England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Tomahawks had not been operational for long and they soon acquired a reputation for giving and taking punishment. Yet at first the Australians had loathed them. The squadron had seen six months continuous desert action, chalked up fifty kills against their Italian and German opponents and during the course of it experienced no difficulty in swapping their Gladiators for Hurricanes. Then a few weeks prior to the Syrian invasion they had been sent to an airfield near Tel Aviv for some well-earned rest before they became another Desert Air Force squadron to convert to Tomahawks. This was expected to take these experienced and adaptable pilots a matter of days.

  Nineteen crashed P40s later, none fatal and few write-offs but much more than the RAF could afford, they were being reprimanded by Air Vice-Marshal Tedder, the senior air force officer in the Middle East, who told the Air Ministry: ‘The Australians are unexpectedly making very heavy weather over the Tomahawks but I have applied a little ginger which, I hope, will have the necessary effect.’

  It was not until the end of 1940, shortly after the Battle of Britain was won, that the RAF took delivery of its first Curtiss Wright P40 Tomahawks. They were part of an order for 230 the French government had placed with its American manufacturer that had been lost to the armistice. When they arrived in England their instrument panels were still in French. But by then the Darwinian demands of the summer’s fighting over southern England had led to extraordinary leaps of evolution in single-seater fighters as both sides adapted to survive. Continuous improvements to engine power, armament and armour meant that the P40s were not in the same league as the latest marks of Spitfires or Messerschmitts. British fighter pilots also found them difficult to put down because they required a flatter two-point landing whereby wing wheels touch first then the tail wheel rather than the simultaneous contact of a three-point. This was the Australians problem with them. Once test flights confirmed that they were not good enough for Europe they were shipped to the Middle East.

  The Desert Air Force learned to love them. They were better than their early model Hurricanes. More important, they were better than the early model Messerschmitts supporting the Afrika Korps. They might have had slow rates of climb, and at high altitudes stagger drunkenly about in stratospheric disarray, but lower down they turned out to be nimble dogfighters and excellent in ground attack. Until, towards the end of the year, the Germans diverted some of their later Messerschmitts to Africa, there was an unexpected interlude of British air superiority in the desert war.

  When 3 RAAF Squadron entered Syria they soon discovered that what applied in the desert applied even more in the French Levant. Their Tomahawks were more than a match for L’Armée de l’Air’s Dewoitine 520s which looked and performed like Hawker Hurricanes though, since most had led a more mothballed existence, they sometimes had the edge over their sand-sore doppelgängers. On the other side of the ledger, two of the Dewoitine squadron commanded by Sous-lieutenant Pierre Le Gloan, who was emerging as the French ace of the Syrian campaign, had been shot down by tighter turning Gladiator biplanes at no loss to themselves.

  Increasingly shrill demands for air cover from Kingcol had led to the RAF reluctantly ordering Tomahawks to pay occasional visits to Palmyra’s desert environs though, without the assistance of ground radar, it was realized that the chances of them coinciding with a French sortie were remote. Nonetheless, on the day before their devastating attack on the Homs airfield they had brought down three twin-engined Lioré et Olivier 451s, a good-looking twin-engined bomber, its 300mph envisaged by its designers as being so fast that fighters would pant behind it to be picked off by a 20mm cannon mounted in a rear turret. The Tomahawk was at least 6omph faster. But this interception was regarded as a bit of a fluke. The much greater damage inflicted at Homs twenty-four hours later was held up as sufficient vindication of the policy of targeting airfields to the exclusion of almost anything else.

  This was all true. After nineteen days’ fighting French aircraft losses exceeded the British by 45 to 16. Vichy attempts to reply in kind were limited to a couple of ineffectual attacks on RAF Nicosia in Cyprus which was mainly used by the Fleet Air Arm’s torpedo-carrying Swordfish and Albacores. It was almost impossible to get at the British on the ground because they were operating from such a wide area. The RAF had at least a dozen airfields at its disposal, landing and taking off from strips scattered all over northern Palestine and Jordan. And now the RAF, which had become adept at exploiting newly captured airfields quickly in the roller-coaster Libyan desert war, was beginning to increase its range and endurance by refuelling at Damascus’s newly captured Mezze airfield.

  So the French continued to concentrate on using their air force in a ground support role, a field in which the RAF did not yet shine as all the British Empire troops involved in this campaign knew to their cost. Certainly the steady attrition of French air power on its airfields was of no immediate comfort to Kingcol where nerves were getting as brittle as melba toast. What they longed to see was L’Armee de l’Air being shot out of the sky. Then on the morning of Saturday, 28 June they got their wish.

  Nine Tomahawks had flown up to the newly captured airfield at Mezze to refuel and rendezvous with a flight of Blenheims they were escorting on a raid against the Palmyra garrison. The Australians thought the Blenheims had finished their raid when they noticed the sudden belated eruption of another rash of bomb bursts in the sand. They looked again and saw that it was not the Blenheims that were responsible for this but six other, slightly larger, twin-engined aircraft that were bombing in pairs. These were land-based Aeronavale Glenn Martins of Escadrille 7B, each with a crew of four.

  One of the many pleasing characteristics of the P40 was its dive speed. An Australian ace serving with an RAF squadron once described it as ‘faster downhill than any other aeroplane with a propeller’. The Tomahawks dropped onto the Glenn Martins like cats. Below them British soldiers emerged from various holes in the ground cheering wildly as, one after the other, all six French aircraft, some trailing smoke and flame, hit the ground. ‘A right and left. Another – and another,’ screamed one of the young aristocrats who officered His Majesty’s Life Guards, watching it through his binoculars and shouting out a commentary for his men like some manic head keeper at a pheasant shoot.

  In four of the aircraft everybody died. Two each survived from the remainder though one pair, tended by Bedouin and brought in the next day, were badly burnt. Altogether twenty French aircrew lost their lives. There were no Australian casualties in the action. Only afterwards was a sergeant pilot killed by an engine failure on take-off at Mezze where the Tomahawks had, once again, stopped to refuel before returning to their latest Palestinian base near the Arab market town of Jenin.

  Despite their losses French aircrews continued to bomb all the advances into Syria across its desert border with Iraq and there was never another success on the same scale as the one the Tomahawks had inflicted on the Aeronavale Glenn Martins. But after that Saturday morning massacre there could be no doubt that the French air attacks on the column grew less intense. And when they did come they came with Dewoitine escorts that no longer added their ground strafing to the bombs but remained high and watched each others’ backs.

  At the start of the move on Palmyra Churchill had referred in the House of Commons to a ‘ring of steel’ being placed around the oasis which, to say the least, turned out to be a bit premature. Now that was beginning to come true. Between them the 1st Essex and the Wiltshire Yeomanry had succeeded in capturing the Chateau, the site of an ancient fortress northwest of the town, and Yellow ridge, a tactical bump in the ground with a decent field of fire which at one point the French had recaptured and the Essex recovered.

  In the Palmyra fighting both sides used Arab troops to their advantage. The British had Glubb’s Girls. The French paid and equipped the Syrian-born Fawzi el-Kawakji and his Palestinian guerrillas. Kawakji had first fought the British as an officer in one of Ottoman Turkey’s Arab regiments during the Palestine campaign of 1915
–18. Then he went on to play a leading role in the 1930s Arab revolt over Britain’s decision to permit limited Jewish immigration there. Now he had attached himself to the will-o’-the-wisp raiders in armoured cars and trucks, they were mainly Légère du Désert, who ambushed supply convoys with the kind of merciless relish British marauders regularly displayed against Rommel’s Libyan baggage train. Survivors from an incident where twenty-two of the Warwickshire Yeomanry were either killed or captured complained they were tricked by a white flag flying from one of his armoured cars. Later, captive French officers insisted that all their vehicles flew them as an agreed identification signal with their air force to ward off friendly fire.

  Then George Clark, the general commanding of 1st Cavalry Division from which the Yeomanry and Household Cavalry were drawn and more involved since Kingstone’s nervous breakdown, decided to protect their vulnerable lines of communication with Glubb Pasha’s Bedouin. Glubb began by occupying two of Vichy’s small desert outposts either side of the Tripoli pipeline. First his vehicles rolled up to Seba Biyer (seven wells), about 80 miles south-west of Palmyra, where the French warrant officer in charge promptly paraded his men and declared he had always been a devout Gaullist.

  Next Glubb went to As-Sukhna, a mainly Christian village some 60 miles north-east known for its hot springs, which was suspected of being a hide-out for some of the Vichy raiders. All they found there were apprehensive civilians and a deserted gendarmerie post. A Household Cavalry squadron came up to hold the place while the Arab Legion took its trucks on a wide reconnaissance sweep north-westwards towards Aleppo. They drew a blank. Then at about 7.30 a.m. on 1 July Glubb saw fast vehicle dust and quite a lot of it approaching from the direction of Deir Ez Zor to the east. As it came closer and he got his field glass on it he counted six armoured cars and four trucks carrying armed men. Some were flying white flags and Tricolours.

  I was standing on a gravelly ridge with some 30 men and our three home made armoured cars. The rest of our men had moved into a little valley behind our right where there was firewood to make tea and breakfast. About 500 yards from us the column halted and the enemy infantry dismounted from their vehicles and lay down. This was a fatal mistake. We always fought from our vehicles. A man on foot in open desert with a rifle is helpless. I told our armoured cars and our 30 infantry to hold the ridge and dashed off to collect our machine-gun trucks, proposing to bring them round the enemy’s flank and surround them. Our 30 infantry and three armoured cars were, however, too impatient to wait and, dashing forward, overran the enemy’s infantry. When I appeared with the trucks behind the enemy’s flank, their vehicles were already in full flight.

  This was far from the end of it. Glubb’s Bedouin had their blood up; some of them were irregulars from those Syrian tribes who did not enjoy the favours of the French and loathed them as much as Fawzi el-Kawakji’s Palestinians loathed the English. A 60mph chase ensued, with men clinging to their vehicles, firing their rifles in the air and chanting their war song, part of which went: ‘Our foes are sick with fear. Pursue them to the death! Abu Haneik! Abu Haneik! Abu Haneik!’ Abu Haneik meant ‘Father of the Little Jaw’ and was their affectionate nickname for Glubb whose lower visage had been foreshortened at Passchendaele when part of his chin was shot away.

  In this case their foes might well have been sick with fear. When they had taken on the armoured cars and the scattering of men they had spotted on the gravelly ridge line they had not realized what lay behind them. They were outnumbered by over four to one and excitable Bedouin were not renowned for taking prisoners. In the end, the French troops were cornered in a box valley and Glubb was sufficiently up with his leading vehicles to ensure that their surrender was accepted, though not before one distraught French officer blew his own brains out. They turned out to be the best part of the 2ième Compagnie Légère du Désert: three French officers and eighty Syrian soldiers. All the French armoured cars, trucks and the heavy machine guns that went with them were captured intact. Including the suicide, eleven had died. ‘Thereafter there were no more raids on our communcations,’ wrote Glubb with pardonable pride. Fawzi el-Kawekji was not among the prisoners or the dead. He had been wounded when his vehicle was hit by a strafing Hurricane and was on his way back to Beirut and thence by air to Salonika, Athens and Berlin where he would spend the rest of the war.

  Two days later, there was no more Vichy Palmyra either, now entirely cut off as the Essex and the Yeomanry really did become a ring of steel, its air support dwindling and sans raiders to nibble at the English flanks. When at 6 a.m. on 3 July the garrison and its outpost at the T3 pumping station surrendered, there were only 187 men left on their feet. Of these 6 were French officers: 48 air force ground crew who had been working at the local airfield; 87 mostly German and Russian Foreign Legionnaires who, as Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union neared the end of its second week, had fought shoulder to shoulder for the Legion. There were also 24 Syrians who were all that was left of the 3ième Compagnie Légere de Désert whose comrades had shed their uniforms and melted back into their villages. These men, with the considerable help of their air force, had held up some 3,000 British troops for twelve days.

  While the trucks of the Yeomanry and the Household Cavalry at last moved towards the rail junction at Homs, their right flank was being covered by Gurkhas, Indians and the armoured cars of the 13th Lancers. Slim’s 10th Indian Division, or at least its 21st Brigade, which had all the petrol and water there was to spare and that was not enough, had advanced north-westwards along the Euphrates and captured Deir Ez Zor and its bridge on the same day that Palmyra fell. Their progress had not been easy. The Indians and Gurkhas found the midsummer heat and dust of the Syrian desert, which gummed the eyelids of sleeping men, just as unbearable as the Englishmen suffocating in their armoured cars. And, like Kingcol, they had been tormented by the incessant attentions of L’Armée de l’Air operating from the safest airfield Vichy had left in the Levant at Aleppo, Syria’s most northerly city. ‘While the number of casualties inflicted were not many, the effect on morale of the frequent bombing and machine gunning from the air was serious,’ admitted Slim in his report on his division’s operations.

  Captain John Masters, Adjutant of the 2nd Battalion 4th Prince of Wales’ Own Gurkha Rifles, recalled that the rear echelon of his brigade produced three deserters, none of them Gurkhas. One paid an awful price for it.

  An Indian non-combatant cook of Brigade Headquarters couldn’t take it and ran away. We found his headless, mutilated body tangled in the reeds by the river the next morning. The Arabs had done us the service of underlining that discipline must hold fast against natural fear. Two Madrassi signallers also decided that they had had enough but, since they were determined in their fear and had a vehide, they succeeded in reaching Basra, 550 miles to the rear. There was considerable confusion everywhere in those days and I believe they got petrol by saying they were carrying urgent dispatches.

  Masters longed for the RAF to show the Gurkhas what it could do and, to try to keep the army happy, it did make the occasional patrol with no real expectation of contact. There were simply not enough planes to cover the turf. The Australians had been very lucky over Palmyra. Then one afternoon it happened. Three Lioré et Olivier 451s were making their second sortie of the day to Deir Ez Zor from their base at Tel Abu Danne outside Aleppo. High above them they had an escort of eight Dewoitines. Between the French fighters and the three bombers were two Hurricanes of 127 Squadron flown by a Warrant Officer Pitcher and a Sergeant Adams. This was their third visit to the area that day and now it looked like third time lucky. Below them Masters had spotted the French aircraft, wrongly identifying them all as Glenn Martins. ‘Two black dots appeared in the south east. Crouched on the burning sand I pointed up and shouted to those Gurkhas within earshot: “Hurricanes! Now watch!” The Hurricane was at the height of its fame after the Battle of Britain.’

  Above the Hurricanes a Lieutenant Legrand in one of the Dewoitines spo
tted their tracer as they opened up on the bombers perhaps a little too early. He and his wingman, Sergent-chef Maccia, and a Sergent Ghesquière, dived at Adams’s aircraft and all three gave it a burst. On the ground Masters watched as, ‘A black tree root grew from the leading Hurricane’s wing, turned red, expanded. It turned lazily on its side and plunged to earth.’

  An air gunner on one of the bombers claimed that, before the remaining Dewoitines were ready to attack, it was he who shot down the second Hurricane flown by Warrant Officer Pitcher. What is indisputable is that, as he went down, Pitcher either collided with or rammed a Lioré et Olivier flown by a Lieutenant Bardollet who nursed his broken machine back to Tel Abu Danne. Its scars were the only damage inflicted by Masters’s Battle of Britain fighters and none of them visible to the watchers on the ground. The Gurkhas avoided my eye and I theirs,’ he wrote. ‘Both pilots had died and we’d bloody well have to put up with the consequences, as they had.’

  In terms of aircraft destroyed this was one of the few French successes as the fourth week of operations drew to a close with Vichy losing twenty-one aircraft and the British four. Some of these losses were in transit. Three out of six Morane 406s, all well used in 1940, failed to become operational: one crashed in Rome, another broke down on a Luftwaffe field in Athens and the third burst into flames on arrival at Aleppo killing its pilot. Yet despite these setbacks, and perhaps a growing realization that there was no way they could win this conflict, L’Armée de l’Air and Aeronavale continued to pour in reinforcements. Fighters included a dozen Aeronavale Dewoitine 520s from Morocco. Another Aeronavale contribution was six Late 298 torpedo-bombers, an open-cockpit monoplane seaplane. They were harboured in the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli, presumably with the Royal Navy’s offshore bombardment units further south in mind.