England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Against this dismal backcloth it was not hard to believe that the British might well have better things to do than occupy the rest of Madagascar and would settle for the ‘Gibraltar solution’ of holding Fortress Diego Suarez at its strategic tip. And for four months this is what happened.

  The 13th and 17th brigades went off to India, which was ablaze with anti-British rioting over the arrest of Gandhi, and eventually to Burma to fight the Japanese. Their replacements were the 22nd East African Brigade, three battalions of white-officered King’s African Rifles from Kenya, Tanganyika and Nyasaland with Ugandan gunners, and the mostly Afrikaans-speaking whites of 7th South African Motorised Brigade Group. Smuts had promised Churchill this formation when he had been pressing for the capture of the entire island. It included a squadron of twenty Marmon-Herrington armoured cars, built in South Africa by welding locally made armour plate onto the chassis of a 3-ton Ford truck. Armed with a variety of weapons including 2-pounder cannon, they were as fast as Jocelin Simon’s Tetrarchs but thicker skinned.

  Festing’s 29th Independent Brigade Group, the amphibious landing specialists who had done most of the fighting, were still there, though at any one time a large number of them were in hospital with malaria. Nonetheless, their presence was a good indication that the British had at least retained the option of ‘going south’, for they would be the best troops to capture the island’s two other main ports: Majunga on the west coast and Tamatave on the east, with its rail link up to the capital. Meanwhile, there were still a few nearby Vichy outposts to be dealt with.

  There were no holds barred in the propaganda war. ‘A frog he would a-wooing go …’ was the Daily Mirror’s caption to this cartoon of a distinctly amphibian Pierre Laval, which appeared after he and Pétain met Hitler at Montoire (RIGHT)

  Laval after being shot in the chest with a small calibre pistol at Versailles. He later successfully appealed for the life of the young man who tried to kill him.

  Charles de Gaulle in 1940.

  Royal Marines returning with their souvenirs to the battleship Ramillies after their successful raid on Madagascar’s Diego Suarez. Note the hilt of the French bayonet tucked into the webbing of the second marine from the right.

  Under the stern gaze of Maréchal Pétain – one of the thousands of images of him that adorned Madagascar – British and French officers discuss ceasefire terms at Antsirane.

  LEFT: In Madagascar, local French surrender terms often stipulated being granted full honours of war. Here British soldiers present arms to a Vichy naval contingent which had been manning a coastal battery.

  RIGHT: Part of the Diego Suarez Joffre line, which was missed by air reconnaissance and inflicted heavy casualties on British tanks. A French 75mm gun muzzle is visible in the blockhouse on the left.

  In Madagascar’s misty hill country a Commando officer uses his Gurkha Kukri to point out a French position to a Bren gunner resting his weapon on a rock.

  A morose looking French officer – Colonel Passerou – who was captured in the closing weeks of the Madagascar campaign.

  Red umbrellas were issued to British troops as ground recognition signals to keep out the RAF’s hard rain – with any luck.

  A wrecked bridge in southern Madagascar. As the campaign dragged on towards its inevitable end the French could do little more than apply a scorched earth policy and destroy key sections of the island’s hard-won road system.

  Some of West’s men travelling in style in a Madagascan railway freight car after what had often been a hard marching campaign. When they left the island most of them went to Burma to fight the Japanese.

  Lt-Colonel Alston Robert West, battalion commander of the 2nd South Lancs, led his men in a daring night attack around the Joffre line and secured Diego Suarez.

  General Mark Clark (INSET) is canoed ashore from the British submarine Seraph off Cherchell in Algeria for his secret meeting with Général Mast and the other dissidents which ultimately sealed the success of the Anglo-American North African landings. Seraph’s conning tower can be seen to the right of the picture.

  8 November 1942. Almost a year after America came into the war the US Army participated in its first major land attack: the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa codenamed Operation Torch. This landing on a beach 20 miles east of Algiers was almost unopposed. Others were not so lucky.

  The enormous anti-aircraft barrage put up by British ships in Algiers harbour after Luftwaffe night bombers based in Rhodes and Sicily tried to interfere with the landings and sank several ships.

  HMS Walney capsized in Oran harbour after a foolish attempt to emulate what the Royal Marines got away with at Diego Suarez. Over half Walney’s crew were killed or wounded when French ships and shore batteries open fired at point blank range during a night attack.

  INSET: War correspondent Leo ‘Bill’ Disher, a survivor of the Walney, receiving a Purple Heart – the US medal awarded to those wounded in action. Disher won his several times over. He was hit 26 times: 15 from shell fragments and the rest from bullets. The crutches date from an ankle broken on passage from England to Gibraltar but Disher refused to abandon his assignment.

  Amiral Darlan and his wife Berthe Morgan, who was partly of English stock, taken at their villa in Algiers shortly before Darlan was assassinated on Christmas Eve 1942.

  November 1942. RAF reconnaissance pictures of French warships burning in Toulon after La Marine Française kept its promise to destroy its ships rather than allow them to fall into German hands.

  October 1945. A defiant Laval in a Paris court room after being accused of treason.

  Laval’s execution at Fresnes prison on 15 October 1945. He had to be brought back to consciousness after attempting to poison himself. He refused a blindfold. ‘Aim at my heart,’ he told the firing squad, ‘Vive La France!’

  In a bloodless operation Mayotte Island, an old pirate lair in the northern part of the Mozambique Channel, was seized by a company of King’s African Rifles and thirty Commandos who scaled a cliff and, since it was shortly before dawn, captured its governor in bed. Later the same day the neighbouring island of Pamanzi, which had an airstrip, was taken. Both islands would become a base for RAF Catalina flying boats hunting for submarines.

  South African-crewed Marylands built up a photographic map of the areas around the capital and the ports the British would have to use to get to it if they were to take the rest of the island with its abysmal lack of roads. The South Africans were obviously determined that there would be no more missed Joffre lines and dozens of missions were flown. At this point Annet’s forces had only one serviceable Morane left, though their anti-aircraft fire had its successes.*

  One day a Monsieur Millot, president of the Planters’ Association in Tananarive, turned up in Antsirane and spoke with the diplomat Grafftey-Smith. His message was a simple one: most of the French in Tananarive wanted a deal with the British but Annet would incur great displeasure in Vichy if he made one. If Britain wanted all of Madagascar it must exhibit enough force to make surrender an entirely honourable proposition.

  The British had already begun to prepare for their administration of the island. A few days before Millot’s visit Lieutenant General Sir William Piatt had been told that from July the French colony would become part of his East African Command along with Mauritius and the Seychelles. Platt, who had been knighted for his long and hard-fought campaign against the isolated Italian forces in the Horn of Africa, would retain Sturges as commander of land forces in Madagascar. But the weeks rolled by and nothing changed. In Diego Suarez, the British infantry continued to beat the retreat, polish their boots, learn to swim, play football and, if they were a Royal Welch Fusilier, perfect their rendition of ‘Men of Harlech’. Meanwhile, in Delhi, Wavell was awaiting the arrival of Festing’s brigade which General Slim needed for an amphibious operation he was planning in the Arakan.

  Then on 20 August it looked like it was all over. Festing’s men departed Diego Suarez, packed into two old
rust buckets called the Empire Pride and the Ocean Viking with the troops complaining that their meals were pig swill and the overcrowded mess decks colonized by cockroaches. Even so, few were sorry to say goodbye to malarial Madagascar. First stop was Kenya where a draft of a couple of hundred reinforcements from the United Kingdom brought all the infantry battalions up to strength, their numbers depleted by sickness as much as battle casualties. After that, with a certain amount of foreboding, they expected to be on their way to India and Burma where they sincerely hoped that the Japanese had not established anything like the Joffre line.

  On 30 August the brigade were the main participants in Exercise Touchstone, an authentic-looking assault on Mombasa’s port defences which were found wanting. This and the renewed waterproofing of their vehicles started a new crop of rumours. Perhaps it was not going to be Burma after all. Perhaps they were going to attack Dakar and wreak revenge for the 1940 fiasco there? Or make a landing behind the Axis front line at El Alamein, recapture Tobruk or Benghazi? Rommel had just started another offensive but for the moment the new British commander Bernard Montgomery was holding him at the Alam el Halfa Ridge.

  It was not until 5 September when, re-embarked on the rust buckets, Festing’s brigade learned that they had been involved in an enormous feint. They were going to finish the occupation of Madagascar by starting with a surprise attack on the port of Majunga. By then they had rendezvoused with a fleet of almost seventy ships under the recently promoted Rear Admiral William Tennant who was flying his flag on the aircraft carrier Illustrious with her new American Wildcat fighters. Surrounding the carrier was a screen of five cruisers, one of them a dedicated anti-aircraft vessel, plus sixteen destroyers and minesweepers. Tennant must have been comforted by the protection he had against an enemy estimated to be down to its last half-dozen bombers. His previous command had been the old battle cruiser Repulse. There had been no such umbrella for him off Malaya in February when the Japanese Mitsubishis, based on the Vichy airfields they had seized in French Indochina, had first sunk his ship and then the Prince of Wales.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The plan was to capture Tananarive in three operations: Stream, Line and Jane. Stream was a surprise attack on Majunga which was what Mombasa’s Exercise Touchstone had been all about. Line was the insertion into the captured port of the motorized 22nd East African Brigade and most of the South Africans’ armoured cars that would seize vital bridges and dash down the road towards Tananarive, 270 miles away. Jane would involve 29th Brigade getting back in their ships and sailing around Diego Suarez and the island’s northern tip to the east coast to seize the Indian Ocean port of Tamatave and advance on the capital from the other direction.

  These three successive hammer blows were poised to crack a very small nut indeed. Over 3,000 Vichy troops had surrendered in the Diego Suarez area. Général de brigade Guillemet had at most six formed infantry battalions left – perhaps 4,800 men – supported by sixteen artillery pieces, some of them manufactured just too late for the Franco-Prussian War, and five aircraft. After the bloodshed on the Joffre line it looked like Annet was about to receive the overwhelming force the planter Millot had indicated he would require to make an honourable surrender.

  In addition there were various feints and diversions designed to alarm and confuse and suck in troops that might have been better employed elsewhere. A 600–strong South African column called Getcol after its commander Lieutenant Colonel David Getcliffe, supported by the remaining armoured cars and artillery, would work its way south from Diego Suarez and link up with the East Africans at Majunga. Some forty Commandos were to be landed at the harbour of Monrondava 300 miles south of Majunga from where there was also a road to Tananarive, making it a plausible landing place. Their task was to start the kind of rumours whose investigation might draw away from the capital at least a reconnaissance in force.

  Operation Stream, the initial assault on Majunga, took place at dawn on 10 September and was over about two hours later after attacks from the landward and seaward sides. At one o’clock that morning the East Lancs and Royal Welch Fusiliers had been landed on a beach 10 miles north of the town and stumbled south through the bush and clouds of mosquitoes in time for them to take the defenders from the rear shortly after first light. At about the same time the landing craft of 5 Commando and the South Lancs, accompanied by a destroyer, had rushed the harbour where they came under some machine-gun fire from a building and a barge secured to a jetty. One of the first ashore was the Commando doctor Patterson.

  The tide was well up and we scrambled out among the bullets and up a low wall about four feet high and I crouched down by the houses with my chaps before following the troops towards the Point de Sable along the front. There was quite a lot of shooting going on and one fellow behind a heap of coal at the petrol store was being a nuisance and shooting at me. However, Buckland (my batman) made him keep his head down with a few accurate shots and we got under cover. A white head on the coal heap gave Buckland a mark. He was very excited. I thought he would shoot me at any moment and decided I would be a lot safer behind him so I made him go in the front. I was pleased with his aggressiveness but he was very trigger happy. As we moved up the town I saw a hand-pushed dust cart pulled in under some palms on the open left side of the road. Slowly, over the top of the cart, up came a floppy white hat on top of a silly looking black head. The dustman was having a shufti. Buckland immediately put up his rifle to shoot him but I roared at him to desist, which he did, and the white hat slowly sank behind the cart again.

  Patterson got into an empty building and set up a field dressing station. One of his first patients was a South Lancs sergeant ‘shamefully deserted and almost dead from loss of blood’ with a large hole in the hollow behind a knee. But most of the casualties were either locally recruited Vichy troops or people who had shown themselves at the wrong moment. ‘I patched up a few French and Malgache too. One poor innocent civilian came running and staggering into my aid post riddled by bullets all down one side, his left arm shattered. Another trigger happy warrior’s victim I’m afraid.’ Later, concerned by the casualties among the non-combatants, he got into the operating theatre of the municipal hospital and was appalled by what he saw.

  Flies and blood and filth were everywhere. A gloomy French doctor was rootling with his finger inside the chest of a little black child who was being held up by the feet by a nurse. There was another doctor with a bottle of chloroform standing around but not doing anything particular. Perhaps he had noticed that the kid was already dead. There was no noticeable asepsis. The instruments were all in a tin bucket of water. There were other casualties lying around, victims of our shooting, and all seemed to be civilians. I was not popular and small wonder.

  While Patterson did what he could to help, Michael West’s South Lanes had surrounded French headquarters and procured the surrender of Colonel Didier Martins, the commander of the Majunga garrison, who wanted to know if his men had fought well. West assured him that they had. The capture of Majunga had cost the British twelve dead.

  Two cars, each containing a French and a British officer and bedecked in white flags, then toured the port calling on both sides to stop shooting. Within a short time the gunfire had died down and the only combatants left were some forty or so Commandos who had gone up the Ikopa river in small boats to seize a bridge. They were using their grenades to keep a tribe of hungry crocodiles at bay. More fortunate were the detachment landed at Monrondava to make a diversion. As expected they were unopposed, the only occupants of its small harbour fort being the families of the French officers who had gone north with their men. Hoping to excite Vichy air reconnaissance, a Union flag replaced the fort’s Tricolour which was rescued by the commandant’s wife who, eyes blazing, encased her body with it, daring the Commandos to do their worst.

  Operations Stream, Line and Jane all went about as according to plan as any military operations ever could. Stream ended with the successful capture of Majunga. Line be
gan with the white South Africans and the East African askaris bounding down the main road towards Tananarive. Jane put Festing’s 29th Brigade back in their ships and brought them around to the east coast port of Tamatave which on 18 September surrendered after a three-minute bombardment. The race to capture the capital was now on.

  From the south-east, sometimes using the railway, came the 29th Brigade with West’s South Lanes in the lead. From the north-west under Colonel John Macnab, who had made a name for himself in Italian Somaliland and Abyssinia, came the 1st (Nyasaland) King’s African Rifles supported by six armoured cars. Both columns were delayed by blown or damaged bridges and a steeplechase of roadblocks, mostly felled trees, boulders and loose stone walls that were sometimes defended but more often not. On 23 September, five days after the 29th Brigade had landed at Tamatave, the South Lancs were still a day’s march away. Macnab and his African riflemen won the race.