England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  A dozen more 25-pounders were certainly a valuable addition to the harassing fire the general had ordered. But the best news came a bit later in the day. Surrounded by a small and admiring coterie of his men, who insisted that their colonel had personally accounted with his Thompson for at least thirty-five of the enemy, the South Lancs’ Michael West had walked back into British lines. This marked the beginning of the return of the half of his battalion that had gone missing. They had quite a story to tell.

  Two of his companies had been stopped well before Fort Bellevue where they had never lost touch with Festing’s headquarters and simply dug in there not far out of La Scama as his brigade’s right flank. But the other two, plus West’s battalion headquarters, some 400 in all, had been out of contact for at least twelve hours, vanished as if they had never been. West had tried to send messengers but none of them had got through and Festing feared they had been cut off, surrounded and surrendered.

  This was far from the case. By sniping, ambushing and stampeding a grazing herd of pack horses and mules for the French 75mm guns, West’s soldiers had created the kind of uncertainty that makes men who are not losing believe that they might be. Not only in Vichy’s rear echelons, but also on the Joffre line itself where sentries staring one way found themselves being shot at from the other. Men who had been disarmed and released were walking back into Antsirane and saying that the English were everywhere and all was lost.

  It was not done without cost. An early attempt to send back about a hundred or so prisoners under a ten-man escort was stopped by French artillery fire which killed thirty of their own and wounded five of the guards who were all captured. In all seventeen South Lancs lost their lives and about forty were wounded. Among the dead was the footballer Roland Moss from Stockport who died staring at a photograph of his baby son which he had asked to be removed from his shirt pocket and placed in his hand.

  Because West had failed to get word of their exploits out, Brigadier Festing was unable to exploit the South Lancs’ success as quickly as he would have liked. But Sturges was under no illusion about the contribution they had made. ‘The effect of this penetration on the morale of the enemy command and troops was later found to have been very great,’ he wrote.

  It was not until late afternoon that the brigadier and some of his officers began to sense that the enemy’s grip on the Joffre line might be weakening. Festing, ‘Frontline Frankie’ to his troops, made a personal reconnaissance in a Bren-gun carrier and then sent out a fighting patrol of Royal Scots Fusiliers who returned with fifty prisoners. This was followed by a probe by the surviving tanks, though not before they came under artillery fire while the crews were being briefed and one of the two Valentines left was disabled. Nobody was hurt but it indicated that a French Forward Observation Officer was somewhere close enough to see them and at the end of a field telephone.

  The remaining four set off with orders ‘on no account to commit themselves against the French guns’. After a while they discovered some hapless Malagasy infantry trying to hide in a swathe of sugar cane and, when they failed to surrender, used their machine guns on them. Behind the tanks, deafening bangs at the headquarters of 1st Royal Scots announced that they were being mortared. Two were killed and the twelve wounded included the second-in-command and the adjutant. Weakening they might be, but finished the French were obviously not. It was shortly after 5 p.m. and the heat was going out of the second day.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  On board the Anthony most of the Royal Marines were being seasick. Marines rarely served on anything smaller than a cruiser and some of them had never been to sea in anything less than a battleship which was a lot gentler on the stomach than the bronco ride a destroyer usually provided, even in a mild sea. This one was distinctly choppy and, from west coat to east coast, they had just over four hours to cover the 120 miles around Madagascar’s northern tip so that their raid on Antsirane coincided with the army’s night attack on the Joffre line.

  Captain Martin Price, who commanded the flagship’s contingent of 160 Royal Marines, had been called into Syfret’s cabin and given forty-five minutes’ notice to organize his fifty-strong landing party. On the Ramillies the marines’ main shipboard task was to man the 15-inch guns in X turret and the starboard 6-inch gun battery, part of the ship’s secondary armament. Price decided to take all the 6-inch gun crews with him, reasoning that Syfret would probably prefer his main armament to be fully manned. The only exception was X turret’s Sergeant Willmott who doubled as the admiral’s valet. Willmott pleaded so passionately to be allowed to go that Syfret gave in. Given his private misgivings about their chances, it must be assumed that it was a decision taken with heavy heart.

  Almost all Price’s party were regulars trained to man guns, board enemy ships, fight ashore as infantrymen, guard prisoners and protect the Royal Navy’s officers from mutinous seamen, though this last issue had not come up for some time. They were not Royal Marine Commandos, who would not exist for another year. They shared the same regard for a bulled boot, a ramrod back and a good band as the Brigade of Guards and generally despised new notions of military athleticism. On the parade ground they had declined to follow the army’s new drill manual, introduced just before the war, and march in columns of three instead of the four that had been good enough for Nelson and the Iron Duke. They were sartorially conservative too. Royal Marines went into action in Madagascar with their lightweight khaki drill trousers swaddled by the knee-to-ankle cloth puttees of 1914–18. As it happened, this made them the envy of the army who wore shorts. There were some fatal strains of malaria on the island and some men were literally being bitten to death.

  By 8 p.m., it was dark and three hours away from moonrise and HMS Anthony, her speed reduced to 13 knots, was feeling her way by echo sounder and radar for the mile-wide break in the cliffs that was the entrance to Diego Suarez harbour. When the water became calmer they knew they had got through it. The destroyer was one of the ships that was normally based in Gibraltar and Syfret had almost certainly chosen her because she was one of the older ones, launched in 1927, her two funnels dating her like last year’s hemline. Like so much of the navy she had been in almost continuous action in the thirty-two months since the war began. She had brought 3,000 men home from Dunkirk, was part of the destroyer pack around the sinking Bismarck, had been bombed, shot at, combed torpedoes and dropped depth charges from Malta to Murmask; but she had never been asked to do anything quite like this.

  The whole point of landing on the western side of the isthmus and marching across to the anchorage entered from the east coast had been to avoid its well-sited coastal batteries which contained a score of guns of various calibres. Now Lieutenant Commander John Hodges was praying that the darkness, the smallness of his ship, which was his first command, and the sheer impertinence of it all would enable him to slip the Anthony in and out of this 8-mile gauntlet of coastal artillery. It seemed a very tall order, almost like one of those stunts against Napoléon’s navy the author C.S. Forester dreamed up in the Hornblower books to be found in most 1940s wardrooms.

  Hodges, who would be 32 in three days’ time, had already warned his crew that if they had to abandon ship they must try to head for the northern shore that was occupied by the Commandos. Behind him the Hermione, which since the operation began had always been on this coast to make her diversions and keep the French guessing, had been joined by the Devonshire, another cruiser. The two had closed up within 6 miles of the harbour entrance to support Hodges with their 8-inch guns. They particularly had in mind the searchlights whose startling beams they had sometimes noticed dancing around these silent waters.

  The biggest and most feared guns was a battery of 33omms at Orongea Point, the same type of Modèle 1931 found on the Dunkerque class battle cruisers. But the destroyer, her speed now up to 22 knots, had penetrated the harbour and was half a mile to the west of these before the French spotted her and opened fire. Soon all the batteries had joined in but Hodges, w
ho had been on destroyers for four years, was keeping much closer to the shore than they realised and in the dark the French gunners were not depressing their barrels enough and shooting high. When one of their searchlights tried to help, the Devonshire doused it with her second salvo.

  On the Anthony Ordinary Seaman Yule, whose action station was on the stern by the depth charges, was convinced that it was the ‘prompt and efficient shooting’ of their own port Oerlikon heavy machine gun mounted on the bridge that had snuffed the light out. The port pom-pom had also joined in as had their aft 4.7-inch gun; the other two, which were forward of the bridge, could not be brought to bear. Then the destroyer was coming alongside the jetty.

  Even at this late stage it had been hoped that 5 Commando might at least have been able to get a small party over to Antsirane, seize the deep water quay and be there to take a line from the Anthony. Not only was there no welcoming party but in the darkness Hodges, with Price’s men prepared to disembark over the port side, overshot the jetty. He was obliged to turn his ship round so that the marines then had to rush over to the starboard side but once again the landing party was disappointed. Strong offshore winds were preventing the destroyer from coming alongside.

  By now these parking manoeuvres were attracting the attention of the French who for the first time had a firm idea where their target was and began to subject the Anthony to rifle and automatic fire, though the pompom and Oerlikon soon diminished it. Coastal batteries, even if they could depress their barrels enough, could not shoot at the ship for fear of hitting the town. An artillery officer named Clavel decided that the answer was to get some of his men to manhandle one of their 75mms onto the jetty and fire at the ship at point-blank range.

  At about the same time Hodges also had an idea: instead of trying to berth alongside he would back into the jetty and stay there long enough for the marines to scramble ashore over the low stern. It worked. Ordinary SeamanYule had helped get the gangplanks down for the marines and was counting them off when he noticed some movement on the jetty. ‘Figures could be discerned about 100 yards away to the left wheeling a field gun into position.’

  Then the petty officer in charge shouted up to the bridge, ‘All Marines ashore.’ They had started to pull the gangplanks in when Capitaine Clavel, who had never imagined it would get quite as point-blank as this, gave the order to fire. As they hit the deck Yule and his party heard the swoosh of the shell above them. Clavel stood there staring at his target which still looked oddly intact. Then he reluctantly concluded that this was because it was. He had actually succeeded in missing a destroyer with a field gun at a hundred paces. He could have hit it with his revolver. But there was no time to dwell on this, for some menacing figures were bearing down on him, his crew had fled and he had no choice but to follow them.

  Anthony was already pulling away from the jetty, all guns blazing and her five battle ensigns catching the night breeze as every man aboard wondered whether their luck would hold and they would run the thoroughly alerted gauntlet a second time. At first the French shooting was just as wild and inaccurate and there was no help from their searchlights. But once off the Orongea headland the crews on the 330mm batteries almost immediately started to land their shot ‘rather close’. The little ship groaned and shook and was covered by their spume. In their thrumming engine room the lights flickered and the artificers looked up at the hatches closed for action stations. Probably the best place to be was behind one of Anthony’s three open 4.7-inch guns where constant loading, aiming and firing left little time to dwell on the unfair advantage coastal gunners enjoyed over ships. Then suddenly the entire crew felt the unmistakable swell of an open sea beneath their feet and knew that Hodges had done it. He had threaded them back through the gap in the cliffs and the chances were they had survived.

  Behind them they had, as planned, left Price and his marooned Marines to their own devices without the slightest prospect of retreat. Their last memory of the Anthony was a departing burst of tracer from her pompom that passed about 6 feet over their heads and vanished into the all-consuming darkness. It was pitch-black. Only in the dockyard was there a faint flickering provided by the fires started by the Fleet Air Arm earlier in the day. As they moved away from the wharf somebody’s shore-serviced boots stumbled over abandoned metal cooking pots with a ghastly clatter and this drew some fire though none of it was close and Price was not unduly concerned. ‘They were obviously firing at the patter of little feet which seem to have grown several sizes larger than usual.’

  Price had been briefed, probably as a result of information Percy Meyer had supplied, to try to establish a strongpoint in the headquarters of the Artillery Commandant. But both he and Lieutenant Powell, his deputy, only had a vague idea where this was and in the darkness it was hard to get their bearings. For a while they wandered rather aimlessly around the port area. Rolling artillery rumbles of the distant thunder kind and faint bursts of automatic fire could be heard from the Joffre front 2 miles to the south. From nearer by came the occasional sharp crack of rifle fire but if they were aimed at them they were bad shots. Otherwise, Royal Marines had known noisier Wednesday nights in Portsmouth.

  Price had made sure they all had plenty of grenades and, conscious that they were supposed to be making a diversion, he decided to ‘advertise our presence’ by throwing a few around the buildings that had already suffered from the air raids. But unless they exploded in confined spaces grenades could sound rather feeble and if the French heard them they refused to take the bait. They seem to have decided that if there was something nasty in the night their best policy was to stay indoors. To say the least it was all a bit anticlimactic.

  Then the marines discovered a gap in a wall that led to a high bank, almost a cliff, on the top of which was a brick wall topped by a close-meshed fence. It appeared to be the back of something important. Using hands as well as feet as it got steeper, they scaled the bank, employed their bayonets to hack a hole through the wire and entered a compound where a slum of live cows, goats and pigs were being kept in their own filth as emergency rations. Beyond them a large Tricolour hung over an imposing gateway on which there was a brass name plate. Price produced his torch. On it was written: Direction d’Artillerie. They had found it.

  Shortly afterwards Lieutenant Powell became involved in a brief skirmish with some Malagasy guards. There were no British casualties and it ended in a shower of grenades and a few bursts of Bren-gun fire after which, to Price’s astonishment, the French commandant marched out carrying a large white flag with a Malagasy bugler a respectful few paces behind him. Price allowed Powell to take the surrender. The marines crowded round, some with their rifles slung, glad it was all over so easily. Suddenly the colonel muttered something to the bugler who began to play a call at once so startling and insistent that there was only one possible meaning. Aghast at this treachery, a khaki scrum fell on the musician and his instrument and soon neither was in any condition for an encore. It is unclear at what point the commandant managed to convince his captors that he had merely ordered the sounding of the cessez-le-feu. According to the Royal Marines, profuse apologies were not only made but accepted. Whether this included the unfortunate bugler is not recorded.

  Inside the Direction d’Artillerie, which was a fairly large barracks, Price discovered about fifty British prisoners, among them the tanks’ commander Jocelin Simon with the two officers captured with him and a three-man Swordfish crew. Most of the other ranks were infantry who had become cut off in the attack on the Joffre line which had petered out some fifteen hours before. There were enough confiscated French weapons to arm all the freed prisoners, which meant that Captain Price had just doubled the strength of his command, which he now began to deploy as a stronghold capable of withstanding an infantry counter-attack.

  While the marines were exploring their gains, alerted by the ringing of telephones which were obviously being picked up and answered, they came across what appears to have been an operations centre. Its
occupants also surrendered their supper, for the landing party had not eaten much more than boiled sweets and chocolate since the majority of them lost their lunch during the start of Anthony’s dash through rough waters. In its retelling this incident became gold-braided senior officers interrupted at une grande bouffe though it was more likely men in shirtsleeves with cold cuts and, if they were lucky, a couple of bottles of wine.

  The delay in uncovering this switchboard played into British hands. It enabled its occupants to continue to spread alarm and despondency about the attack on their rear which was by no means unexpected though, like General Sturges, they thought it would come from the Commandos across the water in Diego Suarez itself. Nor could they be blamed for thinking that the marines were a small part of a much larger force. There was a general perception in Antsirane itself that the British had broken through, which dated from the the South Lancs turning the Vichy flank and their subsequent raiding. By the time the ‘hot and begrimed’ Sturges was asking for the marines to stage their diversion there was already a feeling among some senior French officers that the game was up.

  None knew this better than the spy Percy Mayer. On the night of 5 May he had considered himself a condemned man, sleepless on a hard palliasse, wondering whether the dawn would bring a priest and a firing squad or the British Army. Instead it had brought a return visit from Commandant Melin, the naval Chief of Staff who informed him that it had been decided to grant him parole on condition that he did not leave the confines of his hotel. Before they parted Melin, who had become noticeably friendlier, told Mayer that the invasion had surprised them and he believed the English had already broken through.

  Twelve hours later Sturges’s night attack on the Joffre line was a total success. Advancing on a front 600 yards across, by 11 p.m. moonrise the two lead battalions, the Seaforth Highlanders and the Northamptons, were both firing their Very light success signals. With great good luck they had gone straight between the flanking French forts that were so camouflaged that the British were not quite sure where they began or ended. But it had hardly been a walkover. The trenches and pill boxes between the forts were manned by some very tough and determined Senegalese and Malagasy troops whose French officers had convinced them that they were winning.