India's War

by Srinath Raghavan

  Early next morning, there were indications that the Italians might be withdrawing. When the 29th Brigade captured Zeban, there was no opposition. The Italians had evacuated Keren. The Indians were swift in pursuit and at 10 a.m. on 27 March 1941, a mobile force from the brigade entered Keren. Throughout that morning, white flags popped up from Italian positions, especially those to the east and north of Dongolaas Gorge that had put up a staunch fight against the 4th Division.

  Keren was captured at the cost of 500 killed and 3,000 wounded. This was a high price, but it amounted to just 5 per cent of the Italian casualties and prisoners. ‘I must say the Italians fought very well’, wrote Prem Bhagat, ‘but could not stick to it as long as us. We had literal hell for a month or so, but I think it was worth it. The danger to India from this quarter is over.’53 Indeed, with the capture of Keren, the road to Asmara and beyond lay wide open. Although the Italians staged a planned withdrawal from Keren, taking with them about 60 per cent of their artillery and all their anti-aircraft guns, their morale was battered. As the Italians pulled out, their wounded and stragglers were left behind. Sardara Singh saw a young Italian lying by the road just outside Keren.

  Stopping my truck, I got down and unseen slowly moved to the spot. With my gun ready I suddenly came upon him. He closed his eyes on seeing me. I saw him bleed profusely. I tied a bandage tightly on his thigh and folded his pants up. He had no water in his water bottle. So I put some water from my water bottle. I took out his identity card and a photograph of a girl. I looked at his young, handsome almost teenaged face. I carefully put back his papers. Young men had a common bond. My thought was clear. I had no enemies, so I helped him and moved away.54

  The 5th Division, now under the command of the newly promoted Major General Mayne following General Heath’s transfer to Malaya to command the Indian 3rd Corps, undertook a hot pursuit. Bhagat was out with his sappers one night: ‘it was raining and fairly cold with a cutting wind. To make matters worse the enemy were mortaring (shelling) heavily. I contrived to find a place behind a rock and actually went to sleep.’55 Nevertheless, the advance was inexorable. At first light on 1 April, an Italian convoy with white flags streamed out of Asmara and surrendered to the advancing troops. The 5th Division pressed onwards to Massawa, which fell on 8 April.

  The Italians did considerable damage to the town and port of Massawa before the 5th Division took control. Asmara was in better shape but posed a trickier problem. Of the 80,000 residents of Asmara, almost half were Italians. The African population included soldiers and conscripts for local defence. Disarming and administering Asmara taxed the resources the 5th Division, but fortunately the locals were somewhat awed at the sight of the Indian, especially Sikh, soldiers. The owner of a photo studio made so bold as to walk up to Sardara Singh:

  he asked me about my turban and wanted to know what was hidden beneath. I explained to him the meaning of a turban for a Sikh. He offered a cigarette which I declined. He was again surprised … eventually asked me to show what lay below the turban. They held their breath as I took off my turban and showed my hair. They were amazed.

  The Indians, for their part, found Asmara ‘a cool place’. Coffee was a novelty that they encountered there, though they did not take to its aroma.56

  Meantime, units of the 5th Division moved from Massawa to Amba Alagi in Ethiopia, where they joined up with African forces that had advanced from Western Abyssinia. At noon on 19 May 1941, the Duke of Aosta, the Italian commander-in-chief in East Africa, formally surrendered to General Mayne, effectively ending the East African campaign. Wavell wrote to London that the ‘ultimate pattern of the conquest was a pincer movement on the largest scale’. With characteristic candour, he admitted that ‘this result was not foreseen in the original plan but arose gradually through the development of events. It was in fact an improvisation after the British fashion of war rather than a set piece in the German manner.’57

  Well before Amba Alagi fell, Wavell’s attention had turned again to North Africa, where the long-feared German intervention had resulted in Rommel’s forces rolling back the Western Desert Force. On 29 March, two days after the capture of Keren, the 4th Indian Division had been ordered to move to Port Sudan for embarkation to North Africa. The division would, however, leave one brigade behind. Thus, for the second time in four months, the 4th Division was pulled out of theatre at the moment of victory.

  Historians continue to wonder if it was wise on Wavell’s part to have taken the 4th Division out of North Africa in the first place. The East African campaign is at best seen as a sideshow, if not an irrelevant diversion. From India’s vantage point, however, the campaign was essential for the security of its sub-imperial sphere of influence. By clearing Axis forces from the Arabian and Red Seas, India’s connectivity with the Mediterranean and Britain was preserved. Moreover, for the Indian army, East Africa was a significant theatre of war. Officers and soldiers gained valuable tactical, operational and logistical experience, and the learning acquired at Keren would shape the army’s performance in other theatres. Indeed, it is striking that officers from the two divisions in Eritrea went on to hold so many important command positions: Brigadier Slim of the 10th Indian Brigade commanded the Fourteenth Army in Burma; Major General Heath of the 5th Indian Division commanded the 3rd Corps in Malaya; while Brigadier Messervy of the Gazelle Force and the 9th Indian Brigade commanded the 4th Corps in Burma. Seven other officers rose to become divisional commanders in the Middle East, Burma and Italy.58 More important was the moral and psychological effect of the victory in East Africa. Babu Singh of the 3/1st Punjab conceded that ‘Many soldiers died or were wounded in the brief span of time. Village families lost their young hopes and young soldiers were to carry the scars and incapacities for the rest of their lives.’ Yet, ‘the bloody battle sent a signal to the enemy. The Hindustani soldier was not a pushover.’59

  6

  The Oil Campaigns

  The commander-in-chief of India was not enthusiastic about the move. General Claude Auchinleck had taken over barely three months before and now, in April 1941, his Army Headquarters – recently renamed the General Headquarters (GHQ) – had to shift to Simla. The move was part of the annual migration of the government of India to the hills to escape the torrid Delhi summer, a tradition that continued despite the ongoing war. Auchinleck was already perturbed at the persistence of such pre-war practices and mores in his headquarters. The war had not touched India’s frontiers and the Indian army was mostly deployed in distant theatres. Still, he was alert to the possibility that the Indian security glacis might be imperilled in the not-so-distant future. The war, he felt, was gradually encroaching on the Raj’s sphere of influence and yet there was a general obliviousness to this within the Raj – summed up by the almost absurd inefficiency of the move to Simla. Although he was not unaware of the potential threat to the east, Auchinleck’s immediate concern was in the west – where a crisis was brewing in Iraq.

  An erstwhile province of the Ottoman Empire, Iraq had been occupied by Britain during the First World War. The Indian army had played an important role in its conquest: nearly 675,000 Indian troops had been deployed in Iraq, and although the Indian army had suffered a humiliating defeat, at Kut in 1916, it had gone on to occupy the country. After the war, Iraq was administered by Britain as a League of Nations mandated territory. The outbreak of a major rebellion in 1920 had led London to turn again to India for troops. Eventually the country was granted independence under the Anglo-Iraqi treaty of 1930 and British troops departed in 1937. Under the terms of the treaty, however, Britain retained the right to use Iraqi facilities in the event of war. In turn, Britain supplied equipment and advisers to the Iraqi armed forces.

  Iraq was of considerable strategic importance to Britain. For one thing, there was oil. Pumped from the British-controlled fields in Mosul and Kirkuk, Iraqi oil flowed through pipelines to the ports of Haifa in Palestine and Tripoli in Syria. Moreover, the Iraqi port of Basra was the principal out
let for the main Iranian oilfields – owned by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – just across the frontier at Abadan. The Middle East accounted for only 5 per cent of world oil production in 1941: the United States produced 83 per cent.1 Yet American neutrality and German ability to interdict supplies crossing the Atlantic lent great importance to the cheap oil coming out of the Middle East. By the same token, if these oilfields fell under German domination, let alone control, it would deal a huge blow to Britain.2

  Moreover, Iraq was an important link in imperial communications. It provided a land-bridge from the Mediterranean to India – a route that would be of great value in sustaining British forces in Egypt, if the Suez and Red Sea routes were closed. British airbases in Iraq, especially Habbaniya near Baghdad and Shaiba near Basra, were important stops on the air route to India, the Far East and Australia.

  From the standpoint of India, Iraq was important on two more counts. First, it was an integral part of the external defence strategy of India. Not only did Iraq border Iran, but controlling the mouth of the Persian Gulf at Basra was regarded as indispensable to the wider security of India. As the chiefs of staff put it, ‘if Iraq and Iran became subservient to the Axis powers our enemies would be at the gates of India’.3 Second, developments in Iraq would inevitably impact on the Arab littoral states and on Saudi Arabia, which all fell under the Raj’s sphere of influence. In particular, India’s ability to use the area from Bahrain to Kuwait depended on a friendly regime in Iraq.

  At the outbreak of war, Iraq was ruled by a pro-British regent and an equally well-disposed government. Prime Minister Nuri as-Said promptly accepted British demands to sever diplomatic ties with Germany and provide assistance to Britain. The alacrity with which he acted gave a handle to his opponents. Britain’s role in the affairs of an ostensibly independent Iraq was already a rallying point for the opposition; the Palestinian problem provided another. The presence in Baghdad of the exiled mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, further fuelled anti-British and anti-Jewish politics. The opposition included a group of four senior colonels of the Iraqi army, known popularly as the Golden Square, who were fired by the vision of a pan-Arab state and harboured pro-Axis sympathies.

  Nuri as-Said initially tried to balance his pro-British policy with pan-Arab politics. Unsurprisingly he failed, and he was replaced as prime minister by Rashid Ali el-Gailani in March 1940. A former lawyer and judge, Rashid Ali had opposed the government’s unconditional support for Britain’s war effort. The subsequent course of the war seemingly confirmed his belief that Britain’s hegemony in the Middle East was on the wane. In June 1940, when Italy entered the war, he refused to break ties with Rome. Rashid Ali was also reluctant to acquiesce in Britain’s demand to allow its troops to pass through Basra to Palestine. Most importantly, he opened a secret channel of communication with the Axis powers.

  In shaping Axis policy in the area, Germany allowed Italy to take the lead while reserving the right to take its share of Middle Eastern oil. The Italians were eager to supplant the British in the region and had no interest in the independence of the Arab states. The pan-Arab, pro-Axis politicians in Iraq had to satisfy themselves with a joint declaration by Berlin and Rome in October 1940 which merely expressed ‘full sympathy’ for the Arab cause. The German Foreign Office felt that the Arabs were a ‘tremendously important power factor’, but that their utility should not be overestimated. ‘We have no reason at all to be sentimental about these people who are basically anti-European and torn by religious, family and tribal differences.’4

  The British began leaning on the regent to rid them of Rashid Ali. But the attempt to prise him out of power went awry, leading to a bloodless military coup by the Golden Square on 31 March 1941. Rashid Ali was reinstated as prime minister and the regent took refuge in the American Legation in Baghdad.

  The Indian government watched the tangled web of Iraqi politics with mounting concern. Plans for intervention in the Middle East had been discussed from the beginning of the war. Until the summer of 1940, London and Delhi had planned on the assumption of an incursion by the Soviet Union. In early March 1940, the chiefs of staff had ordered the Middle East Command under General Wavell to plan for a force of three divisions to be maintained in the area of Iraq and Iran. At a subsequent conference it was agreed that India would, in the first instance, provide a force consisting of one infantry division and ancillary units for operations in the area of Basra–Abadan. In July 1940, the chiefs had sent a fresh directive to India, defining the role of this force as not just confined to Basra–Abadan, but also as strengthening the morale of the friendly government in Iraq and deterring hostile Iraqi forces from disrupting lines of communication to Palestine. By the end of the year, the chiefs defined the role of the three divisions (Force Sabine) as checking an Axis attack on Iraq through Syria or Turkey and preventing internal disturbances in Iraq and the Anglo-Iranian oilfields.5

  The drastic expansion of the task of Force Sabine naturally necessitated a reconsideration of the Indian contribution. Auchinleck wrote to Wavell on 8 February 1941 that ‘the situation in Iraq looks none too pleasant’. He was ‘not at all happy’ about the plans for Sabine, either operationally or administratively. He wanted to ‘clear the air on the major problems’, so that his staff could get down to detailed planning. The nub of the matter was operational control of the force. Since India would be responsible for the bulk of the operations, Auchinleck felt that the responsibility – especially for the occupation of Basra – should be vested entirely with GHQ India. However, he was prepared thereafter to place the force under Middle East Command, if necessary.6 Auchinleck was not merely battling for turf. The division of responsibilities hithero envisaged between India and MEC was a recipe for confusion, not to say chaos. India would despatch men and materials, but they would be under MEC’s control from the moment they sailed; India would provide the supplies, but MEC would decide the requirements; India would plan the administrative base, while MEC would approve it.

  Wavell took a month to respond, but accepted Auchinleck’s suggestion that operations in Iraq would initially be under the control of India. Wavell’s dilatory attitude underscored his aversion to launching any operation in Iraq. This stemmed from a couple of sources. In the first place, Wavell felt that he was fast running out of resources. His command was already fighting the enemy in North Africa, East Africa and Greece. He had little time and fewer troops for an intervention in Iraq. In the second place, Wavell allowed himself to be persuaded by the argument – prevalent among the Arabists in the Foreign Office – that they should eschew any move, military or political, which could kindle the wrath of Arab opinion. Ultimately Wavell felt it best to placate Arab politicians and keep the crisis from bubbling over.

  By contrast, Auchinleck was quick off the blocks. By 21 February 1941, the Indian general staff had drawn up a detailed appreciation. The central aim of Sabine was to deny air or land bases in Iraq to any hostile power. The plan would be implemented in three stages: the landing of a force and the creation of a bridgehead and a base at Basra; the establishment of forces in the Baghdad–Habbaniya area; and deployment of troops in northern Iraq and towards Syria. The operation would be planned, led and controlled (at least initially) by India. MEC would be responsible only for the provision of air power.7 The plan had been sent to London as well as Wavell on 21 February. By 10 March Auchinleck had even identified a commander for Force Sabine.

  Auchinleck’s urgency rose not just from his reading of the political situation in Iraq, but from the logistical demands of a large-scale intervention. Moving a division from Karachi to Basra would need about thirty-six ships – not counting those for base units – and the round trip would take three weeks. Sufficient shipping was simply unavailable to move an entire division and base units at one go – and to ensure that it would be self-supporting in active operations for five weeks. Stocking a temporary base in Basra would take between three to five months, while a permanent base would need six to nine mo
nths. The enormity of the task impelled Auchinleck to take a proactive stance on the unfolding crisis.

  The commander-in-chief’s activism met with the approval of Leo Amery. The secretary of state for India wrote to him in mid-March: ‘it may well be that sooner or later you may have to face the necessity of sending troops to Basra’. Auchinleck promptly replied: ‘I feel more and more certain that it will not be long before we shall have to send troops to Iraq … we are preparing for that contingency and planning has now started in earnest.’8 Despite his distaste for the venture, Wavell agreed that the plans for Sabine had to be dusted off and updated. He also informed London that the detailed planning should be done in India and that the operational command should initially be with India. The chiefs of staff agreed.

  Towards the end of March 1941, Wavell convened a meeting in Cairo. India was represented by the chief of the general staff, Lieutenant General Thomas Hutton. Prior to his departure from Delhi, Auchinleck had emphasized to Hutton that he was ‘most anxious to gain a foothold in Iraq. The sooner we begin to get control, militarily, in Iraq, the better.’9 The consensus at the conference, however, departed sharply from the appreciation prepared by India. It was thought that instead of despatching a large force from India to establish a bridgehead at Basra, it would be better to have a smaller strike force located in Palestine. Such a force could threaten Baghdad more quickly and effectively. And a threat against Baghdad would be infinitely more credible than any against Basra. Wavell’s own predilections were also in play. Thus it was concluded that tying up any force in Iraq, unless absolutely necessary, would be a grave error. If Britain could attain its objectives without any commitment of troops, so much the better.