by Colin Smith
At his own initiative Blackburn had sent Captain Kennedy, a Tasmanian, up the road with four of his Vickers, which had a very long range, and the two anti-tank guns. The plan was that Kennedy should machine-gun French positions from the outskirts of Kuneitra and lure some of the R35s onto the armour-piercing shot from his 2-pounders. Then Kennedy had met up with the two Free French officers and learned that most of the Fusiliers were already taken prisoner and the rest on the brink of joining them. So he turned back.
Orr’s 177 officers and men at battalion headquarters had finally surrendered at about 6 p.m. In the late afternoon, almost as if both sides were observing siesta hours, there had been something of a lull. Senegalese infantry had infiltrated into empty houses when they saw their chance and the tanks cruised about firing at targets of opportunity but these got rarer because many of the Fusiliers, dead beat, were snoozing on the stone floors while sentries eyed their slumbering reliefs and looked at their watches. It had been a very long day. Then at about 5.30 p.m. a Foreign Legion armoured car commanded by a Lieutenant Koshonofski, who was waving a white handkerchief and accompanied by a Fusilier prisoner, had approached Orr’s headquarters. Koshonofski had spoken eloquently of how distasteful he found shooting Englishmen – which may have been true for he had closet Gaullist tendencies – and the imminence of their next tank attack. Orr had conferred with his second-in-command and regimental sergeant major, who both stressed the shortage of rifle ammunition, then he had gone off to see Lecoulteux to try to make arrangements for his wounded and the burial of the British dead.
Twenty Fusiliers had been killed and four died later of their wounds. It is not clear how many were wounded but, rule of thumb, it was normally a little under three times the dead. These, though quite enough, were not heavy casualties. The battalion had suffered much greater losses in Eritrea and in appalling conditions, driven half mad by the filth and flies of a long-disputed battlefield where dysentery and desert sores were rife. And there they were the victors.
About forty Fusiliers managed to lie low in Kuneitra until dark, which was only a couple of hours after the surrender, and then made good their escape. Orr and his men were marched to the school yard in the northern part of the town where the 200 or so captured earlier in the day, when the tanks first broke through, had been held for a while before being trucked to Sassa. Officers and men were separated, though the Fusiliers did their utmost to frustrate all attempts by the Senegalese to organize them, convinced that remaining in Kuneitra was the key to rescue.
Tom Wilson, who had watched the tanks line up along the Damascus Road, escaped with a 2nd lieutenant ‘due to a very lax sentry on the back door of the school’ and they both got back to Palestine. But the next morning, by which time the artillery of a belated British relief force was close enough to start harassing the vicinity, the French had the other officer prisoners put in one truck and the sergeants and the corporals in another, and shipped them out fast. The other ranks, who would be marching to Sassa, raised a cheer as they went by, for the French no doubt one of those incomprehensible rosbif moments when the Channel became as wide as the Atlantic.
In all, 374 Fusiliers had been taken prisoner and there would have been more if a company had not been detached, for it was not more men that Orr needed but anti-tank guns. Capturing the best part of an old regiment – in St Paul’s their shot-riddled colours from their last encounter with the French (1811) recently removed to the crypt because of the Blitz – was undoubtedly the showpiece of de Verdilhac’s offensive. When the news reached London Sir John Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was mortified. ‘Surely a battalion of the Royal Fusiliers have not surrendered to the Vichy French?’ he signalled to Wavell. But they had and from the predominantly Australian sector around southern Lebanon’s Merjayoun there was more bad news.
‘Those terrible grey horses, how they fight,’ Napoleon said of the Scots Greys at Waterloo and years later prints of Lady Elisabeth Butler’s famous head-on painting of their charge, wild men on wilder horses, were a popular image of life before the Entente Cordiale. How gratifying for the Emperor it would have been to have witnessed on 15 June 1941 the charge of the 6th Chasseurs d’Afrique at Merjayoun. As their chunky R35s drove all before them in panic-stricken flight, there were the Scots Greys, plucked from the 1st Cavalry Division for use as motorized infantry, doing their dismounted best to out-gallop some of the Australians.
The French chose a good time to attack. The bulk of the 25th Brigade had gone almost 25 miles up the road and taken, after a hard fight, the village of Jezzine. This had been done to provide right-flank protection of the other Australian brigade whose progress up the coast had now reached the port of Sidon which was no more than a couple of hours’ drive away. Behind them in Merjayoun they had left the 2/33rd Battalion commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Monaghan, one of Australia’s small cadre of regular soldiers and a man who appears to have been better at giving orders than taking them. The previous day he had been given permission to take one of his four rifle companies on a reconnaissance in force in the foothills of the Herman range: Monaghan took three.
At least the solitary Australian company remaining in Merjayoun was supported by artillery and anti-tank batteries, the latter demonstrating what might have happened at Kuneitra when three R35s were knocked out almost immediately. It also had alongside them about 200 Scots Greys who unlike the yeomanry element of the cavalry division were mostly regular soldiers and regarded as one of the more illustrious ingredients of Wilson’s hotchpotch force. But as Monaghan’s mountaineers straggled back despite the initial success of the anti-tank guns Merjayoun’s meagre defences began to crumble.
Transport was fast disappearing as men hijacked any vehicle left insufficiently guarded and headed south for Palestine 10 miles away. The War Diary of the Australian 2/5th Field Regiment records a growing conviction that ‘tanks had broken through’. One of its officers watched as a troop of the Greys discovered that their vehicles had disappeared and a ‘wave of panic set in among some of the men and control, both mass and individual, was lost’. When the gunners’ Lieutenant Jack Nagle went forward to investigate he discovered that most of the Australian infantry and almost all the Greys were in headlong flight. ‘He endeavoured to rally these troops telling them that the guns would support them but the majority seemed to have no other idea than to get back … Eventually Nagle got to the south end of the town and held up a trooper carrying his Bren gun to the rear and, on ordering him to stay or give up his gun, the Bren was handed over without ado.’
Nor was his own regiment entirely immune. Four of its vehicles were caught up in the stampede for the nearest Palestinian town of Metulla and it was two days before they returned to their battery by way of Nazareth.
Some of Merjayoun’s defenders lingered long enough to be captured having dug themselves in as best they could in rocky ground either side of a road just north of the town. Among them was William Cross, a tall and well-built lance corporal who had joined the Scots Greys from an orphanage as a 15-year-old boy bugler in 1932.
We were cavalrymen doing an infantryman’s job. We hadn’t been trained for it, we didn’t have much ammunition, and we didn’t have much idea what was going on. At about midday we were attacked by Senegalese troops, their legs wrapped in World War One type puttees from knee to ankle, coming through the scrub from the foothills above us. We fired off most of what we had, I don’t know whether we hit any, but there were far more of them than us and suddenly they were all around us with bloody great bayonets and these scars on their cheeks, tribal markings I suppose, screaming their ruddy heads off. It was like something out of your worst nightmares. Well it was case of, ‘Hands up, credit’s up’. Nobody told us to surrender but we would have been dead if we hadn’t. As it was, there were a few bad moments when they looked like they were getting ready to shoot us but a French officer stopped them. We were formed up on the road and marched away by some Foreign Legionnaires who had also been involv
ed in the fight. As we moved off one of them, who had heard me talking to a mate, sidled up to me and asked, ‘Where you from Jock?’ Turned out he was from Glasgow. He told me he had been firing over our heads.
Lance Corporal Cross was a bit sceptical about this but a head count in the truck they were loaded into confirmed that they had suffered no casualties. The Greys were taken via the Bekaa valley and the winding Barada gorge to Damascus where, appropriately enough, their prison was a stone cavalry barracks, a gloomy Ottoman building. They were fed French Army rations. Cross was astonished to be served red wine with every meal including breakfast. ‘Of course, the first thing the British soldier misses is his tea. And it was damn cold in that barracks and we wanted something hot.’
Behind them Merjayoun was back in Vichy hands. French close air support had fanned the panic on the roads south of the town with little or no interference from the RAF. For some of the Australians this lack of air cover was Crete all over again. But there was unanimous praise for a Lieutenant Bayliss and his Poms manning a single Bofors gun who stuck resolutely to an exposed ridge line above ‘a crowd of struggling vehicles’ and picked off a diving Glenn Martin which crashed with a roar of exploding bombs.
For twenty-four hours it looked like the Chasseur d’Afrique’s tough little tanks might break into northern Palestine. Even at their slowest speed it was hardly an hour’s drive away and, if nothing else, it would have been a marvellous propaganda coup. Then the Australians began to recover and show their mettle. Jezzine, its garrison weakened because a battalion had been sent to help regain Merjayoun, was isolated and virtually under siege but its defenders clung on. This was despite one devastating air attack when seven Lioré et Olivier twin-engined bombers sliced away half of the Hotel Egypt which the 2/31 Battalion were using as a food store and a field kitchen. Among the seventeen dead were four company quartermaster sergeants who were drawing rations. By 18 June this unit had lost thirty-one killed and twenty-seven wounded in the space of forty-eight hours.
On the Merjayoun front itself they fell back to the villages of Khiam and Qleaa, which were near an important fork in the road about 3 miles south of the town, and from there started launching counter-attacks well supported by shellfire. The most feared arm of all the Imperial British land forces was what Rommel called ‘the terrible British artillery’ and the Australians were no exception. The ideal weapon for lobbing high explosive around steep Lebanese hills was a mortar. The French had quite a lot of them and the Australians very few but their 25-pounder batteries were well served by some daring forward observation officers who were often well ahead of the infantry. Radios were soon discovered to be unreliable, often incapable of transmitting from one valley to the next, and they were almost invariably joined to their guns by a couple of miles of cable for their field telephones which trailed through the rocks and scrub behind them, vulnerable to shellfire and unfriendly eyes. Telephone traffic tended to be two-way and one of the drawbacks was that they came with chirpy bell alarms loud enough to wake the dead or cause you to join them.
‘For God’s sake don’t ring me,’ whispered Lieutenant Roden Cutler of the 2/5 th Artillery to his battery as the Australian attempt to retake the town hotted up. Together with his signaller, Cutler had managed to insert his 6 foot 5 inch frame into one of Merjayoun’s narrow storm drains about 50 yards from the place where the crew of two R35s had chosen to leave their tanks for a chat and a smoke with some Legionnaires. As a result of their presence the 2/5th had been delivering some wickedly well-timed salvos at Vichy convoys coming into town and Cutler did not give much for their chances if they discovered the reason why.
Two days before, Cutler had emerged from the ruins of a mud-walled shepherd’s hut with Captain Joe Clark, the regiment’s senior observation officer, disembowelled and dying, over his shoulder, after two R35S had riddled the building with cannon and machine-gun fire. Cutler and Clark had been sharing the hut with two gunner signallers and a three-man infantry Boys rifle and Bren team when the tanks closed in. Two had been killed outright. Cutler, the only one unscathed, had picked up a Boys and, realizing the R35S armour was too good for it, repeatedly fired at the tracks that also served as their steering mechanism. Gunner Geoffrey Grayson, bleeding profusely from a groin wound, watched with considerable relief as the tank ‘slewed around and couldn’t fire at us any more’. Then they had staggered downhill into the welcoming arms of the lead infantry company’s stretcher-bearers some 200 yards away.
But this time Cutler knew there would be no escape if the Legionnaires discovered, stuffed into what was hardly more than a drainpipe, the reason for the uncannily accurate shellfire they had just endured. Only the dark and the slumbers of an exhausted enemy saved the day. The two men removed their boots, strung them around their necks and tiptoed away to their lines through the marble mausoleums of an outlying Christian cemetery, after which Cutler was nearly shot by an old friend from Sydney University who was commanding a platoon in the most forward Australian position.
There could be little doubt that the Australians would soon be back in Merjayoun. At Ezraa too, the most easterly of de Verdilhac’s thrusts, Vichy’s success had been short-lived. At first Colonel Bouvier had taken Lloyd by surprise, partly because Collet had indicated that Bouvier shared his own Gaullist sympathies. But Vichy had shown their trust in him, beefing up his small Druze militia, loathed by their mostly Francophobe co-religionists, with Tunisia Tirailleurs, armoured cars and some light artillery. Colonel Genin and his company of Free French Senegalese had not stood much of a chance and poor Genin had died trying to rally them.
Then, against all the odds, Ezraa was recaptured. This was mostly due to the leadership displayed by an Australian-born Hussars officer on secondment to the Transjordan Frontier Force contingent which had been driven out by Bouvier’s surprise attack with his armoured cars and Tunisian Tirailleurs. Captain Shan Hackett, a Sandhurst-trained regular from a wealthy Anglo-Irish newspaper family in Perth, took over Genin’s counterattack and turned a disparate collection of about 150 men speaking four different languages into a winning team. Apart from his own Bedouin, he had under his command the remnants of Genin’s Senegalese with some junior French officers and about twenty Fusiliers who had missed out on Kuneitra because they had been attached to Lloyd’s brigade headquarters. Among them was the crew of one of Orr’s missing 37mm Bofors anti-tank guns. Under Hackett’s direction this single gun, which was commanded by a Corporal Clark, fired at almost point-blank range at a mud-walled gendarmerie station where some of the Tirailleurs had established a strongpoint. Hackett was wounded in the shoulder and the Tunisians did their best to pick off Clark’s crew but the Fusiliers kept punching holes through the mud walls until a white flag went up. Bouvier was among the 200 prisoners and Ezraa was theirs, including the site of a Byzantine church where the Roman knight and England’s adopted saint, St George, was believed to be buried.
Perhaps the phlegmatic Welshman Brigadier Lloyd always knew that someone was watching over him. Despite de Verdilhac’s counter-attacks, and the painful knowledge of his own contribution to the loss of almost an entire battalion by depriving them of their anti-tank guns, Lloyd had maintained a remarkably cool exterior. Having the enemy sitting on his lines of communication was not allowed to interfere with Lloyd’s attack on Damascus which proceeded as if everything had gone according to plan. At Gentforce HQ his staff began to find their battle maps bewildering. ‘There had been so many moments when formations of either side had been surrounding each other in concentric circles that my attempts at sketches looked like archery targets,’ recalled Major Fergusson of his later attempts to explain what had gone on.
An unexpected bonus for Lloyd was the British failure in Egypt’s Western Desert where much to Churchill’s distress Operation Battleaxe, the attempt to push Rommel back and end the siege of Tobruk, ended only two days after it began with heavy tank losses. This enabled Wavell to send infantry reinforcements he had been keeping in Egypt, partly
as a reserve for Operation Battleaxe if there was a breakthrough and partly to rest them after their experiences in Crete. The first to arrive was the 2nd Queens, which had not quite got to the island having turned back to Alexandria with all the battalion’s Bren guns blazing after near misses ignited their ship’s deck cargo of 3,500 of the army’s notoriously leaky 4-gallon petrol cans. These air attacks caused several casualties and at one point panic below decks when calls for gas masks for the fire-fighting parties were misinterpreted as news that poison gas had been added to their miseries.
After this the Queens’ recapture of Kuneitra turned out to be a relatively mild affair when, in extended order with bayonets fixed, they followed the bombardment of a lone 25-pounder into town and took one casualty from the departing Vichy rearguard. De Verdilhac had evidently decided not to risk his precious R35s down a long road where they might be cut off and stranded without fuel. After the Queens came the pince-nezed VC winner Arthur Blackburn’s Australian machine gunners with their accompanying anti-tank guns. With them was a scouting screen of about sixty mounted yeomanry of the Yorkshire Dragoons and two of the Palestine Police’s locally made armoured cars, which were no more than boiler plate welded to a truck chassis and armed with the same Vickers Blackburn’s men used. Their policemen crews were mostly ex-British army.
By 18 June Lloyd, no doubt secretly relieved that his main supply routes had been restored, was ready to launch Gentforce’s attack on Damascus. It was to be a two-pronged affair down both main approach roads, no feints. The Free French would be on the right on the Deraa–Damascus road starting from Kissoué, which was about 10 miles away from the city. The Indian battalions would be on the left on the Kuneitraé–Damascus road. Their job was to seize the strongly defended village and airfield of Mezze just south-west of the city wall and thus cut its road and rail links to Beirut. Colonel Lionel Jones, normally battalion commander of 4th Rajputana Rifles, was now temporarily in charge of 5th Indian Brigade following Legentilhomme’s wounding and Lloyd’s elevation to force commander. At Gentforce HQ, where there was considerable foreboding, an apprehensive Major Fergusson watched Jones receive his orders.