England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Passing on these gems to the attention of the approaching fleet was not so easy. It would have been far too risky to bring his suitcase transmitter to Diego Suarez and there was little he could tell Berthe in a lightly coded conversation over an open telephone line when his hotel operator was able to get a call through to the capital. The best communications SOE could lay on were through the Lindi, one of SOE’s wooden-hulled dhows with sails and an old Perkins diesel engine which operated out of Dar Es Salaam in Tanganyika. The Lindi was engaged in mapping and sometimes buoying channels to the invasion beaches and had a powerful transmitter as well as sonar aboard.

  On 29 April, a week before D-Day, the spy kept a rendezvous at Ambararata Bay with a landing party off the boat. It was through this meeting that Syfret received the latest list of Vichy ships operating out of Diego Suarez: the converted liner Bougainville, ugly with guns and grafts of armour plate and considered an auxiliary cruiser; D’Entrecasteaux, an anti-submarine sloop with lots of depth charges and the same calibre guns carried by most British destroyers; and the submarines Bévéziers, Le Héros, Monge and Le Glorieux with the last two thought to be out on patrol. The only other vessel of interest was a small German merchantman, the SS Wartenfels, which had arrived there in March in a dash from neutral Portuguese East Africa where she had been stuck since the beginning of the war. There was speculation that there might be a German naval wireless team on board monitoring British merchant traffic in the Mozambique Channel for the U-boats.

  The French submarines posed the main and most obvious threat to Syfret’s ships unless a Vichy bomber could get through the fighter screen. And from Diego Suarez harbour itself, the two surface vessels, particularly the sloop with her shallower draught, could move alongside and harass any troops moving towards them along the isthmus that shielded them from the invaders, though they could fire over it. It was decided, in the first strike anyway, to let the Fleet Air Arm deal with all the enemy shipping. Mayer also brought them up to date on troop deployments including the latest refurbishment along the Joffre line, where he had visited an officer who lived in a hamlet the French called Joffreville.

  Mayer had arranged for another meeting with a landing party off the Lindi in three days’ time and set about preparing maps and notes to update his latest report. But out of a mixture of muddle and faint-heartedness, the Lindi’s crew failed to keep this second rendezvous, leaving the Mauritian to spend hours pacing the shore before he accepted that they were not going to turn up and drove back to his hotel. Apart from being unable to hand over his notes and sketches he had been curious to receive some written instructions for the knockout drops he had been given at their last encounter.

  The idea was that, on the eve of the invasion, Mayer would throw a party at the François with the best black-market booze the SOE could buy. It would be a classy affair for le tout Diego Suarez from which Maerten and Clarebout, sipping their adulterated drinks, would awake a day older to find that their confused and leaderless command had surrendered and they were themselves prisoners of war. The problem was that the man from the Lindi who had delivered the drops, and had no idea what was planned, was under the impression that they lasted no more than the three minutes an agent might need to escape an embarrassing situation. If this were true they were useless and Mayer had been seeking clarification.

  As it was, on the night in question Mayer was not entertaining but had come up with a rather more certain way to serve his cause. General Sturges would call it ‘the finest bit of Fifth Column work he had ever heard of’. He spent most of the day at Ambararata talking about the construction of landing stages for the rice he was never going to bring in. Then at around dusk Mayer drove to an isolated spot he had long marked and cut the telephone line that ran from the observation post at Windsor Castle to Maerten’s headquarters in Diego Suarez.

  Afterwards, he drove back to the beach hoping to be there to greet the British troops when they landed and hand over the sketches and notes he had made to the first senior officer he could find. But at 10.30, wondering whether the date had been changed since he was last in touch with Durban, he gave it up and drove back to his hotel.

  Relieved to be woken at 4.30 a.m. by the sound of guns, he waited until it got light and then walked down towards the harbour and watched the Fleet Air Arm bombing the ships. At about 7, strolling back to his hotel with breakfast in mind, Mayer was arrested by a police patrol, among them a Frenchman in civilian clothes. At the central police station he was caught trying to destroy the notes (written in English) and sketches he was going to hand over and these were painstakingly restored. By the end of the day he had been questioned by Colonel Clarebout at Defence Headquarters and from there sent to Maerten’s office where he was interrogated by a Commandant Melin. Afterwards he was told he was charged with espionage, warned that he would probably face a firing squad and placed in a cell in Antsirane’s naval barracks where he was asked if he wished for the comfort of a priest.

  For all the risks Mayer had taken the most important information came from the crew of the Lindi, some of whom had not been inclined to take many risks at all. During their peregrinations off the western coast they had discovered that Anambo Island, the mark for entering the Nosi Fati shoal, was not where it appeared on Admiralty charts. It was 1 miles further west. Had this not been corrected, and to make sure Lindi put a lamp on the island’s western shore, Syfret’s night approach would have been a catastrophe. Those vessels not lost to mines might well have run aground.

  As it was, at first everything worked like a dream. About 700 men in all – 5 Commando plus one company of East Lancs – landed in Baie du Courrier, captured the coastal battery and Windsor Castle then pushed on along the Col du Courrier, across the narrow isthmus of Andrakaka towards Diego Suarez. On their right flank, in the smaller Baie du Ambararata, Festing’s 29 Brigade also came ashore without any major problems. More than four times stronger than the Commando and the detached East Lancs, and with all Operation Ironclad’s land artillery and tank support, Festing was making the main thrust to Antsirane 15 miles away. His brigade’s first shots came from the revolver of a lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers who, wading through water he could not see, heard splashing from something large and close by. At the time he thought it might have been one of the sharks they had been warned about. Later, when he had got to know the country better, he decided it was probably a crocodile. Elsewhere small groups of the enemy showed fight and sometimes paid the price. A Tommy gunner in the East Lancs and another private killed three and captured a man they had wounded after they had come under machine-gun fire from a low ridge.

  Meanwhile, at first light the Fleet Air Arm were in action over Diego Suarez harbour and Arrachart airfield just south of Antsirane. In order not to jeopardize the element of surprise their orders were to stay at least 7 miles offshore until fifteen minutes after the 0430 zero hour set for the landings. Then they circled around and attacked from the direction of the east coast where the cruiser Hermione was staging a diversion by bombarding and firing illuminating star shells over the hinterland of Baie du Ambadavahibé. This was about as far from the harbour as the west coast landing places and the only plausible alternative. The Fleet Air Arm contributed to this deception by dropping dummy paratroopers, a British innovation and rather less than life-size but they did divert troops to where they were not needed and two years later were used in the Normandy landings.

  Armed with either bombs, torpedoes or depth charges, eighteen Swordfish off the Illustrious attacked in three waves of six. They quickly sank the armed merchant cruiser Bougainville, hit by two torpedoes, and the submarine Bévéziers. Over 100 died. But the sloop D’Entrecasteaux bore a charmed life and, when the waters around her had subsided, emerged with only superficial damage.

  The third Swordfish wave under Lieutenant Robert Everett, the son of an admiral, first dropped leaflets before going on to bomb a gun battery and the D’Entrecasteaux, again without significant result. Sailors who pick
ed up these leaflets were astonished to find them addressed to ‘Camarades de la Marine Française’ and decorated with the flags of both nations.On one side it explained why Britain felt compelled to do what it was doing: ‘On Hitler’s orders, Japan has brought the war to the Far East.’ On the other it explained what the Royal Navy wanted them to do:

  To avoid any untoward incident, we ask you not to move whilst the operations are under way, nor to load your guns. We have already mined the entry channels. If there should be fascists or enemy agents among you, you doubtlessly already know who they are and will stop them from taking any provocative action. Those of you who want nothing to do with all this, remember that in Saigon French officers have to salute Japanese other ranks.

  Also fluttering slowly to earth was the full text of the message Syfret had already radioed Annet. It assured him that His Majesty’s Government ‘did not covet an inch of French territory’ and urged His Excellency to avoid bloodshed and assist this pre-emptive strike against Tokyo with an ‘unconditional surrender’. A couple of hours later Annet got round to sending his reply: ‘We shall defend ourselves to the last.’

  By then Lieutenant Everett and his two crew had become prisoners of war. Their Swordfish’s engine was hit by anti-aircraft fire and Everett managed to ditch the smoking biplane in shallow water off a beach. This was the only British aircraft lost on the first day. Five Morane fighters were destroyed and four more aircraft damaged, two of them Potez light bombers, when Albacores – the Fleet Air Arm’s newer biplane – surprised the best part of the Groupe Aerien Mixte on the ground at Arrachart airfield. Among those killed was the detachment’s commander. In one stroke Vichy air strength on the island had been reduced by almost a quarter. Later in the day another Morane was lost. Sergent Ehret was flying one of two fighters that strafed the beachhead at Baie du Courrier then failed to return to his airstrip at Anivorano some 50 miles south of Diego Suarez. No British claims were made, no wreckage ever discovered. It seems that Madagascar or its surrounding sea had swallowed Ehret whole.

  On the ground all went well until about 9.30 a.m., five hours after the landing. Things started to unravel when the motorcycle scouts of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, which was the vanguard of 29th Brigade’s advance from the beach, captured a car containing a French naval officer and three ratings. General Sturges had made a standing order that the first captured officer should be released and sent back to Diego Suarez or Antsirane with a letter to the governor repeating Syfret’s demand for his surrender. This was duly done.

  But before he was allowed to drive back into Antsirane in his own car the prisoner was taken back to battalion or even brigade headquarters to be given the letter he was to deliver. He was not blindfolded and probably it was considered no bad thing that he should see what they were up against: scores of tramping infantry in long columns along the sides of the road, a terracotta army coated in the thin red African dust churned up by the Bren-gun carriers, towed artillery and even a few tanks all heading down the unmade road to Antsirane. If so it failed to intimidate, though it certainly gave the game away. It was obvious that this was the main axis of the British attack and not the Commando push towards Diego Suarez. Shortly after the officer got back to his own headquarters, Annet started to put his mobile reserve and their anti-tank guns into the Joffre line with a screen of skirmishers in front of them to buy a little time while they got into position. ‘The despatch of that letter was, I fear, a great error,’ Sturges later admitted.

  By about 11.15 French skirmishers, who had brought up machine guns, were in the scrubs, rocks and elephant grass either side of a saddle of land where the road passed through a slight ridge line. It was called the Col de Bonne Nouvelle, the good news for the weary traveller presumably being that Antsirane and journey’s end was a couple of miles up the road. The Joffre line was even closer.

  The first British units to reach this col were the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Brigadier Festing, a tall man with ginger hair and armed with a stout walking stick, had attached his own open-topped Bren-gun carrier and part of his headquarters to the Fusiliers’ lead carriers. When the French fired their first burst at them his driver was shot through the hand and he helped him steer the machine off the road into the cover of some trees. Shortly afterwards Major Jocelin Simon came along in a Valentine tank accompanied by another Valentine and one of the lighter Tetrarchs. There was still some small-arms fire coming in and all three tanks had their hatches down. Festing hammered on the top of Major Simon’s turret with his walking stick until he opened up.* The brigadier, pointing his stick towards the enemy, told him what had happened and ordered the tanks to put a stop to it and make a hole he could push his infantry through. And so at last the Special Service Squadron, trained to perfection, went to war.

  Even before they reached the Col de Bonne Nouvelle Simon’s gunners located the enemy and began to engage them with their 2-pounder cannon and Besa machine guns. Some of the skirmish line evidently decided it was time to go because when the lead Valentine got right into the saddle about ten riflemen were caught out of cover and, according to Simon, more casualties were inflicted. ‘But owing to the rocky nature of the ground the tanks could not get right in and, as the carriers had not followed up, the position was not mopped up.’

  This was not the way the Royal Welch Fusiliers remembered it at all. As far as they were concerned, the Tirailleurs simply went to ground, let the tanks go on down the road at the Valentine’s top speed of i5inph, then had another go at them and this time with more effect. Two officers, one a captain and a company commander, were shot dead by snipers with the nerve to wait until they could be reasonably sure of their target’s rank. The captain’s killer was close enough to die from a lucky pistol shot by the lieutenant who took over. By 3 p.m. the Vichy screen had withdrawn to the Joffre line and the exhausted Royal Welch, who some twelve hours earlier were being seasick in a landing craft before marching 15 miles in 80°F to kill and be killed in a bit of a battle, dumped their packs and slumped under whatever shade they could find on Col de Bonne Nouvelle.

  Ahead of them they had for some time been hearing machine-gun and some sort of artillery fire and hoped that the tanks were doing their next job for them. Since Festing had rapped on Simon’s turret the armour had been steadily reinforcing and, with the exception of a tank stuck on the beach because salt water had got into its electronics, the entire squadron was now engaged. First another two Tetrarchs, these light reconnaissance machines instantly recognizable by their size and their speed, had dashed through to join the three tanks under Simon which were now almost 2 miles ahead of the main column. Then, a couple of hours later, the infantry’s occupation of Col de Bonne Nouvelle and the ground a little beyond it had been consolidated by the arrival from the Baie du Courrier landing of the rest of the squadron. This consisted of four Valentines and two Tetrarchs under its second-in-command Captain Llewellyn Palmer, who would have been with Simon’s party but his Valentine had slipped a track in soft sand and it had taken a couple of hours for the squadron’s fitters to get it back on. Shortly afterwards Palmer’s tanks were joined by one of the Tetrarchs from Simon’s spear point detachment commanded by a Lieutenant Astles. Its return from enemy territory had been accompanied by a captured French motorcycle and sidecar team who rode closely behind while Astles covered them with a Bren from his open turret. But what Astles had to tell them was nowhere near as good as this looked.

  When Major Simon, having decided that his tanks had silenced the machine guns that were doing the damage, had continued towards Antsirane he was blissfully unaware of the existence of the Joffre line. So was Brigadier Festing. So was General Sturges. The blame for this lay mostly with the South African Air Force. At the risk of giving away their intentions Sturges had insisted on aerial reconnaissance but somehow the SAAF’s overlapping camera shots had just missed Vichy’s most formidable inland defences. Yet even this, which was mostly bad luck, should not have mattered. Percy Mayer’s network, indeed the ener
getic Mayer himself, had provided a good description of the mini-Maginot that awaited the unwary. But somewhere along the line this had slipped through the hands of the right members of Sturges’s planning staff. As so often with intelligence failures, people had risked their necks to get what was needed only to see it wasted. If there was ever an inquiry this too appears to have vanished, lost perhaps in some chasm between competing desks.

  Simon’s tanks had gone down the road in single file. In the lead was a Valentine under 2nd Lieutenant Whitaker followed by Simon’s own Valentine, for the leader did not ride point. Behind them were the three Tetrarchs with their lighter and more vulnerable armour. These, in order of march, were commanded by a Corporal Watkins and Lieutenants Carlisle and Astles. Both types of tank had a crew of three: commander, gunner and driver. It was a little past midday. Under their armour plate the men were sweltering and it was tempting to keep the turret and driver’s hatch open as much as possible. There was a good deal of dust. Nonetheless morale was high. In Lieutenant Carlisle’s Tetrarch there was a large Union flag he was carrying to fly from the highest point in Antsirane.

  After Col de Bonne Nouvelle the road bent left to the north as it entered the little peninsula where Antsirane’s whitewashed buildings, church spires, barracks and dockyard could be found at the tip. About 3 miles south of it the lead Valentine shuffled around a slight bend to find its gun sights filled by a truck that must have come off a side road. It was carrying a small mountain gun and its crew. The Valentine shot them to pieces.