by Colin Smith
But Dentz knew that Germany’s blitzkrieg attack on Russia was much worse news for Vichy Beirut. Even the Wehrmacht was unlikely to finish the job in time to rescue them by hitting the English hard enough elsewhere. Certainly, it had put back the prospect of an invasion of England until the spring of 1942 at the earliest. Nor could there be any question of Rommel receiving the kind of reinforcements that would make his entry into Cairo inevitable and even threaten Palestine and Iraq.
Meanwhile, though L’Armee du Levant was not yet throttled, the British were undoubtedly tightening their grip. In a moonlight attack during the early hours of 16 June, Fleet Air Arm Swordfish operating from RAF Nicosia in nearby Cyprus had torpedoed and sunk the French super-destroyer Chevalier Paul which was trying to get into Beirut from Toulon under cover of darkness. The Swordfish were off the carrier HMS Formidable which towards the end of May had suffered severe bomb damage while getting aircraft off to Malta and was under repair. The Chevalier Paul was less than 30 miles from the Syrian coast when the torpedo exploded in an engine room and seven French sailors were killed. The vessel almost immediately began to list but before she sank her gunners managed to bring down one of the Swordfish which ditched nearby. Its two-man crew, Lieutenant Clifford and Sub-Lieutenant Winter, took to their dinghy and were picked up with the 251 survivors from the Chevalier Paul by the Beirut-based destroyers Guépard and Valmy.
The sinking persuaded the French that they must play to their strengths and use transport aircraft. At this point they were still just about maintaining air superiority because one of the Hurricane squadrons was almost constantly employed trying to defend the Royal Navy and Haifa from the Luftwaffe’s Junkers 88s on Rhodes. An air bridge was started via Luftwaffe bases at Athens and Salonika with various types pressed into service including some of Air France’s long-nosed tri-motor Dewoitine D338s, a slow, noisy aircraft that once flew the Croydon–Le Bourget route. But the carrying capacity of these aircraft was very small. One medium-sized shipload would have been worth more than a month of air bridge.
On land, Jumbo Wilson had at last decided that Iraq was sufficiently pacified to do what Raoul de Verdilhac had expected him to do in the first place and open up a front on Syria’s eastern desert border. They would come from two directions. Habforce, as it was still known, though in tranquil Habbaniya the siege now seemed like a bad dream, would start by capturing Palmyra where the first German aircraft bound for Iraq were spotted at its airfield. Once they had Palmyra they were expected to dash west along the Tripoli oil pipeline for Homs. Now that Damascus had fallen, possession of Homs’s road and rail junction would make Dentz’s Beirut even more isolated, cutting links with Aleppo and the entire northern Syrian hinterland up to the Turkish border.
At the same time this area was to be occupied by newly promoted Major General Bill Slim’s 10th Indian Division which had come up from Basra. Slim, the Gurkha officer who had made his name in Eritrea, was to follow the Euphrates to Deir Ez Zor, capture this garrison town and the magnificent suspension bridge the French had built, then proceed northwestwards to Aleppo itself. This would deny L’Armée du Levant all the munitions stored there as well as weakening French air power by reducing the dispersal of their aircraft. Overcrowded airfields were within easy range of the RAF. However, since this had yet to be achieved it all started very badly.
Once again Habforce’s vanguard was Brigadier Joe Kingstone’s 4th Cavalry Brigade: contingents from the Warwickshire and Wiltshire Yeomanry, the Household Cavalry, the 1st Essex, Squadron Leader Cassano’s nine RAF armoured cars, about 350 of Glubb’s Girls who had proved their worth in Iraq and some newcomers in the form of a troop of Australian anti-tank gunners who had been in Crete and were looking forward to a campaign without Stukas. There were a few staff cars, ambulances, petrol and water bowsers and signals trucks crammed with wireless equipment, but most people were packed into yellow-painted 3-ton trucks of one kind or another, some of them stolen from the Iraqi Army for, according to the ceasefire, they were supposed to have returned all booty.
The Arabs once thought Palmyra a beautiful place and called it the Bride of the Desert. It was the oasis city whose rebel Queen Zenobia had ended up being paraded in Rome in golden chains and only saved from execution by marriage to a senator. Long after Zenobia’s rule it was a caravan stop on the Silk Route to China. Then for almost half a millennium it slumbered and decayed in the casual embrace of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire. Twenty years of French rule had brought a little tourism but in 1941 Palmyra was a small, dusty place with some interesting ruins and half a dozen mostly mothballed hotels.
Kingstone’s column set off from the British oil pipeline at pumping station H3 (Haifa 3) and headed north for T3 (Tripoli 3) on the French pipeline which was close to the town. On the meandering camel tracks available, the distance Kingcol had to cover was about 160 miles. Once he got there the brigadier intended to attack the place from all points of the compass. Its garrison was thought to be no more than 500 strong, a mixture of Foreign Legion, air force ground crew, and the 3rd Desert Light Company, French-officered Arabs from the Syrian tribes who considered themselves something of an elite. Somewhere nearby there were two more of these Compagnies Légères du Désert, the first and the second.
The invaders crossed the frontier between British Jordan and French Syria at a point marked by two stone cairns with a short line of boulders either side of them. Shortly afterwards Glubb’s Arabs, who were scouting slightly ahead, fell upon an isolated Vichy listening post and took about ten prisoners. Among them were European signals personnel. These may have got a message off before their wireless was smashed, though even if they had not the chances of the force making a surprise attack were slim. Well over 100 vehicles were approaching Palmyra across a pitiless desert plain and their dust was visible for miles from any patrolling aircraft.
Among the vehicles in Kingstone’s brigade headquarters, which was in about the middle of the column, was an American left-hand-drive car with its front passenger seat occupied by a French prisoner. He was a broad-shouldered man with a small gingerish beard, wearing a high-crowned, red-topped flat military cap, a khaki shirt and buff-coloured jodhpur-style trousers that ended in bare feet and sandals. This was the sergent-chef who been in charge of the listening post when the Arab Legion fell upon it, vandalizing not only its radio set but also his spectacles, which had been lying nearby.
‘He was quite amiable but blinked from the loss of his glasses,’ recalled Captain Somerset de Chair, the French-speaking Conservative Member of Parliament and the brigade’s intelligence officer, who was at the wheel of the vehicle so that he could gently interrogate their captive. Banished to the back among the rolled maps rof Palmyra, Homs and Aleppo were his driver and a Christian Arab available for any Arabic-speaking prisoners Vichy might provide. The sergent-chef had been delivered to the intelligence officer together with all the documents and papers, both personal and professional, scooped up with him. Apart from his radio log, which indicated a boring desert vigil, these included a paperback edition of the French translation of Mein Kampf and a letter dated before the British invasion from his brother, a capitaine Merjayoun recently arrived from France and evidently pleased to have ‘escaped the Boche’.
De Chair had been instructed by Kingstone to try to discover from his prisoner how many and what type of aircraft were operating from Palmyra airfield. The brigadier, who had been warned from the outset that the RAF lacked the resources to give him proper cover, was only too aware how vulnerable his column was to air attack. But though the sergent-chef seemed happy to talk about the troops at Palmyra, pointing out that since the cavalry officer Colonel Collet’s defection they must know all there was to know anyway, he would not or could not give any clue about the French aircraft strength there. However, there soon began a practical demonstration.
We had been going for some hours now and the Column was again halted. We were in a defile between high sandstone hills. I walked over to Joe [Kingstone] a
nd told him what the prisoner had said … I looked up and saw, sharp yellow against the bright blue sky, three aircraft flying down the length of our column towards me. They were not too high up for me to distinguish at a glance the blue, white and red circles under the wings and the twin engines which made me take them for our familiar Blenheims. Even as I watched I saw three bright yellow eggs begin to fall against the blue and my mind, slowly somersaulting to the horrid truth, warned me that there was something quite wrong with the picture. I threw myself down on the hard ground and the bombs burst 75 yards away, blowing the forearm off an officer of the new Australian anti-tank troop.
This was the start of over a week of intensive daylight air attacks against Kingcol. In a single day, Sunday, 22 June, when the eyes of the world were on the news from Russia, the bombers and fighters of L’Armée de L’Air flew a total of 112 sorties against them. And this was only the second day. Vichy’s Glenn Martins, Moranes and Dewoitines almost achieved for the Palmyra garrison, which was even smaller than the British suspected, what the Audax and Oxford trainers did for besieged RAF Habbaniya. If Kingcol did not succumb to the kind of rout inflicted on Rashid Ali’s army it was probably only because they were much more dispersed.
As it was, the French aircrews turned what the British expected to be a mere bump along the road to Homs into a muddled siege. Most of the Legionnaires and the others in the Palmyra garrison were in a line of concrete pill boxes with plenty of barbed wire around them and excellent fields of fire. Every time Kingstone’s formations tried to close with them they were bombed and strafed. Pleas for direct fighter cover were initially ignored because RAF policy at this stage remained one of attacking their airfields where French aircraft were at their most vulnerable.
No doubt this was the right tactical decision but it was not very good for Kingcol’s morale. All they had to fight back with were light machine guns and the chances of shooting anything down were slim. When the batman of the Household Cavalry’s corporal Serjeant major picked up a Bren gun and won a duel with a Morane flown by a Lieutenant Seinturier, who fatally crashed, it was considered sufficiently unusual to merit an immediate award of the Military Medal. At one point de Chair saw the Australian anti-tank gunners, who said it was much worse than Crete, firing their single-shot 2-pounders skywards in what was probably the ballistic equivalent of a lottery ticket. The French aircraft were much faster than the RAF trainers above the plateau at Habbaniya and though some were damaged enough to crash-land at base it did not stop their crews from returning to the fray any more than it had Squadron Leader Dudgeon’s men.
When any part of Kingstone’s column thought they were about to come under air attack the standard procedure was to slam on the brakes and get well clear of the vehicles. Only then might they engage a low-flying tormentor with whatever small arms they had remembered to bring with them. It was every man for himself. Ambulance crews were expected to abandon their stretcher cases. ‘Without them we should have been even worse off,’ observed de Chair.
The intelligence officer had just noted how the bomb explosions were black ‘tinged with a yellow fringe of sand’, when he was wounded standing at the open door of the American car with his phlegmatic prisoner still in the passenger seat. One aircraft had already come low enough for him to feel its slipstream and, for want of anything else to do, he had picked up a camera.
I should, of course, have seized my prisoner by the arm and shouted, ‘Come on, mon vieux’, and legged it … But his calm seemed to freeze my own pride and I remained. Besides, vaguely at the back of my mind, was the idea that he could drive off to Palmyra with all the Brigade secrets. So I turned back, facing the desert, placing a helmet on my head and holding the stupid camera with the other … My ankle felt a crashing blow, the ground throbbed around me. I looked down at my leg. Blood was pumping out in great gulps, pouring down over my khaki stocking into my shoe and spilling onto the desert. My left hand was also bleeding. I got up on one leg and hopped around the back of the car to the other side. The prisoner was still in his seat, undamaged, while the windows of the car were starred with holes and part of the windscreen was shot away. The Frenchman said, ‘Vous êtes blessé alors?’ I took a handkerchief out of the pocket of my shorts and asked him if he could tie it tightly around the wound to stop the bleeding. He sat beside me on the running board and made a tight knot. Then I asked if he could drive me to the ambulance.
De Chair had five injuries, the worst in the left ankle where a lot of the nerves and sinews that control the foot were wrecked. The following afternoon he received two more flesh wounds after the ambulance he and three other stretcher cases had spent the night in jerked to a halt with a screech of brakes and there was nobody behind the wheel when they were strafed by a low-flying fighter. De Chair found himself repeating a childhood prayer and fixated by a tiny metal flake spinning inches from his face around the corner of a shattered window ‘until it dashed into my eye socket where it drew blood under my eyebrow’. He also had a bullet graze on his right calf but two of his companions were more seriously injured, one man bleeding from a fresh hole in a foot and the other in a leg which de Chair, easing himself gingerly down from his stretcher, bandaged with a towel. The fourth man had put on his helmet and hopped clear of the vehicle which de Chair discovered to be a total wreck. ‘The tyres were all in shreds, the engine holed and bullets through the body. The white circle, with its brilliant red cross, stared reproachfully at the sky. With the vehicle standing still, abandoned by the driver as it had been, the emblem must have been clearly visible at 200 yards, when the pilot fired his burst.’
At 300mph plus, adrenaline up and attacking one vehicle after another, a pilot’s ability to recognize and react to a red cross in time is probably as debatable as de Chair’s bewildered anger is understandable. One day a French prisoner is bandaging your wound, the next his compatriot is machine-gunning your ambulance. In June 1941 the desert around Palmyra was a bewildering and angry place. One troop of Wiltshire Yeomanry lost thirteen of its seventeen vehicles and thanked their lucky stars that, of the four that remained, one was the water tanker. Thanks to the ‘stop and scatter’ policy, casualties were relatively low though in some units so was morale. There developed an understandable reluctance to leave slit trenches and drive anywhere in daylight. Among those who became, to use the euphemism of the day, ‘bomb happy’ and had to be evacuated to Palestine or Iraq was de Chair’s Arab interpreter.
Another was Brigadier Kingstone himself, who drove himself hard but was nearing his forty-ninth birthday and, despite his exertions, still carried a few more pounds than suited desert campaigning. After four sleepless days of it the man who had taken Kingcol to Baghdad, and would be awarded a bar to his 1918 DSO for doing so, cracked up and was delivered to a military hospital in Jerusalem. De Chair, who was also mending there, saw the former Sandhurst instructor and commandant of the army’s famous School of Equitation at Weedon, ‘staring ahead with unseeing eyes’, and felt for his humiliation. Kingstone was popular among his officers who were furious that Jumbo Wilson’s staff, ‘behind the stout defences of their mahogany desks’, had so blithely allowed the brigade to go into action without air cover.
The RAF persisted in trying to reduce L’Armee de l’Air by concentrating its attacks on its airfields and, frequent though these were, often found the French oddly unprepared for them. Roald Dahl, an entirely British product of Norwegian parents long settled in England, had joined the RAF in Kenya where he had just started working for Shell. He was 6 foot 6 and much too tall to be crammed into a fighter cockpit. Nonetheless, he flew Hurricanes in 80 Squadron and had been blooded against the Luftwaffe in Greece. His squadron’s main task was to protect the Haifa warships on their shore bombardment sorties up the coast that were sometimes attacked by Junkers 88 from Rhodes and Vichy Glenn Martins at the same time. But one weekend they found themselves switched to a ground attack on the French fighter station at Rayak in the Bekaa valley. They arrived at about lunchtime, s
weeping low over the field.
We saw to our astonishment a bunch of girls in brightly coloured cotton dresses standing out by the planes with glasses in their hands having drinks with the French pilots, and I remember seeing bottles of wine standing on the wings of one plane as we went swooshing over. It was a Sunday and the French men were evidently entertaining their girl friends and showing off their aircraft to them, which was a very French thing to do in the middle of a war at a front-line aerodrome. Every one of us held our fire on that first pass flying over the flying field and it was wonderfully comical to see the girls all dropping their wine glasses and galloping in their high heels for the door of the nearest building. We went around again but this time we were no longer a surprise and they were ready for us with their ground defences, and I am afraid that our chivalry resulted in damage to several of our Hurricanes, including my own.
Nonetheless, they succeeded in destroying some aircraft, though possibly not the five Dahl claimed. Undoubtedly the most successful airfield strike was delivered a few days later by the Australians of 3 RAAF Squadron who were the only pilots over Syria flying the American-built P40s which all the British Commonwealth air forces called Tomahawks. Nine of them took off from a newly rolled refuelling airstrip at the H5 pumping station and raided the French field at Homs, west of Palmyra, where they discovered over twenty Dewoitine 520s parked a little closer than was wise. In ten seconds they had turned five into blazing, broken-backed wrecks, badly damaged six more, and left eleven others in need of minor repairs. Exploding ammunition killed a French pilot and three mechanics. Then they flew to Rayak, which never seemed to be neglected, where they destroyed another Dewoitine, three Potez bombers and holed two more aircraft. Next they found some motor transport to shoot up, though, unlike Kingcol, the vehicles were protected by a Bofors-style light anti-aircraft battery. One of the Tomahawks, flown by a Sergeant Bailie, was badly holed but Bailie managed to keep it airborne long enough to make a belly landing in British Mandate Palestine just north of the Sea of Galilee.