England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Pedder realized that it was time to get out. He told Captain Farmiloe, commander of 1 Troop, that they would go back down the gully and start heading south, attacking everything they could manage, until they contacted Keyes’s party or the Australians. They had hardly begun to move when Pedder himself became the next victim. ‘Tevendale, Farmiloe, I’m shot,’ he announced, almost as if he had just been declared a casualty by an umpire on a field training exercise back on the Isle of Arran and was curious to see how they would handle this interesting development.

  Tevendale, who was about 20 yards away, ran across but by the time the RSM got to him Pedder had died, at least one bullet having passed through his back and chest. It was 0846, about four and a half hours since they had landed. Lying nearby was Private Adams, who had given Pedder the Tricolour. Tevendale lingered long enough in this unhealthy spot to check the colonel’s pockets for any maps or papers before he ran after the others moving towards the start of the gully. Shortly afterwards a sniper killed Lieutenant (acting Captain) Robin Farmiloe with a head shot and Tevendale took over command of the remnants of Command HQ and Number 1 Troop.

  There were no officers left standing. In less than thirty minutes three had been killed and Bryan was lying in the dent of earth that was keeping him alive with most of his right calf shot off. Every time he moved one of his sergeants, also wounded, kept yelling at him to keep his head down or he would be killed.

  I was damned thirsty but could not get a drink as I had to show myself to get my water bottle and each time I tried I got about 20 rounds to myself. So I lay there hoping I would lose consciousness. After a while a lot of fire came down and the next thing was about 25 French advancing out of the scrub with fixed bayonets. The four men left in my section were captured. I raised my arm and one of the French came over and gave me a nasty look. I was carrying a French pistol that my sergeant had given me in exchange for my rifle. It had jammed at the first shot but like a fool I held onto it. Anyway, he just looked at me for a while and I was let alone. I had one hell of a drink and felt better. About half an hour later my four men were back with a stretcher.

  Bryan was carried to a temporary dressing station where a captured Commando medical orderly gave him a morphine injection. Some time later he was loaded into an ambulance together with two French wounded and two Commando sergeants. One of the sergeants, bleeding copiously from a chest wound, was the NCO who had been shouting at him to keep his head down. On their way to Beirut they stopped at a field dressing station the French had set up at the old Crusader port of Sidon where Bryan’s legs were put in cardboard boxes packed with cotton wool. Shortly after they arrived at Beirut’s Maurice Rottier Hospital the blood-soaked cotton wool was removed and the young rock climber’s mangled right leg amputated below the knee by a middle-aged surgeon named Guillermo who told him: ‘You are not our enemy. I served in the last war. You are our allies.’ In the next forty-eight hours he would perform sixty-seven operations on French and British wounded.

  By the afternoon, about eight hours after 11 Commando had landed, it was apparent that the Australians were not yet advancing and all those who had landed north of the Litani were bound to be overwhelmed if they remained where they were. Tevendale’s thirty or so men, mostly all that was left of Commando HQ, were already in serious trouble. They had stirred up such a hornet’s nest that they found it impossible to move sufficiently far south to link up with Keyes whom they expected to find with the Australian vanguard. Eventually they dug in on a ridge line about 300 yards from the barracks facing the Litani. The position commanded one of the secondary tracks to the Vichy front line and from it they sniped at the runners the French had to use for communication because the Commandos had cut their field telephone lines. When the enemy retreated before a heavy artillery barrage, Tevendale added to their misery and in temperatures that had hovered around 86°F for most of the day skirmished on until late afternoon. Then at about 5 p.m., some seventeen hours after they had left the Glengyle, surrounded, under mortar fire, almost out of ammunition and water and exhausted enough to fall asleep under fire, the French called on them to surrender and they wrecked their weapons and stumbled down from the ridge with their wounded.

  At about the same time Captain George More’s northern Z Party began to relinquish their hold on the Kafr Badda bridge area. They had held their roadblocks all day against increasingly determined attempts to break through by armoured cars that had mostly been repulsed with Boys antitank rifles and captured Hotchkiss machine guns. One of the Hotchkisses was manned by Noble Sproule, the young Canadian who had turned down a month’s pay to go on the operation. ‘Boy oh boy it was duck soup. They had 200 yards of open flat plain,’ he would write to his father. But there were far too few of them and their position was fast becoming untenable. More had been obliged to scatter his 100 or so men over a wide area – his two troops were 500 yards apart – and several of their prisoners had been killed trying to disarm their guards and escape.

  As the day wore on some of the Commandos had even come under naval bombardment from a couple of Darlan’s Beirut-based heavy destroyers, the Guépard and the Valmy, which had fired about sixty rounds at them, though the nearest shell landed 200 yards away and there were no casualties. Tommy Macpherson, the subaltern who had been bayoneted in the wrist during the capture of the mountain guns, had got his binoculars onto them. ‘You felt you were practically looking down the barrels but either their shooting was inaccurate or they had no clear idea where our position was.’

  This latter was almost certainly the case, for the French ships soon demonstrated just how good their shooting could be when they were engaged by the four British destroyers Janus, Jackal, Hotspur and Isis. Captain John Tothill, a heavily bearded figure, commanded the flotilla from HMS Janus which off Crete had participated in one of the Royal Navy’s few offensive actions: a night attack in which just over 300 of the Wehrmacht’s seaborne invasion force had been massacred in their commandeered wooden caiques. Slower and out-ranged by Guépard and Valmy’s 5.5-inch guns, Tothill decided there was no time to concentrate his ships and, well in the lead, tried to get close enough to use Janus’s 4.7-inch guns.

  As usual, the French had attached dye bags to their shells to indicate fall of shot: in this case one ship had green, the other red. They concentrated entirely on the Janus, opening fire at 17,000 yards which was long before the British destroyer could reasonably expect to hurt them. It soon became apparent that the green team, probably flotilla leader Guépard, were the superior gunners. Her splashes were easily the closest to the target and before long Janus received a salvo of three direct hits: one killed or wounded everybody on the bridge except Tothill who was unscathed apart from his beard which had turned a startling green (long after this was remedied he was known as Cap’n Fungus); another penetrated a boiler room and wiped out its entire crew, and the third wrecked Tothill’s cabin. Shortly afterwards a fourth shell hit the other boiler room and a fifth was discovered unexploded in a bathroom. Nine of her crew had been killed and Janus, though her guns were still firing, was stopped and an easy target. Jackal, 4.7-inch guns blazing, caught up and laid a smoke screen around the stricken ship, receiving one hit which wounded a seaman but did little structural damage. Guépard followed this up with a torpedo that missed and was in turn hit by a shell, though to little effect.

  The French ships now broke off the action, which had lasted just over an hour, and headed back north towards Beirut pursued by Jackal, Hotspur and Isis, which was in the lead and had entered into the spirit of things by flying Nelson’s second most famous flag signal: ‘Engage the enemy more closely’. This was somewhat optimistic. The engines of much of 1941’s Royal Navy were a poor substitute for the days of sail. When it came to obliging Darlan’s newer ships to do battle on anything other than their own terms they simply could not keep up and soon Guépard and Valmy were out of range. More British ships appeared on the scene and the destroyer Kimberley began to tow Janus back to Haifa at 12 kno
ts while her crew extinguished an oil fire that had started in one of the damaged boiler rooms.

  The French were determined to finish off the crippled destroyer and sent ten twin-engined bombers escorted by six Dewoitine 520 fighters. One of the Dewoitines was flown by Sous-lieutenant Pierre Le Gloan, a gifted and experienced pilot – he had joined the Armée de l’Air in 1931 aged 18 – who had already scored twelve victories: four German and seven Italian aircraft bagged in France before the armistice and his first RAF Hurricane shot down over Damascus the day before, when he ambushed Flight Lieutenant J.R. Aldis while he was taking reconnaissance photographs. Three Hurricanes from 80 Squadron RAF, which was just back from Greece and Crete and now based at Haifa, were on a standing patrol and spotted the bombers, six Glenn Martins and four of the more cumbersome Bloch 200s, a slow and ugly-looking high-wing monoplane with the kind of windows in its protruding nose you would expect to find in a railway carriage. The Hurricanes had not noticed the Dewoitines circling above them and concentrated on the Blochs, splashing one with the loss of three of its four-man crew and obliging a second to make a forced landing without serious casualties. Then they were bounced in turn by the Dewoitines which, though they had been hurried into production and had plenty of teething troubles, was France’s best fighter and probably a match for a Hurricane. Certainly in the hands of the broad-shouldered Breton Le Gloan it was, for he added two more to his score in about the time it takes to boil an egg: Pilot Officer Lynch died; Pilot Officer Peter Crowther bailed out and was captured badly burnt and taken to the Maurice Rottier Military Hospital in Beirut where he met up with the wounded Commando officer Gerald Bryan.

  Three more Dewoitine and three more Hurricanes then joined in the dogfight. No more aircraft on either side were shot down but one of each crashed into the sea after a head-on collision. Their pilots, Sergeant Martin Bennett and Sous-lieutenant Georges Rivory, both bailed out to be rescued by the destroyer Kandahar. Bennett was badly burnt. None of the bombers hit the Janus though their crews could not be blamed for assuming they had, for a second oil fire, the result of the Guépard’s hits in the boiler room, had started. Black smoke was still rising from the ship when she entered Haifa harbour where, to the amazement of the crew, an Auxiliary Fire Service team that came on board with enough foam to smother the blaze turned out to be entirely composed of young Jewish women, a result of Haganah’s vigorous civil defence recruiting. It would take at least six months to get Janus back into action, a loss the Mediterranean fleet could ill afford after Crete.*

  At the cost of one Dewoitine and possibly two Bloch bombers, the French had succeeded in crippling a British destroyer and reducing the RAF’s meagre fighter strength by three Hurricanes. Out of radio contact, George More’s Commandos were of course as unaware of these setbacks as they were of Pedder’s death or the whereabouts of Major Keyes’s party. During scouting trips on a captured motorcycle More had got close enough to the Australians across the river to have them shoot one of his tyres out and had been lucky not to meet the French on the bumpy ride back. All he knew for certain was that if the Australians were not coming to them they must go to the Australians.

  Dispersal into small groups was very much part of Commando training and one of the reasons why they had more junior officers than the average infantry battalion. The fifty-strong troops were organized into two sections that were further divided into sub-sections of about twelve. They expected to break up and come together again according to events and, given a chance, to be aggressive not merely evaders. All the Commandos still alive and at large north of Keyes’s enclave on the northern bank of the Litani, probably about 150 men, were now heading for the river. Their fortunes varied.

  More divided his command into two and took the larger party, which included four other officers, along the coast, keeping to the scrub wherever possible, expecting to meet up with Keyes or the Australians a little north of the Litani’s mouth. This left about thirty-five men under Macpherson, who had been told to get to the Litani by a circuitous south-easterly route. Paddy Mayne had taken a similar course with his men and to great effect, bringing about eighty prisoners with him acquired in three different firefights. The most noteworthy of these was the overrunning of a battalion headquarters. Mayne entered first, in his hand one of the US Army Colt .45 automatic pistols most Commando officers were issued and a weapon with which he had become a qualified instructor.

  I called on them to jetez vers à la planche but they seemed a bit slow on the uptake; one of them lifted a rifle and I am afraid he had not even time to be sorry. This was the sort of HQ with typewriters, ammunition, revolvers, bombs, and, more to the point, beer and food. While we were dining the phone rang. We didn’t answer but followed the wire and got another bull – four machine-guns, two light machine-guns, two mortars and 40 more prisoners. We came back through the Aussie lines. We were rather tired, so the prisoner laddies kindly carried the booty.

  Mayne and his haul would cross the river more or less dry shod at 4.30 the following morning on the pontoon bridge the Australian engineers now had in place. His total casualties out of a strength of forty-five were three killed: two when they landed and advanced to the main road and one shot by mistake by the Australians when they first showed themselves at the river.

  Macpherson did not have a map, which were in short supply, but marched on a compass bearing with his men following him with what he later admitted was ‘an air of unrelieved pessimism and disbelief’. En route they twice skirmished with small units of the locally raised troupes spéciales who quickly surrendered. But unlike Mayne, the only prisoner they kept was a French lieutenant. The others were disarmed and freed minus boots, socks and trousers which were cast, together with their heavier or less interesting weapons, over the first suitable precipice.

  It was a good decision because where they met the river, some way to the east of the pontoon bridge Mayne had crossed, it was much deeper and faster flowing. Prisoners would have been a burden and five walking wounded were hindrance enough. They moved into the warm water after dark. Macpherson, who was 5 foot 10, found it was up to his armpits and probably just about fordable. But twice the lieutenant, seventh son of a judge and an athletic product of Fettes, Scotland’s Eton, had to rescue men who had slipped, panicked and and were being swept away with astonishing speed. One was a former steward on the Athenia who had almost drowned on the first day of the war when the transatlantic liner was sunk by a U-boat.

  By the time Macpherson got him out his screams had alerted a French post 500 yards downstream which responded with long bursts of machine-gun fire, wild at first then getting onto midstream. It is hard for men in boots, chest-deep in a river and holding aloft a weapon, to move any faster when they are under fire but they will try. One of the wounded stumbled, the man behind him picked him up and the man behind him tripped over the rescuer, gifting 36 pounds of Boys anti-tank rifle to the Litani as he was tugged away by its playful currents. ‘I got him out quite a long way down, not without difficulty as he was some four inches taller and three stones heavier than me.’

  Macpherson brought all but two of his men back and they had been killed during fighting earlier in the day. His only other losses, for which he would eventually be reprimanded,* were the Boys, a Bren gun and two rifles dropped in the river. After they reached the south bank they walked west until they met up with their first Australians. ‘We were warmly welcomed to what appeared to be a continuous beer party.’

  More, who had twenty-four of his original Z Party with him, was also close to the Australians. After dark they had gone down to the shore and then waited for two and a half hours for the moon to move behind cloud before, thirty minutes after midnight, heading south towards the Aiteniye Farm buildings, Keyes’s original objective. The artillery they had been listening to had subsided but from the direction of the river came the insistent crackle and pop of small-arms fire. Aiteniye still appeared to be firmly in Vichy hands with plenty of intact barbed-wire entanglements goin
g down to the sea. To cross the river mouth to the other side they needed to get through these. They had just managed to cut their way through what sappers called a ‘Double Apron’, viewed in section a triangular fence, when they were shot at from about 40 yards away with heavy machine guns and some kind of artillery, possibly an anti-tank gun. Then another machine gun fired at them from a different direction and for good measure they came under what seemed like Bren gun fire from the river. Firing back into the darkness and lobbing grenades from rifle discharger cups only made the French fire stronger. Within a few minutes five of the Commandos, including a lieutenant, were dead or dying and three wounded. Stuck in the barbed wire, it became obvious that the French would be able to go on killing them with impunity as long as their ammunition lasted.