England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  The French had just lost one of the submarines they were hoping to use against the British ships. Le Souffleur, which had a long history of battery problems, had surfaced to recharge them about 2 miles off the sponge divers’ harbour of Khaldé some 10 miles south of Beirut. She was running on one engine and years later local Lebanese recalled she was just visible from the coast.

  On deck six men were manning her anti-aircraft guns but the Fleet Air Arm’s Cyprus-based Swordfish and Albacores were not about. Instead she was spotted by Commander Michael Rimington patrolling the Lebanese coast at periscope depth in His Majesty’s Submarine Parthian. Rimington fired a full salvo of four torpedoes. The French lookouts spotted their wakes and Le Souffleur turned her narrow bows to comb through them. Three missed. The fourth hit the submarine amidships and almost broke her in two. She sank in just over 100 feet of water with the loss of at least fifty lives including Pierre Lejay, her commander. Four of the men manning the anti-aircraft guns managed to swim ashore where one was captured by an Australian infantry patrol and, according to some reports, later joined the Gaullists.

  Renewed attempts to send seaborne reinforcements fared just as badly. At Salonika French troops who had arrived there after a long rail journey through German-occupied territory embarked on two small troopships, the Saint Didier and the Oued Yquem. The super-destroyers Valmy and Guépard, both a little scarred from a recent brush with the New Zealand cruiser Leander, were also sent to collect troops. Extra fuel oil for them was made available by the Kriegsmarine in Salonika so they would not deplete supplies in Beirut. The ships were to disembark their passengers at the northern Syrian port of Latakia and ordered to ‘make use of neutral Turkish waters’ in both directions.

  The Saint Didier went first, clinging to the Anatolian coast as she edged around the north-eastern corner of the eastern Mediterranean where the shores of both Turkey and Syria are washed by the Gulf of Adalia. Nicosia-based Albacore torpedo bombers, possibly acting on wireless intercepts, launched their first torpedoes at the troopship at 7 a.m. on Friday, 4 July. Her master turned her neatly between their wakes while his gunners made some unimportant holes in the biplanes. They did not return until shortly after midday when her helmsman brought the Saint Didier through four more attempts to blow her out of the water.

  Albacores were being introduced to replace the Swordfish but it looked like the only improvement was its closed cockpit. By late afternoon the troopship was anchored about 400 yards off the Turkish coast, the deepest she had been into neutral waters, and poised to make her dash down the coast to Latakia as soon as it got dark. Why the French thought the British would observe Turkey’s territorial integrity any more than they were is unclear. At 5 p.m. the Albacores caught up with the ship and discovered that this time they had a nice stationary target on their hands. They still managed to miss with their first torpedo which took an expensive bite out of a Turkish breakwater and resulted in the kind of practised growls from Ankara that the Foreign Office could have done without. The second, third and fourth all found their mark and the Saint Didier sank, though with mercifully small loss of life. Most of those on board, some 500 men, survived to be interned by the Turks. Fatalities totalled fifty-two. But for the British the best result was that the other troopship, the Oued Yquem, was ordered to turn back and Vichy ended all attempts to send reinforcements by sea.

  John Masters, the clever young Gurkha battalion adjutant with the spear point battalion on the Euphrates, was also having dealings with the Turks. Although the air attacks were unabated, opposition on the ground was weak. They had now reached Tel Abiad, a small town about 100 miles east of Aleppo on the railway line that marked Syria’s northern frontier with Turkey. There was a miniature fort there, which Masters thought was exactly like something out of a Beau Geste movie set, that overlooked the town’s jumble of mud-brick buildings and dense dark green citrus orchards. Since the fort was such an obvious target they decided to use it merely as a lookout post and made their battalion headquarters in the orange groves.

  But Masters persuaded his battalion commander to park some of their most decrepit vehicles, the ones with only a few miles left in them, along the railway tracks and L’Armée de l’Air was lured into strafing Turkey’s well-guarded frontier. The gratifying result was the kind of heavy antiaircraft fire the Gurkhas had been dreaming about and at least one Glenn Martin departed trailing smoke. Afterwards Masters visited the elderly Turkish lieutenant in charge of the aircraft guns and assured him that the British presence on the border was purely temporary and they would never dream of treating Turkish territory in this cavalier French fashion. The next time the Glenn Martins came over, Masters estimated that the Turkish anti-aircraft guns started shooting when they were at least ‘two miles inside Syria’.

  Later he had a good look around the Beau Geste fort and discovered its last occupants had left them a message on one of its walls. Wait, dirty English bastards, until the Germans come. We run away now, so will you soon. ‘I love France and it made sad reading, in a way sadder than the actual fighting and that was tragic enough.’

  Only the Germans were not coming and the dirty English bastards were winning as everybody knew, in the end, they must, barring a miracle. High Commissioner Henri Dentz had predicted it on 22 June, the first day of the invasion of Russia. His pleasure at informing the buoyant Dr Rahn, Ribbentrop’s representative on the Armistice Commission in Syria, that L’Armée du Levant would collapse much faster than Stalin’s, is not hard to imagine. It had, after all, been Rahn who had started the whole thing off by providing the Iraqi rebels with military support and the British with a plausible casus belli. Then for four days Dentz had held his breath and wondered whether a miracle had occurred as the air force ensured that Palmyra held out and there was talk of reinforcements coming through Turkey.

  But the increasing aircraft losses, the sinking of the destroyer Chevalier Paul and the dogged British persistence on the ground soon disabused the High Commissioner of this. He sent two staff officers to Vichy to say that they could not hold out much longer and on the 28th Pétain and Darlan agreed that further resistance in Syria was pointless, but for some reason chose not to let Dentz into the secret.

  Then there was a new development. It was a peace feeler from Major General John Lavarack, Australia’s senior officer in the Syrian campaign and the first commander of the Tobruk garrison. Ten days into the fighting Lavarack, who had started out commanding the two brigades of 7th Australian Division, was put in charge of all the ground troops – Australian, UK British, Indian and Free French – except for the push into eastern Syria from Iraq which remained under the direct command of Jumbo Wilson in Jerusalem. The most forward Australian positions were now about 10 miles from Beirut almost up to the south bank of the Damour river which, at high summer, was a fordable sluggish brook at the bottom of a deep-sided wadi with thick banana groves at either side. Beyond it, straddling the coast road, was the little Christian town of Damour itself.

  But most of Lavarack’s command – Australians and UK battalions of the King’s Own, Queen’s and Leicesters – were much further to the southeast, bogged down among the rocks and sudden clumps of conifers in Lebanon’s gruelling mountain country where the mortar tube was king. In some cases the infantry were unable to advance from windy ridge lines they had been sitting on since the fifth day of the campaign. Even the Cypriot muleteers, like the Australians all volunteers, could not persuade their animals to climb to places like the Jebel Mazar. The Australians had to bump their wounded down on stretchers made out of rifles threaded through pullovers which ‘sagged so much it was like carrying a man in a bag’.

  In other places anonymous hilltops known only by their heights often changed hands several times. Sudden skirmishes were fought between men who sweltered all day then froze by night and were sometimes so short of food and water they took it from the enemy dead. Both sides made promiscuous use of grenades and much of the action was after dark. This seems to have suited t
he Australians who occasionally used bayonets and often had the advantage of considerable artillery support though this was rarely as effective as well-placed mortar bombs.

  Their opponents were usually Senegalese or Foreign Legionnaires. Spanish republicans among the latter sometimes drew the line at fighting for a France so ideologically close to Franco and surrendered. Usually the Legionnaires fought as hard as they did at Palmyra. When the Australian 2/31st Battalion finally took Hill 1284 from elements of the 6th Foreign Legion they discovered twenty-one fresh graves and fifteen unburied bodies. Shortly afterwards the Australians, who had thrown their last grenade, were forced to withdraw, though a small rearguard, which included a Bren-gun team, enabled them to take their wounded with them. Not that they needed to fear for them. L’Armée du Levant were usually scrupulous about observing the Red Cross. In one incident a French stretcher-bearer was killed attempting to rescue an Australian.

  Lavarack came to the conclusion that the best way to break this stalemate, which looked like it could go on for some time, was to keep up the pressure while appealing to Dentz to see reason. With Wilson’s approval he sent the High Commissioner a message via Cornelius van Engert, the US Consul General in Beirut, a well-regarded diplomat who had worked in the Levant for years.

  General Lavarack, feeling that to both Frenchmen and Australians the idea of comrades of the last war fighting against one another is repellent and distasteful and a useless waste of good men, suggests that he sends an envoy by air to Rayak or some other mutually convenient airport … which may lead to a solution of the unpleasant conditions which now exist and thus avoid unnecessary bloodshed.

  Unfortunately Lavarack sent his message, presumably through US diplomatic channels in Jerusalem or Cairo, the day after the RAF had decided to end the campaign in a more forthright manner: aerial assassination. In what at this stage of the war was a rare display of pinpoint bombing, at 6 p.m. on Sunday, 29 June four low-flying Blenheims placed fourteen 250-pound bombs on the High Commissioner’s Beirut Residency leaving five of his Syrian police guard dead and five wounded and the building’s neo-classical edifice severely disfigured. Dentz was not there. Along with the German diplomat Dr Rahn, he had moved several days before to the less bombed Aleppo from where he was making occasional sorties to Beirut. Some of the High Commissioner’s staff urged him to retaliate by attacking Jumbo Wilson’s headquarters at the King David Hotel in west Jerusalem but Dentz did not want to go down as the man who bombed the Holy City. Seven years later the Zionist terrorists of Irgun Zvei Leumi, who had no such scruples, almost certainly made a much better job of the King David Hotel than any air force would have done.

  On the coast the Australians had captured Damour, started shelling Beirut’s southern suburbs which were now just within range of their 25-pounders and were advancing between beach and mountain up the flat, straight coast road to Khaldé opposite the submarine Le Souffleur’s last resting place. For just over three days the French had fought hard to keep Damour with some dogged resistance from the Legion and a spirited counter-attack by some Algerian Tirailleurs. Among the Australian casualties was the tall Lieutenant Roden Cutler, the daring forward observation officer for the 25-pounders of 2/5th Field Regiment.

  At dawn, as the British bombardment lifted, Cutler was on the north bank of Wadi Damour with 2/16th’s West Australian infantry, the spear head battalion. At pistol point he extracted from dugouts overlooked by the battalion’s vanguard, six possibly shell-shocked Legionnaires. Then, covered by a Bren gunner, he grenaded a persistent machine-gun post, rushed it and accepted another five prisoners, giving a man shot through the cheek a field dressing and his water bottle. Shortly afterwards, while walking back through a banana stand for a field telephone to replace a defective radio, a bullet shattered his right leg below the knee. All around him Vichy snipers were still active. Found after dark then abandoned by a small group of demoralized Australians creeping back to their own lines, convinced in the confusion of the banana groves that their attack had failed, he was not rediscovered until twenty-six hours after he had been shot.

  By then his leg had become gangrenous and would be amputated from above the knee. His stretcher party were four of the Legionnaires Cutler had captured, delighted to take a gunner search party to the area where the brave young officer who had handed over his water bottle to their wounded comrade might be found. Somebody took a photograph of them carrying the wounded Australian hero down a long straight road, the stretcher party’s poilu helmets instantly recognizable, while French shells explode in the background and Cutler’s head is inclined in conversation towards Captain Adrian Johnson, his regiment’s medical officer who is walking beside him. ‘For most conspicuous and sustained gallantry’ over a nineteen-day period starting with him, surrounded by the dead and the dying, repulsing the tanks with a Boys rifle at Merjayoun, Lieutenant Cutler, just turned 25, would be awarded the Victoria Cross.

  On 8 July, the day before Damour finally fell, High Commissioner Dentz returned to Beirut from Aleppo to call on Consul General van Engert and ask the American if he would enquire about the British terms for a ceasefire. Afterwards he went to inspect the latest damage at his Residency which had been bombed for a second time. The bombing was at the insistence of Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Tedder, newly appointed commander of Britain’s Middle East Air Force who, impatient with the army’s slow progress, thought he would show them how it was done.

  In Sydney a few hours later Sir Frederick Stewart, Australia’s Minister for External Affairs, announced that the Vichy French had asked for a cessation of hostilities in Syria and shortly afterwards this was leading all BBC news bulletins. General Lavarack was furious about the leak. Dentz might be talking peace but everywhere the French were counter-attacking. ‘Knowledge of the possibility of an armistice will make troops less inclined to do the things which so often mean the difference between success and failure. No man is likely to risk his life unnecessarily if he feels the campaign is virtually over.’

  By and large Lavarack must have been right about this. Yet some of his infantry, Australian and UK British, were still fighting as if they had only just begun. Under a crescent moon north of Jezzine in the early hours of 10 July, a company of Australians attacked a French-held ridge they called Bandarane Heights which involved clambering up a series of terraces 2 or 3 feet high. To the right of the ridge Private James Gordon, a 32-year-old farmer of Scots descent who had married shortly before he left West Australia and was the father of a baby boy, was among a platoon pinned down by intense large-calibre automatic fire and grenades. Gordon began a solitary crawl towards the source of this unpleasantness. When he felt he had got slightly behind the enemy, he sprang to his feet and bayoneted and shot four Senegalese he caught lying around a Hotchkiss. This action, which was on his own initiative though not perhaps entirely unexpected, for Gordon had already established a reputation for taking calculated risks, secured the position and resulted in Australia’s second VC of the campaign. William Dargie, the war artist who painted Gordon’s portrait, described him as, ‘Not the smiling, happy-go lucky “Digger” of legend but the slightly older-than-young man with a definite sense of responsibility.’

  At about the same time as Gordon was approaching the Senegalese the 2nd Battalion King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment was forming up for an assault on two rocky and precipitous flat-topped volcanic peaks of the Jebel Mazar, one rising to 1,404 feet and the other about 50 feet taller with a short saddle of land between them. These were part of the tiered French defences commanding the winding highway down to the coast from Damascus with their artillery, mortars and heavy machine guns. Facing the King’s Own, the smaller Peak 1404 was to their right nearest the vital road half a mile away and Peak 1455 to their left covering its slightly lower neighbour from that flank. Capturing them would allow Lavarack to augment the Australians’ advance on Beirut from the south with an additional one from the east to make it a two-pronged attack. Lieutenant Colonel Barraclough, the Kin
g’s Own CO, presented their task as an integral part of the ceasefire talks, explaining to his officers that their success would compel Vichy to accept their terms.

  It was part of a brigade attack with the King’s Own, the Leicesters, the Queen’s and the Free French Marines battalion that was attacking a similar position on the Bel Habil on the other side of the road. The only artillery support available was a battery of light mountain guns on loan to the British Indian Army from the Jammu and Kashmir State Forces that was to be deployed according to need once the fight had started. Otherwise, it was decided to make a virtue of necessity and make it a moonlit surprise attack without attempting a preliminary barrage from the mountain guns and mortars. The King’s Own started to move off at 3.30 a.m. which was about ninety minutes before first light. But scree rattling underfoot alerted French listening posts and the night was immediately lit up by flares and tracer. ‘Rather as though someone had pulled down a main switch,’ noted the regimental historian. Bent double, they tried not to bunch and pressed on, ready to throw themselves down if the tracer was anything but a long way overhead. At one point the ground briefly levelled off into a little plateau which led into a narrow re-entry-type dent in the baked earth, the end of which was walled in by a small 20-foot-high cliff. On the ledge above this were the first serious Vichy positions.

  In the dark Second Lieutenant Edward Bailey got his men to make the kind of human pyramid beloved by instructors on assault courses, clambered up it and once over the edge was almost immediately heard to be using his revolver while a shower of grenades down the cliff face made it impossible for his men to follow. Later Bailey’s body was found next to the Tirailleur he shot as he was impaled by his adversary’s fixed bayonet, the causes of death on both sides still gripped in their hands. It was also established that before this happened Bailey had managed to shoot dead the French company commander in this sector.