Inferno - Max Hastings [83]
On 8 June 1941, Australian, British and Free French units advanced into Syria and Lebanon. British commandos landing on the coast met fierce resistance at the mouth of the Litani River, and suffered heavy casualties—forty-five dead, including its commanding officer, and seventy-five wounded. Two French heavy destroyers bombarded the British positions, then turned their fire on a British destroyer flotilla, of which one ship was badly damaged. Vichy bombers joined the attack on the warships, and their escorting fighters shot down three Hurricanes. A defiant French NCO prisoner told the war correspondent Alan Moorehead: “You thought we were yellow, didn’t you? You thought we couldn’t fight in France. You thought we were like the Italians. Well, we’ve shown you.”
It demanded courage for a man to separate himself from his country, home and family, to accept the status of a renegade in the eyes of his own people, in order to serve in the ranks of Free France. But many Poles made such a choice. Why did the French instead oppose Allied forces fighting their conquerors and occupiers? There was deep bitterness about France’s predicament, which demanded scapegoats. Many Frenchmen considered their country betrayed by the British in June 1940, a sentiment intensified by the Royal Navy’s destruction of French capital ships at Mers-el-Kébir. There was self-hatred, which bred anger. Overlaid upon centuries-old resentment of perfide Albion, there was now the fresh grievance that Churchill had fought on after Pétain succumbed. The German occupiers of France were disliked, but so too were the British across the Channel, especially by French professional soldiers, sailors and airmen.
“France does not want to be liberated,” the former Vichy prime minister and prominent collaborator Pierre Laval told the New York Times. “She wants to settle her fate herself in collaboration with Germany.” Many of his compatriots agreed: the Resistance became a significant force in France only in 1944, and made a negligible military contribution by comparison with the partisans of Russia and Yugoslavia. Few French defenders of Syria in 1941 found anything distasteful about killing British, Indian and Australian invaders. British troops advancing into Syria found graffiti on the wall of an abandoned fort: “Wait, dirty English bastards, until the Germans come. We run away now, and so will you soon.”
As the Allied forces advanced 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 superdestroyer Chevalier-Paul off Beirut, and a Vichy submarine was later torpedoed with the loss of fifty-five lives. At Mezze on 19 June, strong Vichy counterattacks 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 with aperitifs 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, Gen. 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,