INVASION SYRIA 1941
Churchill and De Gaulle's Forgotten War
Henri De Wailly (Translated by William Land)
I B Tauris; 338 pages; Rs 1,600
The Chilcot report took seven years and expended 2.6 million words to confirm the well-known fact that the British Prime Minister Tony Blair was, indeed, US President George W Bush’s “poodle” when it came to invading Iraq in 2003. If John Chilcot and commentators excoriating the Bush-Blair misadventure had a longer view of history – six decades, say – they may have taken a slightly different, though no less condemnatory, tack. As Henri De Wailly’s book Invasion Syria 1941: Churchill and De Gaulle’s Forgotten War, shows in 338 deeply researched and entertainingly written pages, rigged wars are by no means the prerogative of the 21st century powers.
No Briton will describe the famously determined bulldog Winston Churchill as anybody’s pet, least of all of the prickly Charles De Gaulle with whom he enjoyed relations of the most cordial antipathy. Yet, Britain’s wartime prime minister allowed himself to be persuaded by the Free French leader to launch a wasteful little military campaign in West Asia in 1941 that had little logic within the larger strategies of World War II.
The long-term consequences of this six-week war were less fateful than the disastrous outcomes of Operation Iraqi Freedom, if only because other parts of the world were in bigger turmoil. But the parallels between this expedition (codenamed Operation Exporter), little known because it was partially suppressed in the official records, and the 2003 Iraq misadventure are instructive.
Then, too, the battleground was Syria and Iraq. The invasion of the first, under a French mandate after World War I, in June 1941 was the result of Great Power competition for resources in the second. The cassus belli was a May 1941 revolt in Iraq led by Raschid Ali Al-Ghailani and the Golden Square, a group of senior pro-Nazi army officers. They were disenchanted by mounting British demands for control of railways, ports and infrastructure in their country, and correspondingly attracted by the German’s (spurious) promises of independence.
Backed by the pro-Hitler Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Raschid Ali “called for jihad against the British in 13 languages”. Once he took charge, Raschid Ali cut the pipelines to Haifa, where British forces were based, and restored the links to Tripoli that had been cut after the French armistice in 1940. Iraq’s oilfields at Kirkuk were a vital supply line for the British forces fighting the Axis forces on multiple fronts in Yugoslavia, Greece, Crete, Libya, and east Africa. So a force, two Indian brigades among them, was duly dispatched across the desert. Raschid Ali, in turn, desperately appealed to his Axis allies for help.
The Axis powers were wrong-footed by Ali’s revolt. They lacked missions in Iraq and were unable to persuade neutral Turkey to act as a conduit for weapons supply. This brought the theoretically neutral Vichy France, and Syria, into play. The solution was to send a stockpile of seized French arms under an Italian Control Commission, but this required negotiation with the Vichy administration. Admiral Darlan may have had France’s best interests at heart, but his belief in a German victory turned him into a collabo (the French slang for collaborator). Taken in by Hitler’s bogus commitments to concessions, he agreed to the weapons transfer and for German fighter plans to land in Syria en route to Raschid Ali’s aid.
Vichy, thus, had become an Axis collaborator and enemy. For de Gaulle, smarting from an ignominious defeat of his rag tag forces to capture the French colony of Dakar in Senegal, an invasion of Syria would restore his self-esteem, bring the 45,000 French troops to the Free French cause and establish a foothold in West Asia. But by then, Raschid Ali’s revolt was all over bar the shouting. So why did Churchill agree to this pointless exercise against the advice of his commander on the spot, Archibald Wavell? It is hard to escape the view that he was looking to establish control over Iraq by a short, quick operation.
In that sense he got his wish. With the Germans unable to help – Operation Barbarossa, the planned invasion of Russia in June, was looming – the Vichy forces were soon defeated. But the victory was mostly at the cost of resources of the British Empire. The Free French division, writes Mr De Wailly, was “understrength, ill-equipped, not homogenous… their troops did not form a force that was easily usable in the British order of battle.” This Syrian adventure cost the Allies precious resources in men and materiel just when they were on the back foot in every theatre of war. Some 10,000 soldiers, mostly Australian, died — more than twice the number of American soldiers who died in the 2003 invasion.
There were many quirks to this ill-judged expedition. For one, Free French airmen refused to fire on their Vichy compatriots. For another, Syria’s Vichy commander General Henri-Fernand Dentz followed his orders only to the letter: The materiel was disabled before being dispatched and German planes were given only over-flight rights. In 2003, US troops hunted in vain for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In 1941, Allied troops searched frantically for signs of German troops – the ostensible reason for the invasion – only to find none. The other tragi-comic outcome: Few Vichy troops agreed to Free French followers and had to be taken prisoner.
Written in 2006 but available to the English-speaking world in translation this year, this account of a forgotten campaign is a stark reminder of the problems that arise when policy is driven by leaders’ ego.
