by Colin Smith
But by the beginning of March 1942, almost three months after it had been decided to seize Diego Suarez before the Japanese did, Clegg and his comrades along with the rest of General Sturges’s Force 121 were still in Scotland. Britain, in what Churchill later called its ‘worst disaster’, had surrendered Singapore and the Americans were in the process of losing the Philippines. India itself, the jewel in the crown, was threatened and in London opinion was sharply divided about whether Madagascar was important enough to divert precious resources that should be going further east. The divisions were on familiar lines: Churchill was for it. ‘If the Japanese walked into the island, our inaction would take a deal of explaining away.’ And Wavell, now India’s woefully accoutred Commander-in-Chief, was as against it as he had been to the Iraq and Syrian interventions. ‘Sheer madness,’ he warned. ‘Unless War Cabinet considers Ironclad of greater strategical importance than Ceylon.’ Alan Brooke, the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff, backed him, saying there was, ‘Little to gain by it.’
Then the American ability to break the Japanese diplomatic cypher revealed that Berlin was encouraging Tokyo, which already had a carrier task force in the eastern part of the Indian Ocean, to occupy the island and cut the 8th Army’s supply line before Rommel launched his next offensive. On 12 March the War Cabinet agreed to go ahead with Operation Ironclad and named South African-born Rear Admiral Neville Syfret as its Combined Commander. In addition, it was decided to learn the lessons of Syria and apply the kind of overwhelming force that would assure a swift and decisive victory. The 5th Division was being rushed out to India but en route two of its three brigades, about 12,000 men including six infantry battalions, would go via Madagascar. Neither the British nor the Germans consulted their respective ‘friendly French’ about their plans for the colony. In London the political advantages of a Gaullist fig leaf were outweighed by memories of the loose talk that preceded Dakar, the reluctance to fight other Frenchmen in Syria and the need for maximum security.
Ironclad was not an easy operation to keep secret, though the army did its best by issuing some of the troops involved with the kind of Arctic clothing that might suggest a large-scale raid on Norway. Festing’s 29th Brigade was travelling with the entire 5th Division which would be loaning two-thirds of its infantry to Ironclad before it saw Bombay and expected to get them back in the state they left them. When their convoy set out it was the biggest to leave Liverpool since the war began and Doenitz’s U-boats were at the peak of their success.
But Operation Ironclad got off to a good start and on 5 April all the ships arrived safely at Freetown in Sierra Leone. At this point, out of the 7,000 or so soldiers, sailors and airmen aboard, only Admiral Syfret, General Sturges and perhaps a dozen or so others knew where they were going. On the Winchester Castle Bombardier Frederick Bailey, a driver with 455 Independent Battery, took a mournful first look at the muddy waters and red earth of Africa. After a year’s strenuous training for amphibious landings Bailey, a London lorry driver called up in 1939 shortly before his twenty-second birthday, assumed their destination must be Egypt and the nearest they were going to get to a beach was the Western Desert. It was not until they reached Durban, where most convoys stopped en route for Egypt or India, that Bailey found the port ‘alive with rumours that we were going to attack the French in Madagascar’. Then orders to waterproof their vehicles tended to confirm that Rommel probably had the good fortune not to be facing 455 Light Battery in the near future.
They were back at sea, watching the flying fish play as they headed north up the Mozambique Channel, when commanding officers gathered their men and the scuttlebutt was confirmed: they were going to capture Madagascar’s Diego Suarez harbour. D-Day was set for 0400 hours, 5 May. There was a spate of last letters home before they were separated from the navy’s postal links, in this case one of the fleet’s auxiliary ships to the British Forces Post Office in Durban. Often there was no time to scribble more than a couple of lines of love and reassurance. ‘Please don’t worry, you are more than ever in my thoughts at this time,’ concluded Corporal Roland Moss, one of the 2nd South Lancashires best footballers, to his wife Catherine who had been working in a cotton mill in Stockport when he met her. Their son, also Roland, was almost 2 and they were expecting their second child. The only action Moss had seen to date was during basic training when he had been sent to help civilians caught up in the Liverpool Blitz.
‘Operation Ironclad is on. I wonder what sort of battle it’s going to be?’ Captain Joseph Patterson, the Medical Officer for 5 Commando, asked himself some twelve hours before zero hour. Patterson, who was 32, had volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps at the outbreak of war, seen action in France and joined the Commandos shortly after being evacuated from Dunkirk. He was keeping a diary for the wife he had left behind at Windermere in the Lake District where he ran a general practice.
I don’t feel scared, only rather tired and a little bit excited. I must try and get some sleep. This [the diary] must be packed with the rest of my kit. Breakfast is at midnight. The situation in Burma is bad. I should be feeling more nervous if it were Japs or Germans we were up against. There is really no reason why we should lose this battle but I dare say we shall have a fair number of casualties, especially on the beaches … Ramilles, Illustrious and Indomitable are all in a row on our port … It was amusing yesterday on the BBC to hear that the Illustrious had just arrived in a British port after being repaired in America. I could see her through the porthole as they said it and we were somewhere off the south coast of Madagascar.
There were two aircraft carriers: the Illustrious and the Indomitable. The Illustrious, which had undergone major surgery in a US dockyard after being badly damaged by dive bombers off Malta, was back in action for the first time in over a year. The Indomitable, recently based in Ceylon, was borrowed from Admiral Somerville’s new command, the much depleted Far East fleet, which was currently playing hide and seek with superior Japanese forces in the eastern half of the Indian Ocean.
Including the merchant navy vessels carrying the landing forces and their equipment, Syfret now had over fifty ships under him. Accompanying the aircraft carriers were the old and rather slow 15-inch-gun battleship Ramillies, two cruisers, eleven destroyers, four minesweepers, and eight of the little U-boat hunters the navy called corvettes. These wore green, white and blue zigzags of camouflage paint with splashes of red and, according to Patterson, ‘look very pretty nipping around us’.
The Ramillies, launched in 1913 and one of the few British warships named after an old victory over the French (albeit a land one), was flying the admiral’s flag. For Syfret to have done otherwise was still unthinkable. Yet his carriers provided at least as much firepower. Their eighty-six aircraft included twenty American-built Grumman F4 Wildcats, which the Fleet Air Arm insisted on calling Martlets, as well as Sea Hurricanes and Fulmars. Albacores and Swordfish biplanes would deliver bombs or torpedoes.
The French had a little over thirty aircraft of which the best were twenty Morane 406 fighters and seven Potez 63–11 twin-engined bombers that had arrived the previous summer on some of the ships that, thanks to Percy and Berthe Mayer, had been intercepted on their way back to France. There were also a few old Potez 25s, biplanes that had mainly been used for courier work. On the ground, Vichy forces in Madagascar totalled about 8,000 of whom perhaps three-quarters were native Malagasy and the rest Senegalese or French, most of the latter being in the navy. All the infantry were French-officered Africans, either local or West African, and so was most of the artillery, the exception being the coastal batteries which were manned by the navy. According to surviving Vichy documents the Diego Suarez garrison seems to have been no more than 3,000 strong at most, consisting of a three battalion brigade group, the 2 Régiment mixte malgache; an artillery regiment of a dozen or so 75mm guns, some mule-drawn; five coastal batteries, some with large-calibre battleship guns; a battery of 90mm anti-aircraft guns and eight anti-tank guns of 65mm and 7
5mm calibre.
Defending Diego Suarez had always been a simple proposition for the French. Since its narrow entrance and covering batteries made the harbour almost impregnable to a hostile fleet, the majority of their troops were facing the western side of the island’s northern isthmus where the most obvious landing places were two neighbouring bays, Courrier and the smaller Ambararata. These waters were full of reefs and shoals and the three safe passages through them were well mined. For anything that survived the mines, both bays were covered by a single coastal battery. Its fire was directed by field telephone from an observation post overlooking the beaches on the summit of a 1,300-foot rocky volcanic plug that rose suddenly from the flat ground. The French, no doubt with a certain irony, called this protuberance Windsor Castle and its use dated from Maréchal Joffre’s tenure as Fortress Commander.
In 1909, five years before Joffre saved Paris from the Kaiser when his fame rested on a desert crossing and the conquest of Timbuktu, he passed his time laying the foundations for Diego Suarez to protect itself from some jealous maritime power with nearby bases. One Fashoda was quite enough and the British, Germans and Portuguese all had East African colonies. Windsor Castle was Joffre’s most visible contribution to the Diego Suarez defences. But the most important was 2 miles of trenches and pill boxes he built on some rising ground about 2 miles south of the Antsirane dockyards. At either end was a low loopholed stone and concrete redoubt, one named Fort Caimans and the other Fort Bellevue. This line, which was on the narrowest part of the Antsirane peninsula, covered the three main red-dirt roads into town. From both flanking forts the land fell down scrub-covered slopes to mangrove-fringed shore lines. In between the terrain varied: rocks and scrub near the roads then not far off them tall stands of pampas grass and some woodland.
Over the years, parts of the Joffre line had been neglected: scorpions nested in its crumbling pill boxes, its diggings became clogged and overgrown until it was hard to find them in places. But in recent months, as fears of invasion increased, the scorpions had been evicted and loopholes fitted with wire netting to prevent their return, the trench system traced and re-dug though in places the vegetation that hid it was left. About half a mile in front of it unhappy civilian forced labour dug a formidable antitank ditch as broad as it was deep, which was well over 6 feet. Some navy-crewed 75mm guns were moved into the forts. Exercises were held whereby a mobile reserve supported by most of the available anti-tank guns could be rushed into place. Thirty years after it was built, the Joffre line was being treated exactly as a treasured heirloom should be and restored to working condition.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The English did land on the west coast of the island’s northern tip exactly as the French suspected they would. But what they envisaged was a costly daylight assault with the defenders gradually falling back to their fixed positions having already inflicted demoralizing losses. What they were unable to imagine was an invader capable of putting a large force ashore after dark.
‘Firing at night is not contemplated, the entrance to the bay being considered impossible,’ read part of the standing orders discovered by delighted Commandos at the Windsor Castle observation post above Baie du Courrier. Instead Syfret’s ships, operating under the uncertain light of a waning moon, had astonished the French by first sweeping then marking a safe channel with green lighted buoys. In the process fifty-seven mines were lifted. It was the kind of naval trick the English were supposed to excel at and their opponents should have known better.
Not even the accidental detonation of the last two mines to be collected in the clearing gear of the minesweepers spoilt it. As the orders ‘let go kedge anchor’ and ‘fix bayonets’ announced that they were about to hit the beach, 5 Commando’s first wave were convinced that the explosions must have brought triggers to first pressure and they were only waiting for them to get closer. But much to his delight Captain Bill Knight, one of the two attached Royal Artillery forward observation officers sent to each landing beach, found himself stepping onto a silent shore. Behind him, with wireless and Morse lamps, came the three navy signallers who were his link to the 4.7-inch guns on the destroyer HMS Laforey.
We moved up to the gun position which we could see quite clearly in the moonlight. Strangely enough, all was quiet and deserted, no sentries posted and no sign of life at all. We removed the breech blocks from the guns and put them in a place apart just in case of a counter attack and could not help wondering what had happened. As dawn broke we saw some buildings nearby and went to investigate. There we found the gunners all in bed.
Most of them were Malagasy with French officers and sous-officiers. Only the French fought. A Commando was stabbed through the arm and one of the Frenchmen took a burst from a Thompson sub-machine gun. Another grabbed a bayonet and charged at Lieutenant ‘Dopey’ Rose, so called because his brother officers insisted he looked remarkably like that member of the Seven Dwarfs. But Dopey proved fast enough with a Colt .45 automatic and brought his assailant down with a single shot through his forehead. A horrified Knight, who had celebrated his twenty-first birthday shortly before his convoy left Liverpool, could not help noticing how much bigger the exit wound was.
That was the end of the opposition. One elderly French officer was clearly enraged by these events and shouted at me, ‘Ce n’est pas bon ca’, and then observing my badges of rank coupled with my tender years he went on, ‘Vous êtes trop jeune pour capitaine.’ No doubt I was but it was none of his business. I expect promotion prospects were bleak in a colonial backwater like Madagascar.
Dr Patterson, who was not feeling his best with ‘bad bellyache’ from a bout of gastroenteritis that had been going through his troopship since before Durban, treated the bayoneted Commando then examined the Frenchman who had taken the Tommy-gun burst. He discovered that the man had a broken thigh, a shattered arm, and three bullets through his belly. He did what he could for him and got him stretchered down to the beach for evacuation to one of the ships if he survived that long. To his amazement his patient would make a complete recovery.
By now a white flag was fluttering from the observation post on the top of Windsor Castle and Patterson watched as some of the Commandos under a Captain ‘Chips’ Heron started their way up to take the surrender. ‘It was beginning to get hot and I didn’t envy them the climb.’ But once Heron’s party had neared the top there seems to have been a change of mind, for somebody dropped a grenade on them which wounded Chips in the leg. Once he was back down, Knight and his signallers got busy and Laforey’s guns ‘knocked the concrete off the top of the hill, complete with inmates’.
‘The battery at Courrier Bay was unable to fire a single shot,’ noted the official postmortem, which would not be circulated around the Vichy War Office for another four months. ‘They were taken by surprise and overwhelmed.’ The gunners were asleep when the Commandos arrived. Surprise was achieved because they did not believe a night landing was possible and the last-minute telephone call from Windsor Castle which might have woken them up did not arrive. The man responsible for this was the SOE’s Percy Mayer.
Some 500 miles north of his home in the capital, the remote and security-conscious naval base around Diego Suarez did not offer much in the way of commercial cover for Mayer. But two weeks before the invasion the inventive and well-connected Mauritian came up with an excellent reason to spend an awful lot of time there.
Diego Suarez was getting short of rice which was the staple diet of most of the troops defending it, Malagasy and Senegalese. Deliveries by both road and ship had been severely reduced by the fuel shortage brought on by the British blockade. A small amount was getting in on dhows but wind and tide often made this impossible. Mayer persuaded the authorities that he might have the solution.
Let him explore the possibility of bringing the rice up the coast in chains of barges towed by wood-burning tugs and unloading it (where else) at Ambararata Bay. From there he proposed to find sufficient dirt road, even if he had to do a litt
le road building himself, to truck it up to Diego Suarez. Obviously, considerable reconnaissance of the overland route would be necessary. The military could not do enough to accommodate him, starting by allowing him to ship his own car to Ambararata and providing all the petrol he required.
For the two weeks preceding the invasion, based in Antsirane’s Hôtel François, Mayer had mixed freely with both the Diego Suarez garrison and its civil authorities. He had called on District Commissioner Garrouste whose enthusiasm for his rice transport was unbounded. He had visited Courrier Bay and met a lonely and garrulous French sergeant who claimed to command its defences and invited him to go fishing with him the following Sunday. ‘We had a drink and he then showed me all over the defences, position of machine-guns, signalling gear, gave me the number and composition of troops etcetera.’ There had been an informative lunch with Colonel Édouard Clarebout, who was in charge of the army at Diego Suarez, and a guided tour of the harbour where he had been shown over the submarine Bévézier and noted alongside her Le Héros preparing to go out on patrol. Above all there was a meeting with Capitaine de vaisseau Paul Maerten, the naval commander.
Mayer and Maerten, who often visited the capital, were already well acquainted and had, to say the least, an ambivalent relationship. Six months before, Mayer had decided that Maerten was ready, if the bribe was big enough, to allow the British to take over Diego Suarez without a fight. But when he had broached with him the hopelessness of the Vichy cause, Madagascar’s isolation and the need for a strong man to seize his opportunity, it appeared he had made a terrible misjudgement. Capitaine Maerten, it seemed, might enjoy the good things in life but he was as Pétainist as the next man and if he had to tighten his belt he would. He found this kind of treasonable talk appalling. Yet not, it seemed, quite appalling enough to turn Mayer in. During his recent meeting Mayer had suggested that perhaps a better place for unloading the rice would be Courrier Bay. Maerten had told him that this would be a very bad idea because the navy had just mined the place and Mayer had departed with another trophy.