Perhaps Slessor was influenced by such considerations into abstaining from writing his own account of the debacle for presentation to Menzies. Meanwhile, the story spread amongst British military officers that the AIF in Greece had behaved badly, throwing away their arms, losing all discipline. (It would be a picture later rendered in Evelyn Waugh’s sniffy trilogy, Sword of Honour.) Slessor wrote, ‘This is a filthy and malicious lie which, with great rage, I have heard British officers repeat myself, since the facts, as I know them are that whatever panic and disorderly withdrawal there was, was done by English troops and RAF men.’
BOB’S BIG AMBITIONS
The Greek adventure was damaging to Menzies, not least because he had failed to consult the Advisory War Council, a body made up of both United Australia Party ministers and Labor representatives, including Curtin and the Bathurst engine-driver Ben Chifley. The idea ordinary people had then, and which has persisted, was that Menzies had been bamboozled into agreeing to Greece. So strong was the outcry in Australia, directed chiefly at Menzies but also at Britain, that some American newspapers thought that Australia was likely to withdraw from the war, and the Japanese newspapers declared that the Empire was crumbling. There was rage and grief in the eight thousand households whose sons had been killed or captured in Greece or Crete. And one further question arose: why were the Australians withdrawn to untenable Crete when Greece had been such a fiasco?
Blamey would argue later that the Royal Navy had advised him that it was vital to hold Greece if the situation in the eastern Mediterranean was not to be compromised. Menzies, under political pressure and at Churchill’s urging, gave a speech on the matter in which he tried to imply that it was the sort of disaster that would never occur again now that General Blamey had been appointed deputy commander-in-chief in the Middle East, as indeed had happened. To have abandoned the Greeks, said Menzies, pushing a Churchillian argument, would mean having been guilty of ‘one of the infamies of history’. Australia would have been subjected to criticism from all over the world if it had not agreed to sacrifice its troops.
Minister for the Army, Percy Spender, appealed for more men to enlist, but they did not do so in sufficient numbers to make up those lost. At the recruiting office in Martin Place, Sydney, 150 men per day enlisted in the first four days of the new recruitment drive, and the average age of these recruits was much higher than the military would have desired. The June recruiting quota fell short by three thousand men. With improved job opportunities at home, and given Britain’s hunger for steel and wool and wheat, men wondered why they should go so far away to be made fools of.
And there was a further crisis. A week before the German invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had attacked in the Western Desert, in the region of Cyrenaica where the Australians and British had recently been so successful. Such was the pace of Rommel’s advance now that the two senior British commanders, Sir Richard O’Connor and Lieutenant-General Philip Neame, were captured. The German attack in Cyrenaica also meant that there was no chance of reinforcements for Greece.
After Greece, and in view of the situation in the Middle East, Spender, a man not given to the same degree of Empire-centricism as Menzies, had been disappointed during a visit to Singapore to discover by interviews with officers, and on the basis of his own native intelligence, its indefensible condition. Along with much of the press, he began to urge an intensified war effort. Writing to Deputy Prime Minister Artie Fadden on 21 April, he had worried about the ‘extreme gravity of the present situation’. There were anti-tank men from the 8th Division who had been sent overseas without even seeing an antitank gun. Young recruit Russell Braddon would later describe the absurdity of performing the motions of deploying and loading and then firing utterly nonexistent guns. Spender and others were concerned that there was a possibility that with Rommel’s attack in the desert, and with Greece and Crete thrown in, the three Australian divisions in the Mediterranean could be destroyed, and then what of Australia?
The emphasis should be on local rather than Imperial defence, Spender believed. Yet the old campaigner Billy Hughes had discovered and complained to the Englishman Admiral Colvin that no mining of Australian ports had taken place. The first mines were laid off Port Moresby in New Guinea, but the approaches to Newcastle, Australia’s vital industrial city, remained unmined because the Australian navy lacked the materials to do it. After nearly two years of war, Australia possessed a total of ten light tanks to train its entire Armoured Division of close to twenty thousand men. Despite the inevitable complaints that those who criticise this stage of Menzies’ career and performance are sour leftists, on absolute terms and objective criteria, the Menzies of 1941 must be declared a failure, and his policies an endangerment of his country.
Menzies had been distracted all along by a glittering prize—the chance of being appointed the dominion representative on the British War Cabinet. But for that to happen, he had now to survive as prime minister, and despite Fadden’s hostility and disapproval. Thus he felt not only personally damaged by the catastrophes of 1941, but also oppressed by the possibility that Tobruk, as Rommel advanced, seeking a deep-water harbour to supply his troops, would fall and a great part of the Australian forces be consumed there. Hence Menzies’ powerful sense of destiny was at a crisis.
Meanwhile, the new question arose of Syria and Lebanon. By late May there seemed to be the chance of a German attack on Syria, which would leave the Allies in the Middle East flanked on the north-east and south-west. Syria was occupied by the Vichy French, those French who had remained loyal to the collaborating Marshal Pétain and who had come to terms with the Germans. German squadrons had been operating from French airfields there, and if the Germans landed in force, the Vichy French would fight alongside them. The Allies did not know that Hitler had no ambitions there—he was concentrated on the as-yet secret invasion of Russia to occur the following month.
The Light Horse of the Mounted Anzac Division had been amongst the forces that had captured Damascus from the Turks in 1918. Now two brigades of the 7th Division (the other one was besieged at Tobruk) and one of the 6th, under the overall command of spiky but brilliant General John Lavarack, were slated to take on the Vichy French in Syria, in a campaign that—except for those who fought there, and for the relatives of those who died—achieves little visibility in popular Australian history. British and Indian troops would also be engaged in the operation, as well as a small Free French division that had trained in Palestine and was ready to take on the Vichyists. So, on the French side, something of a civil war was to be fought in Lebanon and Syria.
Lavarack himself had already organised the defence for Tobruk against the Germans before being called away to lead the force of Australians, Indians, Free French and British against the Vichy French in Syria and Lebanon. Lavarack was not one of Blamey’s favourite men, although Blamey’s own ascent would leave room for Lavarack’s rise and rise as well.
The Vichy commander in chief in Syria was General Henri Dentz, who certainly had little time for the British. But many wondered if the way to deal with Dentz was through diplomacy instead of what a senior intelligence officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Rogers, would call ‘this cruel campaign’. General Wavell had decided to initiate the assault only under pressure from the chiefs of staff in London, who were in turn under political pressure. Blamey himself was dubious about the operation. On the one hand the Vichy French might collapse, but on the other the campaign might become a slow, cumbrous business. In a letter to Menzies on 7 June he described what lay ahead as ‘largely a gamble’.
The Australians were to move up through Palestine by truck and then push forward in three columns on a broad front—one column along the coast, one towards Merdjayoun in inland Lebanon, and one aimed at Damascus. For the first two days after the initial trip up from Palestine, the Australians found the going easy, but in the mountainous country away from the coast, the resistance set in at an area around Tzfat (Safed), n
orth-west of the Sea of Galilee in present-day Israel. The Australians were told that they must move forward and attack.
One soldier described the beginning of their preparation for the assault as they lay under cover on 7 June. Their position, he said, was bounded on the rear by a low stone wall used by vendors displaying their wares. A soldier could buy anything from a boiled egg to a bottle of cheap wine. There was some danger of an Arab peddler speaking to the Vichy French, and it was all the more odious because of the care taken in other regards: vehicle bonnets were all beneath the cover of trees, wheel marks had been swept away to prevent detection by reconnaissance aircraft. Out of fear of Arab informants who might betray them to the Vichy French, the Australians sheltering in the olive groves had been ordered to alter the shape of their hats. They did, but it did not dent their confidence. One soldier declared that evening by the water truck, ‘All we’ve got to do tomorrow is walk in, wave our hats to the Frogs and walk on.’
The Australian soldiers would find that many of the troops they were to face were not metropolitan Frenchmen but Spahis—Algerian, Moroccan or Tunisian troops. Whether against Spahis or French, the Australians of the 21st Brigade on the coastal wing of the advance found the French resistance at the Litani River intense. Churchill had spoken of the expedition being an ‘armed political inroad’ but it had become more than that, and the Australians had to fall back on their desert skills in outflanking, penetrating and—in that curious military term—‘reducing’—machine-gun nests and strongpoints.
On the night of 8 June, some Australian commandos from the 16th Battalion were to be landed by sea north of the Litani River which runs east–west below Beirut and Damascus. Landed, they found themselves on the wrong, southern side of the river, which was some fifty metres wide and flowing fast between poplar-lined banks. The bridge across had been blown up. They had to cross by rowboats they found along the shore, one of the first of which was manned by eight members of Lieutenant Sublet’s platoon, including ‘Pud’ Graffen, Len O’Brien, Blue Maloney, Chummy Gray and Chook Fowler. Most of them had grown up in Kalgoorlie and gone to school together and had never been in a small boat before. Each was laden with his gear and three hundred rounds of ammunition. It was obvious that if the boat tipped over they would all drown. Vichy French mortar shells were falling in the water and machine-gunners were firing from the opposite bank. In other boats, four men were killed, including two officers; Sublet was the only surviving officer in his company, but he got across, and moved with his men through the bamboo that grew on the north bank and into the orchard beyond, driving the defenders back and creating a bridgehead.
Lavarack’s force knew by now that the Vichy troops were expert in using the rocky coastal spurs to site their machine guns and cannons, and their destroyers were bombarding the Australians from the sea. Albert Moore, the Salvation Army truck driver who accompanied the soldiers as a ‘comforts man’—meaning that he served tea, coffee and cocoa, biscuits and cigarettes and what stew he could make—‘learnt during the day that the Adjutant’s brother, Corporal Buckler, is our first fatal casualty. I served this lad with tea last night. It is terrible.’ Corporal H.A. Buckler had been killed when moving across an olive grove to attack a machine gun. Moore put himself in peril too—he would drive his truck down the road to Jezzine, which lay halfway to Beirut along the coast, a stretch known as the ‘mad mile’ because Vichy artillery had it zeroed in.
The troops on the coast were very impressed at last, after an advance that tested them greatly, to see the beautiful port of Sidon, and to discover that it had been abandoned by the French. But the Vichy troops had taken up position elsewhere. A platoon of the 14th Battalion attacked Hill 1248 north of Sidon, climbed 670 metres to the top of a spur, and sheltered behind boulders as machine guns fired down on them and grenades fell amongst them. ‘Shit, they’re bloody real,’ Private Harry Saunders cried. The platoon was driven off after a third of them had been killed or wounded. The battle around Jezzine would last for a week.
Far inland, the thrust from the desert right-wing was only 40 kilometres from Damascus, but in the middle, where the map is labelled with geographic names which include the sinister ‘Jebel’ (rock or mountain), the advance had hardly made much progress at all. Great boulders prevented trucks from leaving the road and the sharp-stoned plains cut up infantry boots. The planned route was through the Bekaa Valley and into a landscape of defiles and outcrops and watercourses designed for defence. There the Australians would face Moroccan and Tunisian Vichy battalions and two Foreign Legion regiments. Senegalese battalions and one Foreign Legion regiment lay in reserve.
It is hard to assess how ambivalent the French and North African troops felt about Vichy France. Certainly the North African troops had little choice but to be there, and it is quite possible that many of the French were chiefly fighting from loyalty to commanders and for their honour rather than because of adherence to the Fascist propositions of Pétain and Hitler.
Lavarack had impressed on Blamey the difficulties of the thrust through the Bekaa Valley. On the far right the Free French and the Indians were closing in on Damascus, but the column in the middle, said Lavarack, including the Australian 25th Brigade, but others as well, needed all the help that could be rendered. Blamey was so filled with urgency that he drove that night to the British headquarters in Jerusalem and insisted that General Wilson be woken up to listen to his and Lavarack’s fears that the inland thrust might cave in to the French.
‘All right,’ Wilson said to Blamey, ‘I’ll get hold of Lavarack and Rowell in the morning.’
‘Not in the morning,’ said Blamey. ‘Tonight. Men are dying in Syria.’
Within a few hours, Lavarack, with his orders revised, was authorised to send a British brigade and three Australian battalions from the coast to help the British, Indian and Free French forces inland, on the Central Bekaa thrust to Damascus. After Lavarack was able to release his new reserve troops, the central column had successes, and later in the month the Free French and Indian forces helped by emerging from Damascus and recapturing villages on Lavarack’s line of march. The 3rd Australian Battalion, meanwhile, came up to Syria from Palestine by rail in cattle trucks through the ferocious heat of the Jordan Valley, where the temperature at the town of Samarkh was later claimed to have been 54 degrees Celsius. Their journey was complicated by a collision between an engine and some of the trucks. After that seventeen-hour train journey, the troops travelled all night to the front in commandeered civilian buses and in trucks.
For the Australians beating their way to Damascus through the mountains, medical supplies at the village of Mezze, where the wounded were treated, gave out. The Australians were given the job of capturing a number of forts north of Mezze and west of Damascus. Fort Goybet proved testing and very dangerous to take, having steep approaches. A misunderstanding between Australian and Indian troops led to the deaths of two Australians from friendly machine-gun fire. This same fire awakened the Vichy French troops in Fort Weygand who in turn opened fire, and a number of Australians were captured. The Australians of the 3rd Battalion who got to the top had not eaten a hot meal since they had boarded their train in Palestine three nights before. By the time Fort Goybet had been taken, there was a plan to attack southwards along the ridge and rescue the Australian prisoners there. But a quartermaster sergeant named Carlisle Smith had already led a party of three armed men from a kitchen truck below the heights, captured Weygand and released the Australians. Nearby Fort Vallier was empty, littered with clothing and bloodied bandages.
Further hills had to be attacked, and there were intimate Australian-to-French contests. The exchange at the Jebel Mazar summit between a French officer and the Australian lieutenant-colonel A.C. Murchison was indicative of the strangeness of this campaign, and of a certain emotional reluctance on both sides.
‘There are no Germans here,’ the French officer called to Murchison.
Murchison said he knew that. ‘What of it?’
‘Then why are you fighting?’
‘Because I’ve been told to,’ said Murchison. It was only after a pause that he said, ‘Because you are collaborating with the Huns.’
On the height of Jebel Maza, a regiment of Moroccan Spahis began to surround Murchison and managed to take seven Australian prisoners.
There were continued attacks by Vichy aircraft, and nine Tomahawks of the Number 3 Australian Squadron shot down six French bombers and two German-manned Junkers bombers.
Australians: Flappers to Vietnam Page 24