarters. En route Astles surprised the motorcycle and a truck-load of reinforcements on their way to those western outposts of the Joffre line around the Col de Bonne Nouvelle. He shot up the truck and claims to have left most of the men on it dead or wounded but took the officers in the motorcycle and sidecar team prisoner. Perhaps they had the opportunity to surrender.

  Simon watched the Tetrarch depart then began to organize his shipwrecked crews who were lying in the long grass and scrub about 20 yards off the road. Lieutenant Whitaker and Sergeant Grime, his gunner, led a scavenging party that crawled back to the four knocked-out tanks and, despite some sniping, retrieved another Bren, a Thompson sub-machine gun, ammunition, water and first-aid kits with morphine for the burn cases who were placed in the best of the available shade. At this point there were ten of them of whom half were wounded. Then the sound of a motorcycle engine was greeted by a renewed crackle of rifle and automatic fire as, from the direction Astles had gone, there came towards them a small and apparently unstoppable cloud of high-speed dust. It contained the squadron’s liaison officer with brigade HQ, an anxious Royal Marines captain named Belville who was wondering if there was anything he could do to help. A badly burnt lance corporal was put on Belville’s pillion and managed to cling on while his rescuer ran the gauntlet with him back to a British field dressing station.

  Simon was under no doubt that their liaison officer had probably saved the life of a man ‘who would otherwise have had to remain in the open under fire for three-and-a-half hours’. During that time they had three times beaten off attacks by Senegalese riflemen while they waited in vain for their own infantry to rescue them. It was a nerve-racking business, for concealed in the long grass they could sometimes hear the ‘low jabberings’ of the Africans before they tried to rush them with fixed bayonets. Once Simon saw some Bren-gun carriers appear down the roads and thought they were about to be relieved ‘but owing to heavy machine gun fire they were unable to approach’.

  The enemy then made a third sortie, employing the same tactics. They managed to approach quite close, but were held off by fire from the Bren guns, Thompson sub-machine-gun and pistols. The Tommy and pistol ammunition was, however, by now almost exhausted. Finally 2nd Lieutenant Whitaker, who had been manning the Bren gun on the right flank with great determination and accuracy, was fatally wounded.

  In the North African desert, bailed-out tank crews from both sides would try hard to get back to their own lines but rarely attempted to avoid capture by fighting it out on foot. There seems little doubt that Simon’s Special Squadron really were a bit special and their training with the Commandos, particularly weapons handling, had imbued them with a fighting spirit that almost made them welcome dismounted action, and it showed. It would hardly be surprising if some of the Africans were in no mood to take prisoners and probably had a good idea who had done the most damage.

  Simon’s concise 1,600-word after-action report of this epic stand was routinely classified secret and lodged in the War Office’s basement filing depository. Dated eight days after it took place, the style is almost comically impersonal. His own role is rarely referred to and then always in the third person as ‘the squadron commander’ or the ‘tank commander’. ‘The tank proceeded down the road under its own power, without the tank commander being aware that the driver was not in control.’ That same driver’s terrible death is not mentioned though it is reliably sourced elsewhere. And while Simon makes it plain that Lieutenant Whitaker was good with a Bren gun and played a crucial role in prolonging their defence, perhaps with next of kin in mind, it does not say how he received his fatal wound.

  A little more detail is supplied in an account that appeared some years later in the regimental magazine of the 9th Lancers who lost three men in the fight. It says that Whitaker died ‘in a hand-to-hand fight with a Senegalese and it was only the intervention of a fine spirited French officer which saved the rest of them from a similar fate’. Perhaps for ‘hand-to-hand’ we should read ‘bayoneted’.

  Certainly, the ‘fine spirited French officer’ matches Simon’s brief description of what happened immediately after Whitaker’s death when the eight survivors, including the badly burnt gunner who died of his wounds, surrendered. ‘The enemy then advanced and at approximately 1545 hours captured the party. Only three of the tank crews were then unwounded. The prisoners were treated by the enemy with great consideration.’

  All Palmer knew from Astles, and probably confirmed by the liaison officer Belville, was that his commanding officer had lost four tanks in fewer minutes, had some badly wounded men with him, and when last seen was trying to hold out until help arrived. For Brigadier Festing there was some profit in Simon’s losses, for at least he had become aware of t
hese formidable Vichy defences before his infantry learned about them the hard way. Now he had to work out how to deal with them.

  As a first step, once Col de Bonne Nouvelle was secured, Festing personally ordered Palmer to go forward and ‘locate the precise positions’ of the guns that had just reduced his tank strength by a third. ‘A most difficult but necessary task,’ admitted the brigadier who came to see them off. Nonetheless, Palmer appeared to welcome it, perhaps thinking he might be able to rescue Simon and the others, though by then it was at least half an hour too late. Two years after Dunkirk, he was also anxious to get back into action.

  As the seven tanks moved out they were shelled. There were no casualties but the French must have suspected something was stirring. They were close enough now to spot each other’s dust. Shortly afterwards the four Valentines and three Tetrarch slipped off the main Antsirane road, and began to go through the scrub and sugar cane to the right of it until they came to some long grass high enough to cover the tanks. Then they stopped and dismounted for a briefing.

  Palmer’s plan, as he outlined it to his men, was simplicity itself. Using whatever cover was available, they would advance until they discovered a hull-down position, the tank commander’s tactical eldorado where they could see and shoot with only turrets above the parapet. Then they would fan out into an extended line and all open up together, carefully noting where the return fire was coming from. But the Hussar officer confided to his own crew that they were going to do a bit more: he and the sergeant major were going to take their tanks back towards the road and get the French to reveal their positions by deliberately drawing their fire. This part worked magnificently. Even Lance Corporal Clegg, Palmer’s devoted gunner, was a bit taken aback. ‘It was another Balaclava. As soon as we were clear of the pampas grass all hell descended on us. The crack of the shells as they flew over the turret and around us sounded as if the artillery was on our hull. We made for the cover of a wood to our right but Sergeant-Major Allen’s tank, another Valentine, had been hit.’

  Allen’s tank had a track broken, its main gun jammed in the half-recoil position and all three crew members were wounded. Palmer’s machine had also taken several hits and he and his driver were hurt though Clegg was unscathed. Both crews bailed out and four managed to get into cover; but Palmer noticed that Allen’s driver was still struggling in his hatch. Despite his own injury, and the French artillery’s evident determination to prove that practice makes perfect, Palmer went over and got the wounded driver out. He was helping him towards the other tanks, which had found a reasonably hull-down position, when a shell-burst killed both of them. Clegg saw it happen. ‘One moment they were there, as if held motionless, and in that terrible flash they were gone.’

  For a while the remaining five tanks, now under a Lieutenant Harwood, duelled with Fort Bellevue’s artillery but by 6 p.m. the light was fading fast, which was probably just as well. They withdrew with a slightly better idea as to where the French guns were but hardly one that could be called precise and certainly not worth the price the squadron had paid in their two brief encounters with them. In less than twenty-four hours their unit strength of 6 officers and 39 men had been reduced by over a third: 7 were dead, 8 wounded and their commanding officer was among 3 unwounded prisoners. They had also lost half their tanks, though a couple might be repairable. Brigadier Festing would recommend Palmer, who had died because he went back for the wounded driver, for a posthumous Victoria Cross but it was turned down. Instead he got a Military Cross for the leadership he had displayed before he was killed.

  In its small way, the Joffre line was showing what in 1940 the Maginot line could have accomplished had the Germans been sporting enough to attack it head-on instead of sneaking around it. The navy might have put Sturges’s men into the ring but, against all odds, there could be no doubt who had won the first round of the land battle.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Brigadier Festing welcomed the dark. He knew that he lacked the artillery and now the armoured support to break through these Vichy defences in daylight. It would have to start with a night attack. By noon he had all four of his infantry battalions ashore, the last to arrive at Ambararata Bay being Lieutenant Colonel Michael West’s 2nd South Lancashires, the brigade’s reserve.

  At 11 p.m. West was attending a conference at Festing’s HQ which had been set up in a Chinese-owned trading store known as Robinson’s Hotel, its proprietor being well disposed to the British who had come to deliver him from the Japanese. This was at the village of La Scama which was also the site of Antsirane’s abattoir and a meat canning factory. It was well forward for a brigade headquarters, easily within rifle shot of the Joffre line’s outposts and there was a considerable amount of sniping. The Royal Welch Fusiliers, who had spent the day as spearhead battalion and were now in reserve, were deployed around it though it was not much of a rest.

  At this conference West learned that his South Lancs, being the freshest battalion, had been given the star role in Festing’s plan of attack. The Vichy defences spanned the three approach roads into the Antsirane peninsula but ended where the land crumbled steeply into its mangroved coast, an area that could only be protected by foot patrols. Taking advantage of the moonlight, West’s men were to make a night approach and get behind the enemy’s left flank (British right) by going over the broken ground that skirted the east coast’s Baie des Français. Once firmly installed behind the Joffre line they would attack from the rear while the 1st Royal Scots Fusiliers and 2nd East Lancs attacked from the front. Zero hour was set for 5.30 a.m. and would be preceded at first light by air strikes from the Fleet Air Arm’s Albacores and Swordfish. There would be additional fire support from the six 3.7-inch howitzers of the brigade’s 455 battery.

  ‘Speed and savage hearts in the attack. Tolerance in victory,’ General Sturges had signalled his troops, though how many got the message is uncertain. Wireless communications, as the general would soon learn, were bad and some company headquarters were loath to be lumbered with heavy sets that would not work. Festing’s abiding memory of that night was of a ‘fierce heath fire raging around my brigade’s perimeter’. It had been started by his own troops to smoke out snipers and the flickering flame gave the place a sinister edge. The East Lancs were delighted when a bunch of South Lancs, not yet adjusted to the sounds of battle, prostrated themselves when one of its Bren gunners fired a burst.

  At 2 a.m. the newcomers set off to turn the enemy’s flank in three columns some 50 yards apart. Colonel West, carrying a heavy Thompson sub-machine gun with a Capone-style drum magazine, was with B Company which was part of the column on the extreme right. He was 37 and his contemporaries suspected he was destined for great things if he lived long enough.

  At first they kept their moonlit march to order with company commanders halting every few hundred yards to wait for the tail to close up, a painfully slow business. Two sentries encountered in some mangroves were shot without raising the alarm. But it was hard going. The mangrove swamps made every step an adventure and the mosquitoes could not believe their luck. Soon they had little more than two hours to get to the Antsirane cemetery from where they were supposed to arrange themselves to deliver a battalion attack at 5.30. Now the gaps were no longer being closed and before long entire platoons had gone astray.

  At first light it was discovered that parts of C Company from the left column were inextricably merged with B Company from the right. With the minutes ticking away to zero hour West knew they had no chance of making their rendezvous at the cemetery even if they were entirely certain where it was. They had brought no wireless sets. The ground was hard enough going for men with rifles and West had left the sets behind with his rear companies whom he hoped to be in touch with by runner. As far as he was concerned this was a large-scale raid and they needed to be light on their feet. West had already briefed his officers that, if they got lost, they must share their confusion with the enemy by attacking whatever offered a reasonable chance of succes
s. Now he ordered Major Northcote, who commanded B Company, to split it into guerrilla bands of ten – all infantry platoons divided into three sub-sections of this number – and ‘do the maximum damage possible’.

  At 5.00 a.m. the Swordfish and Albacores began bombing the Joffre line and half an hour later, to coincide with the troops’ zero hour, some Martlet fighters machine-gunned the same positions at spectacularly low altitudes. As the 2nd East Lancs and 1st Royal Scots Fusiliers went forward they saw an aircraft burst into flames and were relieved to see a parachute open. But no British planes had been lost. The man at the end of it was a Lieutenant Héloise, the observer and sole survivor of one of two Potez 63—11 light bombers shot down by the Martlets as they headed for Syfret’s ships. Two wounded French airmen survived the crash-landing of the other bomber, making a total of three prisoners and three killed. Héloise said that his pilot, Adjutant Dietsch, had stuck with the plane and died to give him the chance to jump.

  There was Gallic heroism on the ground too, though not under the same flag. Peter Reynier, a subaltern in the Royal Scots Fusiliers, was the son of a Finnish mother and a French wine merchant who had flourished in London where Reynier was born at the family home in Pimlico in 1916. Shortly after the outbreak of war Reynier had volunteered for the British Army and served for a while in the Commandos before being commissioned into the Scots regiment. He spoke fluent French; after leaving school he had spent some time learning the family trade in Burgundy and Bordeaux, and given the usual dearth of interpreters and translators could easily have got a headquarters job. But that was not what he wanted any more than his elder brother Roderick who was also commanding a platoon in Madagascar in Hugh Stockwell’s Royal Welch Fusiliers.