The Thirty Days War

by John Harris

  It was no wonder that the favourite songs were ‘You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean’, and Kubaiyah’s very own song:

  Sweet music rising to the sky,

  In tune with songbirds fluttering by,

  A garden fair where all is bliss,

  A place the Air Force would not miss.

  To passers-by it thus appears.

  To us inside – two bloody years!

  Nevertheless, with things as they were, being in prison seemed to be the worst they were going to have to endure as the four hundred airborne troops arrived in Shaibah. Shaibah was 450 miles to the south but it was within easy reach by air and it was a comforting thought that reinforcements were handy, especially as no one was certain how much the Assyrian levies could be trusted.

  The talking continued between Ghaffer al Jesairi and the ambassador, but it was well known to Osanna that the meetings were all being reported to Berlin, and the following morning Kubaiyah learned what the talking had been about. Ghaffer al Jesairi and the Golden Triangle had informed the ambassador that the troops which had arrived at Shaibah should be moved at once to Palestine – which was where it had been claimed they were heading – and that, despite the treaty rights which allowed the British to move troops through Irazh, before any more landed the ones who had already arrived must move out, while future troops were to be allowed to pass through the country only in small units.

  ‘So they can be mopped up more easily,’ Jenno growled.

  The ambassador fell back on the claim that the annual flooding of the roads after the seasonal rains – and they could all see the great sheets of steely water on either side of the road between Kubaiyah and Mandadad – made the movement of troops impossible, but every single man in Kubaiyah knew that they didn’t and, moreover, that Ghaffer knew they didn’t.

  ‘He also knows we haven’t enough troops here to stop them taking over if they wish,’ Jenno said. ‘And that with every day he delays we could grow stronger. He’s bound to move before long.’

  It was clear that Air Headquarters had the same feeling because that day Group Captain Vizard was instructed that nothing was to stop him turning out pilots, navigators and gunners.

  To Vizard it seemed that while it was essential to continue training – if only to show the Irazhi government that nothing could disturb the icy calm of the Royal Air Force – it was going to have to be speeded up. The courses, he decided, must become crash courses and all training flights would take place over Irazhi bases and installations while, just in case, a mosaic of air photographs would be prepared of all routes between the airfield and the capital.

  ‘All of which,’ he observed to the chief flying instructor, Squadron Leader Fogarty, ‘isn’t really a great deal of help, though, because, although we’ve got the bombs, we haven’t got the aircraft to carry ’em. The Audaxes could carry two 250-pound bombs instead of the official load of 20-pounders, but the Oxfords aren’t supposed to carry bombs of any kind and that’s a pity because we’ve got more than our share of those. And that raises another question. What crews could we raise?’

  Fogarty frowned. ‘We have a few instructors, sir,’ he said. ‘Most have operational training but there are some who are unsuitable for combat at the moment and are supposed to be here as a rest from ops.’

  ‘Then we must push the pupils.’

  ‘Most of the flying here’s only circuits and bumps, sir.’

  ‘I think we’ll find there are a few who would have the skill and nerve to fly an aeroplane straight and level over a target and drop a bomb if they had to.’ Vizard shrugged. ‘And we can probably raise a few other pilots among AHQ staff and our own staff, a few from the aircraft depot and one or two from the Military Mission in Mandadad. They’re all out of practice but, all told, we could probably manage about thirty-five.’

  ‘I made it thirty-two, sir.’

  ‘You’ve forgotten Jenno and his second in command. If it becomes necessary, they can be pulled in. They’re both pilots. We can leave the cars to the sergeants.’

  ‘That makes thirty-four, sir. Who’s the other?’

  ‘Boumphrey. After that, we shall have to promote the more promising pupils who’ve finished initial flying training. They’ll learn quickly enough under combat conditions. What about the rest?’

  ‘They’ve all already volunteered to act as observers or gunners.’

  Vizard frowned. ‘It’s a good job they have,’ he said. ‘Because we’ve only four experienced men in that category.’

  The following day it was learned that the British government had turned down the Irazhi government’s requests that no more troops should be sent from India, and the ambassador told the air vice-marshal that he had better be prepared.

  Tension was increasing and Jenno and Boumphrey found themselves doing longer and longer patrols towards the north where troop movements had been reported, or towards Hatbah where the Engineers were busy on the road. The fort looked like something out of Beau Geste, solid white walls with firing slits and a gate of heavy timber. Despite its imposing looks, however, it would be useless against artillery or bombs.

  Barber, the Engineer colonel in command there, was far from happy. ‘Still,’ he admitted, ‘we could take off at a minute’s notice for Transjordan. Who are you expecting? Fawzi ali Khayyam?’

  ‘It could be,’ Jenno admitted. ‘On the other hand, it could be straightforward Irazhi regulars.’

  While Jenno moved north and west, Boumphrey’s Belles kept up a constant patrol towards Mandadad. The ground on either side of the road was flat and low and, after the rains, was so flooded it was impossible for vehicles to move away from it. The ponies the legion rode could move off the road, though, and since most of the riders knew the dry patches, they managed to pick their way through and Boumphrey was able to report that Irazhi police seemed to be increasing in numbers at the village of Sin-ad-Dhubban and at Fullajah, even at the iron bridge across the canal at Shawah just outside the capital – facts which even the aircraft crews had not produced, because the positions had been reinforced at night and the lorries had disappeared before daylight the following day. Vizard immediately contacted Fogarty and from then on the aircraft on training flights were instructed to practise their S-turns to the east over the villages, and both pupils and instructors were to keep their eyes peeled.

  Practically every European in Mandadad knew that more troops would be sent in if the situation deteriorated, and that, they knew, would cause riot and civil commotion, and they were all – every one of them – out on a limb.

  ‘Don’t you know anyone who lives nearer the embassy you could stay with, old thing?’ Boumphrey asked Prudence Wood-Withnell when he met her at the club that evening.

  ‘Of course. But they’re as scared as anybody else. And you know Father. He’s been here so long, he’s convinced nobody will harm him. He thinks he’s a father-figure to the Irazhis because he’s always treated Europeans and Irazhi patients alike.’

  ‘There are a lot of people in Mandadad who aren’t his patients,’ Boumphrey pointed out realistically. ‘And politicians aren’t inclined to deal with individuals, anyway. He might find he was wrong.’

  Prudence stroked Archie and looked fondly at Boumphrey. At the moment he seemed brisker than normal, his thoughts more carefully collated, and she had a suspicion he had put his finger on the truth.

  ‘All the same,’ he went on. ‘Don’t worry. If it’s in my power, I’ll be there if trouble starts, to make sure you’re all right.’

  ‘Oh, Ratter,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t take risks for me.’

  Boumphrey blushed. ‘I can’t think of anyone I’d rather take risks for,’ he said.

  The following day they heard that more troops were to be sent from India to Basra and almost at once they learned that there had been trouble in the oilfields in the north round Zuka. Anglo-Irazhi Oil Company employees had been roughly handled and the Irazhis had closed the pipeline across the desert to Haifa on the Me
diterranean coast. Jenno was already on his way with half a dozen lorries escorted by his armoured cars to bring the Europeans to the safer area of Mandadad.

  Everybody turned out to see the cars leave. They were ugly vehicles, despite their 40-50 horsepower Rolls-Royce engines. They carried Vickers guns and were ugly chiefly because they had been built in the days before anyone had thought of streamlining. They had steel cylinders mounted on them fitted with revolving turrets and their bonnets and the flaps covering the radiator and other important points were of specially toughened ⅜ inch armour plate. As they disappeared northwards in a cloud of dust, everybody knew they were an inch or two nearer a crisis.

  They were right. Late in the day they heard that as a further gesture of protest Irazhis who had been imprisoned two years before for an attack on the British consulate at Musol had been released with a considerable amount of ostentation. What was more, Ghaffer al Jesairi had learned of the impending arrival of more British troops and had made it clear that there would be no question of them passing through the country.

  ‘He’s elected for war,’ the ambassador told Air Vice-Marshal D’Alton. ‘He must be expecting German help.’

  ‘Doubtless,’ D’Alton said dryly, ‘in the form of the Luftwaffe.’

  There was a buzz of consternation at the club and a few remembered what had been said only a week or two before.

  ‘That picnic everybody said it was going to be,’ Christine Craddock observed, ‘is turning out to have terrifying proportions.’

  April was a punishing month in and around Mandadad. The working day, governed by the sun not the hands of the clock, began early and ended early. The glare turned the dusty city into a smelting house, coating everything with a shimmer of heat that dulled the capacity for clear thinking. For most people the day ended at noon when the British headed home to change from sweat-stained clothes and even the local Irazhis sought what shade there was.

  The political parades started around lunch time. Normally, the British watched them, enjoying the colour, the noise and the enthusiasm, but this time there was a perceptible current of unease and they kept away. They went on all day, growing noisier all the time, and Osanna reported that an agitator whom he knew to be in the pay of the Italians had called a meeting in the great square of the Place Habib abi Chahla for two days ahead, had sent telegrams to people he hoped would speak at it, and had been going about the city in a hired horse-drawn carriage encouraging people to attend. Stones had been thrown at Craddock’s Dragoons near the British embassy.

  At Hatbah, Lieutenant Colonel Barber of the Engineers was handed a radio message from Mandadad. It came from the Military Mission based on the embassy and it warned him to be ready for trouble. He immediately alerted his men and they checked to make sure their lorries were loaded and ready. A culvert ran underneath the road where they had been working, to carry away the water that ran off the hills in the rainy season. It was a big culvert because a lot of water came from the hills and that night, Barber and his men stuffed explosives inside it, ran a wire to a car battery, and packed the explosives with stones and soil to contain the blast and increase the power of the explosion.

  As the last shovelful of earth was tossed into the culvert and tamped down tight, the Engineers climbed out, sweating. Dawn was just breaking and alongside the road a stove was roaring to provide breakfast. They were just standing in a group drinking mugs of tea when a crackle of rifle fire sent them bolting to the safe side of the lorries. Two men were yelling with wounds.

  As they dragged the injured men to shelter, it was difficult to see where the firing was coming from, then Barber realised it was from a gulley just to the north. The stove was put out and shoved aboard one of the lorries, and the last of their tools were tossed after it, with the generator and the lights they’d been using. Two men were running out a reel of wire to a point in a rainwater gulley twenty yards away where they could shelter behind a pile of sand-coloured rocks. There was nothing about the hills surrounding them to indicate they were full of eyes but Barber knew they were being watched.

  The sun rose higher and the jade green of the dawn became lemon yellow, then the heavens were tinged with a bright brassiness which told Barber they were in for another scorcher. It was ghostly in the silence as they waited. A sergeant came running from the direction of the radio van.

  ‘A message’s gone through to Mandadad, sir,’ he said. ‘They know we’ve been fired on.’

  ‘Good show, Sergeant,’ Barber said. ‘And just keep your head down–’

  Even as he spoke there was a rifle shot and the sergeant, his face bloody, tottered away and fell into a ditch. As men ran to him Barber concentrated his gaze on the hills. He could see movement and was able to place where the shot had come from.

  A corporal appeared beside him, clutching the earth.

  ‘Sergeant Selfridge, sir–’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He ought to be all right if we can get him to the doctor.’

  ‘We shall, Corporal, we shall,’ Barber said. ‘We shan’t be staying here. I’d just like to know what the opposition is.’

  Still studying the hills, he decided the best thing they could do was bolt as fast as they could down the pipeline to safety in Transjordan.

  ‘What about the oil dump?’

  ‘All ready, sir.’

  ‘Right. Stand by to fire it.’

  A vast column of black smoke began to rise and at once they heard yells from the cluster of rocks.

  ‘Right,’ Barber shouted. ‘Mount!’

  The men scrambled into the lorries and they began to move off at speed along the road west. Immediately the firing increased.

  Driving a scout car, Barber was the last to leave. Stopping at the far side of the culvert where they had been working, he climbed out. The two men there, hiding behind the cluster of rocks, looked up. Little puffs of dust showed where the bullets were striking.

  ‘Let it go,’ Barber said, and the men behind the rocks touched a wire to the terminal of the car battery.

  There was a tremendous roar and the road above the culvert seemed to bulge, then it disintegrated into a lifting fountain of dirt, dust and stones. As the rocks came down, bouncing on the dusty earth, Barber turned to the car. The two men were already running to it with the battery.

  Barber began to walk slowly to the car. As he climbed into it, one of the men looked at him.

  ‘Who was it, sir? Old Fawzi ali Khayyam?’

  ‘No,’ Barber said. ‘Not this time.’

  Seven

  ‘The Royal Engineers working party near Hatbah has been fired on,’ the ambassador said. ‘Barber managed to get in a signal after he left. He said they were Irazhi police.’

  ‘Irazhi police?’ Colonel Craddock’s red face grew darker. ‘That’s an act of war. They wouldn’t do that without prior instructions. Where’s Barber now?’

  ‘Holed up in the fort at Hatbah. It was his intention to head for the border and cross into Transjordan but he found his way blocked and he had no option but to go into the fort and prepare for a siege.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘We’re in touch by radio. He’s safe enough for the time being but he can’t get out. He’s well armed and has plenty of supplies, but we can’t leave him there.’

  ‘No, by God, we can’t,’ Craddock snorted. ‘I’d better get along there and fish him out.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the RAF armoured cars do the job more quickly?’ the ambassador asked.

  ‘The RAF armoured cars are no damn good. Anyway, they’re all up in the north fishing the oil company employees out of Zuka. What are left are needed to watch the perimeter of the aerodrome.’

  ‘I thought there was a ten-foot fence. Isn’t it supposed to be unclimbable?’

  ‘All it does is keep the camp population in and the jackals out.’

  ‘If you disappear to Hatbah, what happens here?’ The ambassador gazed at his military commander, wondering how much he could trust him.
‘Wouldn’t it be better if we sent the Irazhi Legion?’

  ‘Boumphrey’s Belles?’ Craddock snorted his scorn. ‘That lot couldn’t rescue a drunk from drowning. I’ll do it with my people in lorries and be back in two days. I’ll leave two squadrons here and take the other one to Hatbah. It should be enough. Dammit, Ambassador, the Irazhi regulars aren’t very hot and these are only police!’

  Unfortunately for Craddock, his departure happened to coincide with the great meeting which had been organised in the Place Habib abi Chahla. The German and Italian-paid agents had been hard at work ever since the idea had been put into their heads in the Italian embassy.

  Concerned with details, Craddock didn’t move terribly fast either. He occupied the rest of the night preparing his men for the move, and, in the end, decided it might be wiser to take two squadrons and leave one to guard the embassy. There was a great deal of confusion as the second squadron was alerted and finally he also changed his mind about using lorries and there was a last-minute scramble because the big horses he used didn’t like the heat much – and some of them had fallen off in health, so that the weaker animals had to be changed for the stronger ones belonging to the squadron that was to remain behind. His officers and NCOs were nagged until they were worn out but when dawn came the two squadrons were lined up alongside their mounts on the sandy square of the parade ground.

  Craddock looked on them with enthusiasm. During the great debates that had taken place in cavalry barracks and in parliament during the thirties he had always advocated retaining the horse.