by Colin Smith
Among the capital’s French-speaking elite Berthe Mayer was well known as an accomplished pianist who had studied at London’s Royal School of Music. She was the wife of Percy Mayer who, like her, had been born and brought up in the British colony of Mauritius. Mayer’s considerable, if now mostly moribund business interests, included being local agent for the Ford Motor Company.
At a time when almost everything, including entertainment, was in short supply in the blockaded Vichy colony and even baguettes were being made from rice, Berthe’s musical soirees were popular. Imagine then her friends’ surprise had they known that the pianist’s fast and assured touch with a Morse key had become equally admired by the British signals personnel at Special Operations Executive’s African headquarters in Durban.
At the end of October 1941 Madame Mayer went to her bathroom, extracted her transmitter from behind its false ceiling and began to tap out the most important signal her husband – for mostly she played postman to his spy – had yet to send to Durban. As a result, on 3 November, the Royal Navy captured an entire convoy of five Vichy blockade-runners as they left Madagascar for France. Even with Britain’s appetite for shipping it was an enormous meal at one sitting: 40,000 tons worth. Among the prizes were the liner Compiegne, the SS Padaran and the SS Bangkok which in July had delivered six twin-engined Potez 63–11 bombers to the island. The Padaran, her engines damaged in an attempt to scuttle, was doggedly towed the 362 miles to South Africa’s Port Elizabeth in just under four days. ‘A very fine show indeed,’ declared Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, in a letter of thanks to SOE.
German reaction was equally predictable. The idea that French lack of security, perhaps even Gaullist infiltration, had allowed Britain to replenish some of its own merchant shipping losses so easily was intolerable. Its representatives on the Armistice Commission, which ultimately controlled all Vichy military movements, forbade Darlan to send any more reinforcements to Indian Ocean waters. By the spring of 1942, when Vichy’s Secretariat of Marine was becoming increasingly convinced that the English had Syrian designs on Madagascar, this unexpected bonus of Madame Mayer’s timely signal was still in place.
Madagascar is the world’s fourth biggest island after Greenland, New Guinea and Borneo. It is as long as New Zealand and larger than France, being 1,000 miles in length and 400 at its widest point. Once heavily forested, by the middle of the twentieth century slash and burn clearance for rice growing and a voracious timber industry greedy for its ebony and rosewood had all but devoured it. An estimated seven-eighths of the island was covered in tall prairie grass interspersed with clumps of bamboo and stands of the tall traveller’s tree, a native palm (Ravenala madagascariensis) whose huge leaves hold enough water to save a man from dying of thirst and provide excellent house thatch.
In 1942 about 4 million people lived on the island which gave it a population density of five people per square kilometre, one of the smallest in the world. About 3.6 million were native Malagasy who are not of African but mainly Indonesian stock, the descendants of a migration across the Indian Ocean that peaked about the time of England’s Norman conquest. Their language has old Austronesian roots though they have mingled enough with their African and Arab neighbours to acquire words from both. About 25,000 resident French were equally divided between the colonial civil servants who administered the island and the colons who tried to get rich by exporting its wood, vanilla and the graphite used in electrodes. There were also 10,500 Africans and Asians, among the latter a fairly prosperous community of Chinese traders, some 3,000 Europeans who had the misfortune not to be French and, officially, about 2,000 Métis which, given the reputation of its colonizers, seems like a remarkably small number. On the north-west coast there were small communities of Swahili-speaking Muslims from the Comoros Islands at the northern end of the broad Mozambique Channel separating Madagascar from East Africa.
Unlike the smaller Indian Ocean islands of Réunion, restored to France in 1815 as a post-Waterloo goodwill gesture from its new rulers, and Mauritius, which the privateer Surcouf knew as the Ile de France, Britain and France had never fought over Madagascar. On the contrary, in 1845 an Anglo-French military expedition tried and failed to topple Queen Ranavalona who, riled by the westernization of her realm, had persecuted Christian converts and expelled missionaries. A particular target was the London Missionary Society whose Protestant ministers had considerably increased literacy by devising a Latin alphabet for Malagasy that had only ever been written down in Arabic script.
After Ranavalona’s death in 1861, the missionaries were allowed back and French influence, commercial and military, increased, though Madagascar avoided formal European annexation until 1896. For the first ten years there were a series of uprisings, sometimes bloodily suppressed. But by the 1930s coffee, tobacco and cloves crops had been introduced, three major roads and some railways built and bush airstrips cleared. About half its population still practised a lavish form of ancestor worship involving occasional outings for the dead who were returned in new shrouds to tombs better built than most houses. The other half were Christians, though often by no means entirely immune to the old ways, and about equally divided between the Protestant and Catholic churches.
Like Djibouti on the Red Sea, Madagascar was isolated from France’s other African possessions, being much closer to the Anglophile President Jan Smuts’s Union of South Africa and the British colonies of Kenya and Tanganyika. When France fell Governor Jules Marcel de Coppet, a socialist appointee of the Popular Front not long in office, walked into the studios of Radio Tananarive and made a broadcast that seemed to be advising his listeners to support de Gaulle. For a moment it appeared he might have caught a defiant, anti-armistice mood among the whites. Then along came the casualty lists from Mers-el-Kébir and, though he could have relied on South African military support, the governor dithered and de Gaulle had to accept the loss – for the moment.
In any case, Vichy’s National Revolution with its emphasis on hard work, family values and unflinching patriotism was undoubtedly the message Madagascar’s colons really wanted to hear for, like expatriates everywhere, they had long suspected the old country was going to the dogs. Léon Blum’s Popular Front could never be their France. With this went an instinctive Anglophobia, their creed a casual Fashoda complex that left them in no doubt that the English had always lusted after all of French Africa. Nor was the governor’s case helped by the unanimous support he received from British missionaries. Vichy replaced de Coppet with his immediate predecessor, the Algerian-born Léon Cayla.
This was a popular choice among many of the Malagasy as well as the whites, for the ebullient Cayla had been Madagascar’s longest serving governor – nine years from 1930 to 1939 – and in some circles was considered the man mostly responsible for improving the colony’s economy. Then in April 1941 Cayla, who like de Coppet was almost 60, had to retire for health reasons. He was replaced by Armand Annet, previously Lieutenant Governor of Dahomey, before 1919 German Togoland, and at 52 coming towards the end of an unblemished career in the colonial service. Annet was shrewd, hard-working, had all his generation’s reverence for Pétain and knew how to please. In a report to his immediate boss, Amiral Platon, Vichy’s Secretary General to the Colonies, he obviously delighted in recounting how he had revived an ancient tribute ceremony in which the local aristocracy offered him the first sheaf of their rice harvest. ‘I responded that the call to work was one of the precepts of the Marshal. Then I handed a symbolic angady [spade] to each of the sheaf carriers.’
From the start Percy Mayer had regretted the departure of Governor de Coppet and had been anti-Pétain. Both ends of the Indian Ocean were British and, quite apart from any other considerations, Vichy’s isolation was not good for a family who thrived on trade. The Mayers, who were of Alsatian and possibly Jewish stock, had long been established in Mauritius. Percy was born there in 1903, a French-speaking British subject of the colony’s wealthy and close-knit Eur
asian mercantile class who prided themselves on having the best of all worlds: French style, British law, the world’s two major languages, a knowledge of wine and a touch of Indian cuisine. Although he had studied engineering in London, there was never any doubt that he would join the family firm Edwin Mayer & Co whose interests included rice and flour mills, a distillery, insurance, and importing refrigerators, radios and bicycles as well as cars.
Clever, energetic and ambitious, in 1934 Percy was appointed the firm’s permanent representative in Madagascar and shortly afterwards, because it made things easier in business, acquired French citizenship. As well as being an accomplished yachtsman, he was also a good amateur pilot who had set up an air service to those parts of the island that remained inaccessible by road. In 1938, during a visit to Mauritius, he had married his cousin Berthe Mayer, a striking, raven-haired young woman who had recently returned from her London interlude, and took her back to his well-appointed house in Tananarive and the Steinway piano he had bought her.
Vichy rule gradually severed Madagascar’s contacts with its Anglo neighbours. In November 1940 Mayer had arrived in South Africa on the last passenger ship from Madagascar’s east coast port of Tamatave and contacted Lord Harlech, Britain’s High Commissioner who was based in Cape Town. ‘Mayer is ready to put his services at the disposal of the British authorities in order to assist in any way the detachment of the island from allegiance to Vichy,’ Harlech reported to London. SOE took a look at Mayer and liked what it saw. ‘Great charm, absolutely fearless and clear minded.’
The Mauritian managed to prolong his stay in South Africa for four months. During this time he was given intensive wireless training, learning to use a high-speed Morse key, coding and decoding, and operating a suitcase transmitter. Then he returned to Madagascar with his radio, sailing to the west coast port of Majunga in a small boat he had bought after persuading a Bank Line steamer to put him and his craft down in the Mozambique Channel some 250 miles from the island’s west coast. In October 1941 he returned to Durban on a shorter visit, this time going via the neutral Portuguese port of Lourenco Marques where he had been dropped by a Malagasy blockade-runner.
The Treasury agreed to pay SOE an extra £4,000 a year to fund Mayer who, as well as setting up a network of agents, was expected to spend a good deal of it on subversion and propaganda. In addition, Sir Bede Clifford, the Governor of Mauritius, which was the nearest British listening post to Madagascar, had encouraged SOE to set up France Libre d’Outremer, a radio station that made entirely unfounded allegations about the private lives of the devout Catholic Annet and his underlings. In Whitehall it was hoped that their agent, by dint of ‘bribery, corruption, murder’, would bring the island into the Anglo-Gaullist fold on the cheap and save the blood and treasure of a full-scale invasion.
But it soon became clear that the colony’s ability to feed itself, an apathetic civilian majority, and a ruling clique of no more than 100 senior military and civil servants made the chances of an anti-Pétainist coup remote. ‘I am convinced, and Mayer confirms, that propaganda alone will never alter the political situation in Madagascar,’ Sir Bede reported.
But there was little appetite in London for military intervention, though de Gaulle hoped that his representative in South Africa might persuade Jan Smuts to have a word with Churchill. Then, thousands of miles away from Madagascar, a remorseless series of events began to take its toll. Relations between Japan and the Americans, who were supplying the Chinese military in its war against the Japanese invaders, were going from bad to worse. Talks with a Japanese delegation in Washington about lifting the US trade embargo against Japan had reached an impasse. Tokyo was scarcely bothering to hide its preparations for a wider war. In French Indochina Vichy, without even a token resistance, had allowed Japan to move into naval bases and military airfields in southern Vietnam and Cambodia. A few days before Japan’s almost simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong and northern Malaya, the British Chiefs of Staff were already discussing the awful possibility that the French might grant the Axis powers similar facilities on its huge African island.
Britain’s main supply route to Egypt avoided running the Mediterranean gauntlet by sailing around the Cape then through the Mozambique Channel between Madagascar and East Africa en route to the Red Sea and the Suez canal. Godfrey’s naval intelligence department argued that they would all sleep better at nights if a pre-emptive strike secured for the Royal Navy the port of Diego Suarez on the island’s north-eastern tip. Entered through a mile-wide gap in a cliff between Cap Diego and the dockyard town of Antsirane, it was a superb natural harbour almost big enough to accommodate the entire Japanese fleet. In 1935 France had completed new jetties and oil bunkering facilities there and its narrow entrance was commanded by formidable coastal batteries. It would be a foolhardy enemy who tried to get through its front door.
On 10 December 1941 Japanese torpedo-bombers based on Vichy’s Indochina airfields took ninety minutes to sink, with the loss of over 800 men, the Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse which were off the Malayan coast and just in range of the aircraft’s new landing grounds. Churchill heard the news in bed and turned his face to the wall in one of his rare moments of utter despair. The Prince of Wales was Britain’s newest battleship and had been sent to the Far East in the hope that the sight of her awesome profile would keep Tokyo neutral. Shortly after the news of the sinkings was announced, Darlan was seen at an official reception in animated conversation with the Emperor’s ambassador to Vichy. As the Japanese blitzkrieg gathered momentum, and in rapid succession the Anglo-Americans suffered defeat after defeat, preparations for the Madagascar operation gathered apace. On 23 December, forty-eight hours before the Christmas Day surrender of Hong Kong, Major General Robert Sturges of the Royal Marines was appointed commander of Force 121: the land element of what would be Britain’s first major amphibious landings since Gallipoli where Lieutenant Sturges had heard his first shots in anger and whose mistakes he was determined to avoid. Its code-name was Ironclad.
The nucleus of Force 121 was to be Brigadier Francis Festing’s 29th Independent Brigade Group. This was an obvious choice because for over a year it had been in Scotland undergoing the kind of intensive training for combined operations normally confined to the Commandos. Its men had spent months living on ships and getting in and out of landing craft and to all intents and purposes were marine infantry, though the Commandos sometimes tended to be a bit sniffy about their boat-handling skills. Instead of an infantry brigade’s usual three battalions the 29th had four: 1st Royal Scots Fusiliers; 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers; 2nd South Lancashires; 2nd East Lancashires plus an independent artillery battery, the 455th Light, with four 3.7-inch howitzers and two 25-pounders. There was also an anti-aircraft troop of four Bofors.
For Operation Ironclad, Festing’s brigade was strengthened by the attachment of two other units. One was 5 Commando, 500 men who had been training even longer than 11 Scottish had been when they went into action on the Litani and were just as keen, though their hard-drinking commanding officer was nowhere near as good as Pedder. The other was the Royal Armoured Corps’ Special Service B Squadron with its twelve tanks: six Valentines and six Tetrarchs.
The latter was a small, fast, but thinly armoured tracked reconnaissance vehicle named after one of the essential four parts of an ancient Macedonian phalanx. Like the heavier Valentine, it was armed with a 2-pounder cannon as well as a machine gun but this did not stop it being any more than a mini-tank.
In the early part of 1942 about twenty of them were shipped to the Soviet Union where they were treated with the kind of curiosity an élite cavalry unit might reserve for a troop of Shetland ponies. No tank has ever been spacious but perhaps only certain Japanese models ever required the same Houdini-like contortions as the Tetrarch and the men who commanded them seemed, at best, to look back on the experience with a kind of exasperated affection.
It was like looking through a bloody periscope, shaving, riding a bi
ke, reading a map, talking on the wireless and doing ten other things at once. The gunner had an amusing act as well. He had a seat which went up and down; to his right was the big two pounder gun and to the right of that a machine gun. He had two triggers – left hand for the two pounder and right hand for the machine gun. By moving his shoulder up and down against a pad, and bumping his seat up and down, he could move the gun. His eye was glued onto a periscope with a brow pad that held his head steady while his left hand turned a handle which traversed the turret, and with his left foot he cracked walnuts!
All these tank crews were volunteers for special operations abroad involving landing armour on a defended enemy beach, then a novel concept. Some had just spent a frustrating six months confined with their Tetrarchs in the cramped and sticky accommodation of a fleet auxiliary tanker at Sierra Leone, poised to invade Spain’s West African island of Fernando Po should Hitler persuade Franco into the war. But a year after they were founded this was the nearest the squadron had come to seeing any action.
Most of them were regulars who had already fought in France in 1940 and felt the Germans were not as good as they were cracked up to be. Second-in-command Captain Peter Llewellyn Palmer of the 10th Hussars, a popular officer, had been delighted to discover men in the squadron eager to ‘continue where we left off’. Among them was Llewellyn Palmer’s gunner, and devoted unofficial batman, Lance Corporal Clegg, who had served out a pre-war enlistment with the 10th Hussars and been a reservist working for the General Post Office when he was recalled to the colours. In the interest of esprit de corps all ranks had received the same training as the Commandos in unarmed combat until, according to a clearly mystified Clegg: ‘We were considered good enough to look after ourselves should we become involved in a pub brawl.’ More relevant, as things turned out, they polished their small arms skills, not only with Brens and Thompson sub-machine guns but also with the .38 revolvers all tank crews were supposed to carry.