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By Root 1047 0

on Damascus, strafing Vichy fighters badly wounded one column’s senior Free French officer. On 16 June Fleet Air Arm Swordfish torpedo-bombers sank the super-destroyer Chevalier-Paul off Beirut, and a Vichy submarine was later torpedoed with the loss of fifty-five lives. At Mezze on the 19th, strong Vichy counter-attacks with armoured support prompted the surrender of two Indian battalions and a unit of the Royal Fusiliers. British gestures of chivalry and attempts to parley were treated with contempt. A flight of Hurricanes sent to attack a French airfield made their first low-level pass without firing when the pilots glimpsed on the ground Vichy airmen entertaining girlfriends to apéritifs beside their planes. In consequence, on a second pass heavy ground fire damaged several Hurricanes including that of Roald Dahl, later famous as a writer. The French brought in aircraft reinforcements from their North African colonies. Among the Roman ruins of Palmyra, a unit of the Foreign Legion halted a British thrust from the east for nine days, though some Spanish legionnaires in the Vichy camp decided that the ideological conflict was unacceptable, and surrendered without a fight.

By the time Vichy’s high commissioner General Henri Dentz bowed to the inevitable and signed an armistice on 14 July after five weeks’ fighting, his own forces had suffered over a thousand killed. Allied casualties were somewhat fewer, but the Australians lost 416 dead. Vichy hailed as heroic the feats of Pierre le Gloan of the French air force, an ace who shot down seven RAF aircraft during the campaign. There was intense British bitterness about the vigour of resistance, and the callousness and sometimes brutality with which Allied prisoners were treated. Roald Dahl wrote later: ‘I for one have never forgiven the Vichy French for the unnecessary slaughter they caused.’

Dentz, in a gesture of spite, shipped sixty-three British officer and NCO prisoners to Greece en route to PoW camps in Germany, even while he was negotiating the armistice. Only British threats that he and his senior colleagues would be denied repatriation secured the captives’ return. Thereafter, 32,032 Vichy and colonial troops chose to sail with their commanders to occupied France, while 5,668 accepted service with de Gaulle. General Georges Catroux, condemned to death in absentia by the Pétain regime for his support of de Gaulle, became Free French plenipotentiary for the Levant. The Syrian people remained unenthusiastic about rule by Frenchmen of any hue, but the region was now safe from German dominance. Churchill’s boldness, amid the caution of his generals, was vindicated, even if the clumsy management of the little campaign promoted scant confidence in British military competence.

The Syrian venture ended in a useful strategic success. The achievement of securing Britain’s flank in the Middle East was more important than the loss of Crete. But across Europe, oppressed and threatened people struggled to find consolation amid so many conspicuous Allied defeats and failures. Mihail Sebastian wrote in Bucharest on 1 June 1941: ‘So long as Britain does not surrender, there is room for hope.’ But with Axis air power now dominant across most of the Mediterranean, the prestige of British arms lay low – and would fall lower yet.

On 15 June 1941 Wavell, reinforced by a consignment of tanks dispatched at great risk from Britain through the Mediterranean, launched a new offensive, Operation Battleaxe. Within two days, this foundered after Rommel’s 88mm guns inflicted heavy losses on the attackers. Failure cost the Middle East C-in-C his job. He was replaced by Gen. Sir Claude Auchinleck, who appointed Alan Cunningham, victor in Abyssinia, to command the newly-christened Eighth Army. To Churchill’s frustration, there followed a five-month lull in big battlefield operations. The British Army engaged in only minor actions in North Africa and elsewhere, though much was made of the Australian defence of beleaguered Tobruk.

The next desert offensive, Crusader, was launched on 18 November.