England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  To get through them the Seaforths – some fuelled on a mixture of army-issue Benzedrine* and navy rum they had taken for the 18-mile route march that preceded the attack – found themselves screaming the regiment’s Gaelic war cries and delivering a bayonet charge. One of these was Sergeant Jim Stockman, a regular soldier who had fought in France but like almost everybody else had never stuck a 17-inch bayonet into anything more unpleasant than a bag of straw. Nine hours had elapsed since Stockman, a God-fearing man troubled by killing, had taken, as well as his own, an additional three unwanted pep pills and washed them down with ‘four or five’ tots of rum. When he stepped into the landing craft he had felt ‘ready to take on anybody’. Now the grog and bennies were wearing off but, if not one of the bezerkers, he seems to have been in a dreamlike state filled with a kind of cold resolution.

  We just kept moving, driven by some inexplicable group momentum yet feeling strangely introspective with fear and confusion. I recall Lieutenant Penny, my platoon officer, together with Major Lowe and other officers all shouting at us to keep on moving in order. And this with men dropping left, right and centre … As I kept going I suddenly came across this huge Senegalese coming at me. For a moment I panicked, hesitated. Then, on thankful impulse, stopped him in his tracks by thrusting forward and shoving the bayonet right through him until it emerged on the other side. At first, I did not realise the ferocity with which I stuck him and then found to my horror that I could not pull it out again. I had to fire a round, twist savagely then pull to disengage it.

  Covered in the African’s blood and vomiting, a shaken Stockman stumbled further into the Vichy positions. At one point he exchanged his rifle for the Bren gun of a wounded friend, using it until the ammunition ran out. Another Seaforth had lost part of an arm and was insisting that it had been bitten off by an enraged African. A French grenade exploded close enough to pepper Stockman’s own right arm with shrapnel. He picked up a discarded rifle that would not fire and used the bayonet. Then he was flattened by the blast of a mortar bomb which left him crawling to a field dressing station with shrapnel wounds in his back and buttocks. Loaded with other stretcher cases onto the back of a truck on the first stage of their journey to a hospital ship, a medical officer handed an indignant Stockman a revolver saying that, since he could still sit up, he could look out for snipers. ‘As if I still had the energy!’

  He was one of eighty-seven wounded Seaforths. Another seventeen died, including three officers. All this was in less than three hours and by far the heaviest casualties of any of the British infantry battalions since the landings started. Five of its officers, all injured, won the Military Cross.

  The Seaforths’ bayonet charge was almost the last act in the capture of Antsirane and with it all the other strongpoints that went to make up the Diego Suarez anchorage. Long before dawn on 7 May elements of both the 17th and 29th brigades, with Festing in overall command, were well into the town where the Royal Welch Fusiliers had their last fatalities when they lost another officer and his batman at a roadblock. By 1 a.m. they had got to the docks and met up with Price’s marines. But their later insistence that they were in time to welcome an unopposed landing must be seen as a mischievous response to Admiral Syfret’s irritating claim that the marines’ feint was the ‘principal and direct cause of the enemy’s collapse’.

  Seeing that Distinguished Service Orders went to Lietenant Commander Hodges and Captain Martin no doubt reflected Syfret’s gratitude for the cold-blooded professionalism that improved the chances of his outrageous gamble not ending in tragedy. But if the Anthony and her passengers had been blown out of the water, the South Lancs would still have got behind the Joffre line, the Seaforths still made their charge and Sturges still have in reserve the fresh 13th Brigade which was just coming off the ships. Bluffing with bumps in the night and inserting a mere fifty marines, while it could not be anything else must have contributed to Vichy’s disarray, but as it turned out, it was a needless risk.

  Anyway, the Royal Welch refused to be impressed and D Company commander Henry Jones rushed off to the Defence Headquarters with Lieutenant Roddy Reynier and his platoon. On the face of it this half-French officer, fluent in his father’s native tongue, was the obvious choice. But Reynier had just heard from the Royal Scots Fusiliers that his younger brother Peter was missing believed killed and was in no mood to indulge in the military courtesies normally afforded senior enemy officers. When Capitaine de vaisseau Paul Maerten, the Vichy naval commander who Percy Mayer tried to suborn, and Colonel Pierre Clarebout, head of the military garrison, insisted on surrendering to officers of equivalent rank they were frog-marched out of the building.

  Brigadier Festing wasted no time getting there, publicly reprimanded Jones and Reynier for the unchivalrous treatment of their prisoners and saw that they were made fit for public viewing at a ceremony Sturges was planning. Maerten was sufficiently mollified to draw Festing’s attention to the contents of his wine cellar before it was discovered by the rapacious soldiery. Not long afterwards Reynier came across his heavily bandaged brother alive if unwell in a French military hospital where he had obviously been well cared for. Years later he would still be picking particles of his own grenade shrapnel out of his scalp, but he otherwise made a full recovery.

  In the air and on the sea the fighting spluttered on for another twenty-four hours. As the British infantry were consolidating in Antsirane, three Morane fighters on a first light reconnaissance patrol clashed with four of the Fleet Air Arm’s Martlets doing the same thing. In the ensuing dogfight a Martlet pilot with 20mm cannon shells in his engine ditched off a remote beach and took two days to get back to his ship. All three Moranes were shot down. One pilot, Capitaine Assollant, was killed. The other two, one of whom bailed out, escaped with superficial injuries.

  At about the same time one of six Swordfish off the Illustrious flying anti-submarine cover, spotted Le Héros on the surface at the northern entrance of the Baie du Courrier and straddled her with depth charges at the beginning of her crash dive before she was properly submerged. Three hours later fifty survivors were picked up by the destroyer Pakenham and the Flower class corvette Jasmine. That evening, after four minesweepers had ensured that the entrance channel and harbour were free of mines, Syfret took the Ramillies into Diego Suarez, followed by the cruiser Hermione and the destroyers Paladin and Lightning. It was scarcely sixty hours since the initial landings and a proud moment for the rear admiral. But Darlan’s navy had not yet finished with him.

  By daybreak on the 8th the submarine Monge, which had returned to Madagascan waters from her island hideout on Réunion, had placed herself in an excellent position to exact revenge. In the expectation that more of Syfret’s ships would soon be joining him, she was cruising at periscope depth some 7 miles east of the entrance to the Diego Suarez anchorage, opposite the gap in the cliffs the Royal Navy called the Orongea Pass. She did not have long to wait. Shortly before 8 a.m. along came the aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable with forty or so aircraft aboard. Lookouts spotted the telltale trails from the Monge and, with agonizing slowness, the top-heavy carrier tried to turn to starboard in order to face the torpedoes and sail between them. She just made it. The wake of the nearest torpedo was seen to be 50 yards ahead of the carrier’s bow. The Monge, named after Gaspard Monge the eighteenth-century mathematician who became the Revolution’s Navy Minister, did not get a second chance. Indomitable’s destroyer escorts were already in sonar contact and soon their depth charges were bringing to the surface a large amount of oil in which were mixed pieces of men and machinery. There were probably sixty crew on board and, unlike Le Héros, there were no survivors.

  By then the ground fighting had been over for almost twenty-four hours. After a brief and bloodless bombardment by the 15-inch guns of the Ramillies the coastal batteries on the Orongea peninsula had put up a white flag, though not before they had spiked their guns by burying the breech blocks somewhere. Final negotiations with these gunners were condu
cted by Hugh Stockwell, debonair commander of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, who was said to have started them off with a white flag, a bugler and two bottles of gin.

  Some of Captain Price’s marines, dog-tired though they were, were shipped back to the Ramillies to change into their white tropical uniforms in order to inject what Sturges hoped would be a soothing ceremonial ingredient. Their main task was to mount guard with the marine band outside the residency where Capitaine de vaisseau Maertens was listening to the British terms for the capitulation of the naval base that was Madagascar’s most visible military asset. There was no word from Governor Annet who, as far as anybody knew, was still 500 miles away in the capital.

  At one point a marine platoon was diverted to one of the Joffre line forts where it was required to turn out a guard and present arms to a garrison that declined to surrender without being granted full honours of war. Price himself was bemused by the final-whistle approach both sides brought to the ceasefire. ‘It was as though we had won a hard game of rugger and neither team appeared to have any ill-feeling.’

  Overwhelming force had inevitably won the day but the French had inflicted more casualties than the British had really expected, most of them incurred during their frontal assaults on the Joffre line. In two and a half days’ fighting they had lost 105 killed, 15 of them officers, and 283 wounded of all ranks, some permanently disabled. French losses were 145 killed and 336 wounded. Of these 129 of the dead were metropolitan French, all but 18 of them navy, though some of the naval casualties would have been gunners killed in the land fighting.

  After almost two years of British naval blockade drugs were in short supply in Madagascar. Most of the more seriously wounded on both sides were eventually sent to the hospital ship Atlantis, a converted cruise ship, where there were not only medicines but proper facilities. On shore Frenchwomen volunteers, usually the wives or daughters of officers and non-commissioned officers, were helping out in makeshift wards. To feed a sous-officier unable to swallow because of a throat wound from a bullet which had exited through the back of his neck, 5 Commando’s Dr Patterson improvised with a contraceptive douche ‘shyly proffered by one of the French ladies in response to my inquiries’.

  Three days after the capitulation the British staged a victory parade. The marine band was back in action once again. So were the pipers of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. French-speaking members of the SOE’s signals team off the schooner Lindi tried to assess local reaction from a pavement table at the town’s main café where the only drink available was a rather poor local rum. They decided it varied from ‘the silently apathetic’ to the openly disapproving. ‘They add insult to injury,’ an elderly gentleman was overheard saying. ‘First they take our town, then they play the bagpipes at us.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  within a few days Sturges’s soldiers were behaving just as they would have done in any other garrison town. All the infantry battalions made an effort to get back to ‘real soldiering’. Boots were shone and webbing scrubbed and never mind the scarlet dust which made both these pastimes as silly as top hats and gave Madagascar its second name: Red Island. At sunset the drum and bugle bands of the various regiments competed at beating the retreat. And the same Michael West who had toted a Tommy gun and preached guerrilla fighting when he took his South Lancs behind the Joffre line, introduced a polished swagger stick inscribed ‘Madagascar 1942’ for the briefly immaculate soldier most often chosen as ‘Stick Orderly’ during the inspections that preceded guard mountings. Late afternoons were for sport. The Commandos won the 29th Brigade football final, beating the East Lanes 3–1 ‘after a good fight by the Lancs’. In Festing’s brigade there was also a concerted effort to exploit the comfort of warm waters and teach the non-swimmers, of whom there were a lot, to swim. The officers organized a drag hunt and steeplechase meetings.

  Most evenings there were cinema shows sometimes replaced by communal singing when the electricity failed. Naturally, the Royal Welch had their own choir and boasted that they ‘taught Diego Suarez how to sing’. These distractions were welcome. Provision for drink and sex was not up to the normal standards of a French colonial town, certainly nothing like Beirut’s thriving bordellos or, for that matter, the British officers’ ‘club’ known as Mary’s in Alexandria until it was hit by an Italian bomb. Medical officers reported low rates of VD though considerable malaria. For the first few weeks of the occupation, after which some trade with South Africa had been restored, the only alcohol available was the weak rum or the moonshiners’ astonishingly strong carburant, which also served as the blockaded island’s main petrol substitute.

  Officers congregated for al fresco dinners in the courtyard of the Hôtel Francois where the occasional bottle of hoarded wine supplemented the gin and navy rum smuggled ashore from Syfret’s ships. Sometimes they would be joined by a group of war correspondents, desperate men offering outrageous bribes to the wireless operators to get their copy back to Fleet Street ahead of their colleagues. They had arrived from Mombasa to write about what Churchill, groggy from the Japanese avalanche, would later admit was the ‘only sign of good and efficient war direction of which the British public were conscious’. A British victory, however humble, was a story in itself.

  Despite this the Prime Minister was anxious to move on. It had never been his intention to try to occupy all of Madagascar, merely seize the strategic port at its northern tip, and five days before the landings he had made this plain to the Chiefs of Staff. ‘A principal object must be to get our best troops forward to India and Ceylon at the earliest moment, replacing them with garrison battalions from East or West Africa. Getting this place is meant to be a help and not a new burden. The true defence of Madagascar will be the Eastern Fleet, when based with adequate air support on Colombo.’

  Eight days after the fall of Diego Suarez nothing had changed as Churchill’s telegram to Admiral Syfret makes clear:

  your problem is one of holding the place with the least subtraction from our limited resources. It may well be that you will think it better to let matters simmer down and make some sort of modus vivendi with the French authorities. Money and trade facilities should be used. The way you can help the war best is to get the 13th and 17th Brigades on to India earliest and the 29th Brigades within the next two months. Everything else is subordinate to this, except of course holding Diego Suarez, which must on no account be hazarded.

  Then three weeks after the invasion, on 27 May, Governor General Annet sent an emissary to see the British at Diego Suarez. Lionel Barnett was an Englishman who had lived and worked in Tananarive for some years as the representative of the Standard Vacuum Oil Company of South Africa. He was also loosely connected with Percy Mayer’s Special Operations Executive network in that he sensed Mayer had something to do with British intelligence and had passed on enough that was useful, mostly concerning the effects of the blockade, to earn an SOE code-name: DZ14. Now DZ14 had shown commendable initiative.

  He had convinced Annet to allow him to go to Diego Suarez as a spokesman for the island’s commercial interests, hoping to persuade the British to lift their blockade of all the island’s ports including those still firmly under Vichy control in the south. Annet had agreed to this on condition that Barnett asked the British to ‘save further bloodshed’ and settle for an agreement whereby a neutral Vichy French sovereignty would be recognized over all but Diego Suarez. Unstated seemed to be the offer that Vichy would accept that the anchorage on the island’s northern tip had temporarily become a kind of Madagascan Gibraltar. Barnett’s own impression was that Annet was playing for time and would probably like to start a dialogue he could drag on until November when the seasonal rains would make further campaigning difficult.

  General Smuts, who feared that Vichy might invite the Japanese to do mischief from some of its southern ports, also had the Madagascan monsoon in mind. Ever since Churchill had first confided the Ironclad plan to him he had urged that the whole island be occupied and offered to cont
ribute a South African brigade. Now the chances of doing this were improving. On India’s eastern border with Burma the situation could be said to have stabilized. A British Indian Army under Bill Slim (last seen as a divisional commander chasing Vichy out of northern Syria) had just regrouped there after a horrific fighting retreat. And even the Japanese had at last reached the end of their frugal ration train and were consolidating.

  But Churchill remained adamant about the need to reinforce India before the small men with the long rifles were on the move again. Diego Suarez was quite enough of Madagascar. The 13th Brigade, which had hardly been engaged in the fighting, was already on its way and the Seaforths and the rest of the 17th were getting ready to go. The navy too was much reduced as Admiral Somerville, hunted by Japanese aircraft carriers and short of everything except trouble, demanded that his destroyers rejoin him off the Seychelles. The only ships left for anti-submarine duties were the corvettes Thyme and Genista.

  This was not a matter of great concern because the chances of an underwater attack on the Diego Suarez anchorage seemed low. All the known Vichy submarines in Madagascan waters had been sunk. German and Italian U-boats, hunting British ships avoiding the dangerous Mediterranean route by supplying its forces in Egypt the long way around the Cape, tended to attack them in the South Atlantic off West Africa. Sinkings in the smaller waters of the Mozambique Channel and the Red Sea were comparatively rare.