England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  As far as Keyes was concerned, finding themselves unable to attack from the rear as was intended was no reason to call off X Party’s contribution. Although he had already concluded that they were on ground ‘likely to be extremely well registered by batteries’, Keyes decided to make a frontal assault across the river and get to where he would have been if only the navy had got its navigation right. †

  The Commandos were about half a mile south of the river in the flat open scrubland just off the beach. As they advanced they began to meet some astonished Australians belonging to 2/16th Battalion’s C Company under Major Albert Caro, an accountant in civilian life. Caro had been expecting them to turn up on the opposite bank and had been ordered to provide supporting fire. His battalion’s main crossing was being attempted by A Company at a bend in the river upstream of the demolished stone bridge about half a mile to Caro’s right.

  In charge of the boat parties here was Captain John Hearman, a London-born immigrant, a large and physically confident man who by the age of 3 o had become a successful fruit farmer in Western Australia’s Donnybrook area 130 miles south of Perth. His first problem was to overcome the current which was so fast at this point that every man aboard the light assault craft would have to paddle, leaving no fingers free for a trigger. Hearman decided they would pull themselves across on a line and, since nobody had thought to provide them with a rope, had improvised one by cutting and splicing roadside telephone wires. A Corporal Alan Haddy, a brewer’s maltster from Perth who insisted he was the best swimmer present, reached midstream with this cable wound around his middle when a mortar bomb exploded on the surface and a fragment grazed his chest. He struggled on to the other side and tried to tie the line to a tree but was obviously weakening when another corporal dived in after him and helped him complete the operation.

  Captain Hearman called for volunteers and up stepped eight privates who had all attended the same school in the landlocked desert gold-mining town of Kalgoorlie and seem to have approached the occasion in much the same spirit as a first trip to the seaside. Hearman, who unlike the Kalgoorlie Eight had been in a small boat before, wanted to go with them but they feared his weight would capsize it and, in the Australian way, insolently hauled themselves away. This was a pity because it soon became apparent that it was safer closer to the enemy on the north bank than it was on the south which was coming under bombardment. A single mortar bomb, landing as they always did without the whistling warning of a shell, deprived A Company of all its officers in one bang. Its commanding officer was killed and the other four wounded. The resourceful Hearman insisted on carrying on until he was hit by shrapnel again and evacuated. Nonetheless, by 6.30 about fifty Australians were well into the bamboo thickets on the north bank, hunting the mortars doing the damage.

  Keyes was beginning to take even heavier casualties from artillery, machine gun and snipers: ‘all firing very accurately’. Shortly afterwards he made some journal notes, possibly even on the spot during lulls. Certainly a generous and unforced use of the present tense lends an authentic air of immediacy. The tone is predictably understated but far from Woosterish. It is an honest enough account of how he conquered his reluctance to get up and move under fire and took command. He also makes it plain how grateful he is for the quality of the men under him, particularly his officers. Yet, though he sings the praises of a few, he is unfairly disparaging about the majority of the Australians for holding back and failing to support the Commandos and obviously had no idea what was going on upstream with Hearman and Haddy and the Kalgoorlie Eight.

  Extremely unpleasant … snipers in wired post on far side of the river. Very accurate fire. Padbury, Jones, Woodnutt killed. Wilkinson badly wounded, all in one place. Several 3 Troop killed and wounded. George and Eric [Captain Highland and Lieutenant Garland] cool as cucumbers, take most of 3 troop over about 60 yards to right flank … Four gallant Aussies (the only four) succeed in carrying up one boat … One killed. [Keyes would have no doubt been delighted to learn that two of the four, Lance Corporal Charles Dilworth and Private Tom Archibald, had been born in England. Very loath to leave for George’s position as ground very open and sniped at. Start crawling down minute fold with Ness [his batman runner] level with me. Feels like a billiard table and several bullets very close … it is completely exposed beyond with a low bank to cross, so decide to run for it. Ness and I start running but I trip up after about three paces as I’m very heavily laden. Fall down on the bank and Ness, the idiot, gets down too, even more exposed. We got badly sniped so I told him to run on to George, which he does safely. I give them about 10 minutes to forget me then do it in two bursts. Inspect Woodnutt and Jones on the way, both dead. George and Eric busy picking off snipers with a Bren and all the men quite cheerful and aggressive. Now about 9.30 and getting very hot on neck and back of knees; we are in a shallow dell which gives good cover.

  Garland, with his MC from Dunkirk for rescuing men from an exploding ammunition dump and a particularly risky reconnaissance patrol, was one of the 11th’s few subalterns with any battle experience, and so far he was unimpressed with Keyes’s performance. ‘He was lacking in initiative. I had been under fire before. Keyes had not and it showed.’

  The ‘shallow dell’ Keyes refers to was still about 200 yards from the river but the Australians, who had been watching the Commandos’ progress, now came to their aid with some well-directed artillery support from a 25-pounder battery about a mile behind them. This enabled the Australian Lance Corporal Dilworth’s boat party and six Commandos led by Garland to make a dash for the river where they dived into the cover of a clump of bullrushes between two of the moored boats. Dilworth then carefully arranged Garland and his men in their fragile canvas craft and paddled them across. Their main objective was a well-dug-in Vichy position – Keyes called it a redoubt – on a knoll overlooking the river mouth that had probably been responsible for killing most of the Commandos who died trying to cross the sand bar. It was bristling with machine guns plus a small-calibre pack howitzer and an anti-tank gun.

  Once over, they began to use a long-handled wire cutter they had brought to deal with the concertina entanglements they had expected to find on the water’s edge. Garland, fair-haired and just under 6 feet, wriggled forward, cutting and parting the wire, while his men covered him with a Bren gun and attempted to lob grenades into the redoubt from a Lee-Enfield rifle fitted with an attachment known as a discharger cup, a poor man’s mortar. Sometimes Garland, who liked to carry a rifle as well as a pistol, would pause to start shooting at the sandbagged trenches above him. ‘I couldn’t really see a target but we were trying to make as much noise as possible and give them the impression that there were far more of us and they were the ones who were outnumbered. Every so often I would shout up to them, “Désarmez!” I hoped it was the right word but if it was I don’t remember any kind of reply.’

  At first the only discernible response from the native French speakers in command was a noticeable increase in the return fire. Not so much at the Commandos immediately below them, who the Tirailleurs could only see properly by leaving their trenches, but across the river. Like Captain Hearman’s Australians upstream, for the moment at least, the nearer the enemy the safer you were. For the next hour and a half Keyes and his companions on the other side of the river found themselves pinned down ‘lying almost in the water being bombarded whenever we move’. Machine-gun fire and high explosive set fire to two of the Lebanese fishing boats, the smoke making a marker for the well-trained crew of a 75mm field gun somewhere in the dusty foothills to their right. Unable to find this gun, the Australian battery concentrated on the redoubt and, despite their deep trenches, this eventually had the desired effect for suddenly a white flag was being waved.

  Accepting this surrender was not easy. Keyes was desperately short of men. Apart from casualties, almost an entire forty-strong troop reorganizing themselves after coming off the beach had been sent to the rear by Brigadier Stevens in person after the Australi
an commander had heard that the rest had been almost wiped out. If Garland revealed just how few men he had with him there was always a chance that the Tirailleurs might change their minds and the 75mm, which had a heavy machine gun working alongside it, made it difficult to reinforce him.

  But at least the fire from the redoubt had diminished and shortly after midday, some seven hours after they had landed, a total of twenty-one Commandos had crossed and thirty-five prisoners, some wounded, were being escorted down to the river. Keyes counted ‘about half a dozen dead men’. At this point his own losses were 14 killed, 20 wounded and 2 missing.

  Among the spoils was a 25mm anti-tank gun which interested Garland because in France he had commanded his battalion’s anti-tank platoon for a while and the British 2-pounder was similar. They lunched on singe, the French rendition of bully beef so-called because a monkey* was the trademark of a popular brand, and pain de guerre, a lethal Gallic hardtack. As they ate, the 75mm field gun somewhere to the east of them was back in business shelling the sand bar across the river bank and making it difficult for Caro’s Australians to join them. Keyes might not have gone up much in Garland’s estimation but his own admiration for what the younger man (21 to his 24) did next is plain.

  Eric locates flash of 75mm gun on hillside 1,000 yards away which is shelling Australians at river mouth. It does not seem able to shell us as embrasure does not allow traverse. Gun very well hid from our artillery which is searching for him. We have brain wave and pull up 25mm gun. Eric lays and after three shots ranging puts four through the embrasure. Nice gun and good shooting settles his hash.* Persuade Caro it is safe to cross onto sandbar and come into post from seawards.

  The first Australian officer to cross it was a Captain Louis Longworth, a forward observer for the 25-pounders that had been giving them artillery support. Longworth and his wireless operators were aghast at what it had cost the Commandos to get to where they could now walk unmolested. ‘Their dead literally littered the beach,’ he reported.

  On the other side he found Keyes ‘nonchalantly perched and in full view of the enemy’ staring out at the buildings of Aiteniye Farm, his original objective had he been landed north of the Litani. He no longer had enough men to attack it and must leave it to the Australians. Even so, he had secured Brigadier Stevens an extra crossing point, while elsewhere Pedder’s two other landing parties had caused mayhem among the rear echelons of Vichy’s Litani line and prevented the arrival of reinforcements. But Keyes’s men were not the only Commandos to pay a heavy price.

  Captain George More’s most northerly party, which had to take the Kafr Badda bridge, came safely ashore but not their two radios which were ruined by salt water after one landing craft hit a rock. Within ten minutes they had captured a Vichy outpost near the bridge, taking about forty Lebanese troupes spéciales prisoner in a surprise attack launched from some high ground behind them. An attempt to retake the bridge by French armoured cars and some kind of locally manufactured armoured personnel carrier was repulsed with two captured heavy machine guns and the steel-cored bullets fired by shoulder-breaking Boys anti-tank rifles that inflicted dreadful wounds.

  Meanwhile, a patrol under Tommy Macpherson, another of Pedder’s boy lieutenants still four months off his twenty-first birthday, rushed a battery of four small mountain guns crewed by Arab gunners under two French officers. The battery was perhaps too well dug in and surprise was complete. The only casualty was a man with a rifle and fixed bayonet in one of the deeper gun pits whom Macpherson had not noticed until the man’s upward lunge nicked his right wrist and the offender was ‘promptly pumped full of tommy gun by Sergeant Bruce’. After this the others surrendered and their guns were rendered useless by one of the Commando’s ex-gunners who broke firing pins and instruments. One of the French officers told them that they had only arrived the previous evening and had not been able to fire a single shot because their field telephone lines to their forward observer had been cut. Not quite four hours after they had landed, having set up a little prisoner-of-war camp and a first-aid post for the wounded, More set off on a motorcycle he had acquired to see if he could locate Pedder and find out how long he would have to wait for the Australians to turn up.

  Pedder’s party did not have such an easy landing. Over half of them had to swim or wade ashore in water up to their necks when their four landing craft backed suddenly away from the beach after coming under machine-gun and mortar fire. Regimental Sergeant Major Tevendale, a Gordon Highlander with 11 Commando Headquarters, estimated that the fire was coming from a position about 300 yards to their right. There were few casualties and they resented the navy’s panic. They could see from the yellow tracer the French were using that most of it was high and soon found cover in what appeared to be a dried-up river bed along which they crawled to the coast road, untying as they went the inflatable navy waist lifebelts they had attached to their weapons so they could swim with them. As arranged, Paddy Mayne, the dancing master of Nicosia, broke away from the rest of Y Force and turned right towards Qasimiyah where it was hoped he would support Keyes with a flank attack and generally kick up a fuss.

  Once across the main highway, Pedder’s main party, now about ninety strong, started cutting field telephone lines then advanced on the barracks up a deep gully. Before long they discovered ammunition dumps in two separate quarries and began to take sleepy prisoners who had been roused from the deep natural caves where, undecided whether there really was a war on, they had spent the night in their pyjamas. Elsewhere some of the Algerians were only too alert and it took the Commandos the best part of an hour to silence some of their machine gun nests and mortar positions and in some cases they were merely repositioning. Then, at about 7 a.m. Pedder entered the barracks and a Private Adams presented him with the Tricolour he had hauled down.

  Not long afterwards came the crack of nearby outgoing artillery and it soon became apparent that they were firing south down the beach towards the Australians’ left flank. RSM Tevendale went out into the gully and climbed up its north side. From the top he could see a battery of four 75mm guns with spoked wooden wheels, France’s famous field piece of the 1914–18 conflict. The nearest gun had five or six figures throwing grenades at it. Leading this assault was Lieutenant Gerald Bryan, the son of a civil servant from an old Anglo-Irish family now concentrated in Belfast, whom Pedder had poached from another Commando for his rock-climbing skills. Like Macpherson, Bryan was hardly out of his teens, having celebrated his twentieth birthday shortly before they moved from Egypt to Cyprus. This was his first time in action and the men with him happened to include some of the trained gunners who had joined the Commando the previous summer.

  I think I was the first to start throwing grenades at the gun. A corporal was shot through the wrist and was cursing every Frenchman ever born. As he couldn’t use a rifle I gave him my Colt automatic pistol and he carried on. We crawled through some scrub to get closer. By then the gun itself was deserted, the crew cowering in a slit trench. We bunged in a few more grenades and then went in. It was rather bloody.

  The gun was the right-hand gun of the battery and the other three were between 100 and 300 yards away. One of Bryan’s Royal Artillery contingent, a sergeant, started rummaging around the ammunition limber.

  Our gun was pointing away from the battery, so we grabbed the tail piece and heaved it right around so that it was pointing at the nearest gun. The sergeant took over, shoved a shell in and sighted over open sights then fired. The result was amazing. One hell of an explosion and our target flung up like a toy. We must have hit its ammunition. No time to waste. The sergeant traversed onto the next gun, sighted rapidly and fired. There was a pause. Where the devil had the shell gone? Then about half a mile up the hillside, there was a flash and a puff of smoke in the dome of a mosque. A thick Scottish voice said, ‘That’ll make the buggers pray.’

  By trial and error they disposed of the other two guns and, their blood up, shot some of their fleeing crews with a Bren gun. When
they had finished the sergeant used a rifle butt to snap the firing pin of the captured gun and they rejoined Pedder’s Commando HQ. This involved a sprint of about 300 yards across open ground under fire but nobody was hit. After that their luck began to run out.

  Ably led by their French officers, the Algerian Tirailleurs, which literally means skirmisher and implies skill at field craft and marksmanship, began to live up to their name. First they fell back into a wooded area about half a mile above the barracks and overlooking the magnificent Phoenician coast where they set up their machine guns or found comfortable sniping positions among some conifers. Then they waited for the English, who they guessed were advancing up a gully, to emerge onto a bare ridge line some 300 yards below them. Once they had enough of them in their sights they were soon inflicting casualties and had the rest pressing themselves into the flinty slope hardly daring to move. It took Bryan ten minutes to crawl 50 yards to a place where two Bren gunners were doing their best to hit back.

  Every time they tried to fire a machine gun opened up and they couldn’t spot it. Suddenly Alastair Coode, the B section lieutenant whose family ran a big engineering firm back in Glasgow, saw it and grabbed a rifle but as he was taking aim he was shot in the chest and went down coughing blood. Then, from a different direction, the Sergeant was hit in the shoulder, so we were being fired on from two fronts. I shouted to my men to make for some scrub about 100 yards away and started crawling towards it. Bullets were fizzing past. The Sergeant, who had been wounded, decided to run for it to catch us up but a machine gun got him and he fell with his face covered with blood. Suddenly I felt what at first seemed to be a tremendous bang on the head but this was shock. When I opened my eyes I saw it was my legs. We were taught this crawl in the commandos where you tried to keep your heels down by keeping your ankles close to the ground. But I was in a hurry to get to the scrub and I suppose my heels were up and it raised my silhouette. I had been hit by a heavy machine gun bullet, something like a .50 I guess, which had gone through my left leg just above the ankle and slap through the tibia and then went on to hit my right leg by which time the bullet had become a kind of dumdum and did terrible damage. The amazing thing was that it completely spun me around and turned me over. Before I was hit I was crawling on my belly towards the scrub. Afterwards, I was lying on my back with my head in the other direction. Anyway, after I got over the shock I decided not to die. I dragged myself into a bit of a dip and tried to get fairly comfortable.