The Anglo-Iraqi War begins

On 2 May 1941, before dawn, several dozen aircraft were circling over the plateau that overlooked the British air base at Habbaniya: obsolete biplanes and twin-engined trainers, flown by the instructors and pupils of the RAF’s No. 4 Flying Training School. At five in the morning bombers arrived from Shaibah near Basra, and the first bombs fell on the positions of the Iraqi army, which since 30 April had been holding the base under siege. The British struck without an ultimatum, so as not to give the Iraqis time to shell the airfield. So began the Anglo-Iraqi War: a month-long campaign in which Britain overthrew the government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani before the Germans could give him any real help.

The decision

Rashid Ali’s government, which had seized power in Baghdad on 1 April, decided to answer the British landing at Basra with a show of force where the British were weakest. On the night of 29–30 April Iraqi troops occupied the plateau rising a few hundred metres from the airfield at Habbaniya and demanded that all flying cease. According to the official history of the RAF, on 30 April some 9,000 troops with 28 guns were in position there, and by the following day several dozen guns, light tanks and armoured cars were counted. The commander of British forces in Iraq, Air Vice-Marshal Harry Smart, replied that he would regard any interference with training as an act of war, but for two days he did not attack: he knew the policy of the command in Cairo, which wanted to avoid fighting in Iraq at almost any cost.

On the morning of 1 May the answer came from London: the situation had to be restored, and the ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, was given full authority to take any steps necessary, including air attack. Should communication with the embassy be cut, Smart was to act on his own responsibility. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, added a telegram of his own: “If you have to strike, strike hard.” It was by now too late for a day-long bombardment preceded by an ultimatum, and the number of guns on the plateau was growing by the hour. In the evening Smart, with the agreement of the ambassador, with whom he was in touch by radio, decided to strike at dawn without warning. He feared that, once forewarned, the Iraqis would start shelling the airfield and prevent his aircraft – the only weapon he had – from taking off. RAF Middle East Command sent him Wellingtons of No. 70 Squadron at Shaibah, followed by a second wave from No. 37 Squadron.

A flying school goes to war

The forces at Smart’s disposal were essentially an improvisation. Since the beginning of April the workshops at Habbaniya had been converting training aircraft for combat: the Hawker Audax and Fairey Gordon biplanes, which normally carried light 20-pound bombs, were adapted to take two 250-pounders, and the Airspeed Oxford trainers, never designed to carry weapons at all, were fitted with racks for eight small bombs. The school’s few Gladiators were joined by six sent from Egypt. According to the official history of the RAF, there were only about thirty-five qualified pilots on the base, instructors included; among them were officers of the Greek air force who were training in Iraq. The most able pupils, barely through their elementary training, were therefore promoted to “operational pilots”, while the weaker ones and volunteers from the ground staff flew as observers and gunners. Out of all this four bomber “squadrons” and a fighter flight were formed, called the Habbaniya Air Striking Force, under the school’s commandant, Group Captain W.A.B. Savile. The golf course and polo ground inside the perimeter fence were joined to make a landing ground for the Audaxes, hidden by trees from observation from the plateau.

Ground defence was taken over by Colonel Ouvry Roberts of the staff of the 10th Indian Division, who had flown in from Basra to look at the situation and decided to stay. He had at his disposal some 300–400 men of the 1st Battalion, King’s Own Royal Regiment, flown in from Shaibah in the last days of April; companies of the Levies, recruited mainly from among the Assyrians; and an RAF armoured car company. There was no artillery apart from a few mortars. There were also some 9,000 civilians on the base, including British women and children evacuated from Baghdad on 29 April.

Friday 2 May

The first aircraft took off while it was still dark and by about 4.45 a.m. were over the plateau, looking for targets. At five o’clock the Wellingtons of No. 70 Squadron arrived from Shaibah; the British Army’s official history speaks of eight, the RAF history of ten. When they turned for home, thirty-odd Audaxes, Gordons and Oxfords from the school went into the attack, diving to a few hundred metres to hit the gun positions. Within minutes the Iraqis replied with artillery fire on the airfield and the cantonment, and their infantry began firing at the aircraft. The attack took them completely by surprise: many, as it later turned out, believed they were taking part in an exercise, and some were preparing for morning prayers.

The first day was hard for the defenders. One Oxford went down in flames, killing an instructor and two pupils. A damaged Wellington made an emergency landing on the Habbaniya airfield and burned out under fire. In the morning the Iraqi air force appeared over the base; according to the British official history it had 50–60 serviceable aircraft, some of them more modern than the trainers. It proved less dangerous than the artillery, however. The artillery, for its part, shot surprisingly badly: by ten o’clock the air attacks had subdued the batteries’ fire, neither the water tower nor the power station had been hit, and the training aircraft had learned to start their take-off run behind the hangars so as to stay in view for as short a time as possible. Between the raids transport aircraft carrying women and children flew out of Habbaniya to Shaibah.

By the evening the school had flown 193 sorties. It had lost five aircraft, two in the air and three on the ground, and some twenty others had been damaged; the mechanics worked all night to make them airworthy again. On the base 13 people had been killed and 29 wounded, among them nine civilians. In the south of the country the Vincent biplanes of No. 244 Squadron from Shaibah attacked Iraqi troops and cut the railway from Basra to Baghdad, losing two machines. Near Basra, where the 20th Indian Infantry Brigade was already stationed and further units had disembarked on 29–30 April, Indian troops guarded the airfield, the port and the power station; the Iraqi units in the city, which on 2 May had promised to withdraw, stayed where they were, and a bigger clash, for the suburb of Ashar, took place on 7–8 May. In the west, near the border with Transjordan, the Iraqi desert police had already fired on British road workers at Rutba on 1 May, and with the outbreak of war oil stopped flowing through the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline to Haifa.

In Baghdad the news of the attack came as a shock. Rashid Ali and the colonels of the Golden Square had counted on a base full of pupils and civilians capitulating, or on London agreeing to talks; they had not expected a flying school to fight. The government appealed to Germany and Italy for immediate help, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who was living in Baghdad, a few days later called on Muslims to wage holy war against Britain.

The siege reversed

By the evening of 2 May the Iraqi forces around the base had grown to roughly brigade strength, but they showed no inclination to assault, and their guns proved much less dangerous than had been feared. Smart therefore concluded that he could turn part of his force against the Iraqi air force and the supply lines from Baghdad. On 3 May aircraft from Habbaniya and Wellingtons from Shaibah bombed the positions on the plateau, the road from Baghdad and Rashid airfield near the capital, the main base of the Iraqi air force. That day the Iraqi authorities dismantled the British embassy’s radio station in Baghdad. Some 350 Britons had taken refuge in the embassy, and several hundred more people in the American legation.

On 4 May Wellingtons of No. 37 Squadron bombed Rashid, and Blenheim twin-engined fighters of No. 203 Squadron, escorted by two long-range Hurricanes that had arrived from Egypt, strafed the airfields at Baghdad and Mosul, where German aircraft were expected. Within a few days the Iraqi air force had been practically eliminated; according to some accounts 22 aircraft were destroyed on the ground in the raids on Rashid alone. From 4 May aircraft also circled over the plateau at night, although few of the pilots had any experience of night flying. Roberts, for his part, sent out small parties of Levies and King’s Own infantry at night to raid the gun crews and outposts. According to the RAF history the roles had been reversed: it was no longer the Iraqis who were besieging Habbaniya, but Habbaniya that was besieging the Iraqis, cut off by the night raids from the supplies coming from Baghdad over the only bridge across the Euphrates, at Fallujah.

On 5 May Smart, injured in a car accident in the night-time blackout, was evacuated to Basra and then to India. That was the official version; one of the Habbaniya instructors, Tony Dudgeon, claimed years later in his memoirs that the commander had also been at the end of his nervous strength by then. Command on the ground passed in practice to Roberts, while the air forces in Iraq were taken over by Air Vice-Marshal John D’Albiac, who had just returned from Greece and reached the base a dozen or so days later. On the night of 5–6 May King’s Own patrols raided the plateau, supported by armoured cars and two First World War howitzers taken from outside the officers’ mess, where they had stood as ornaments.

6 May: the end of the siege

That same night of 5–6 May the Iraqis, exhausted by the incessant air attacks and night raids, abandoned the plateau. According to both British official histories, the Army’s and the RAF’s, reconnaissance at dawn on 6 May found it deserted; some publications put the withdrawal a day later, on the late evening of 6 May. A mass of equipment was left behind in the positions and was soon put to use on the base, including six Czechoslovak mountain howitzers, an Italian tank and ten armoured cars.

The RAF armoured cars set off in pursuit and ran into Iraqi troops holding the village of Sin adh-Dhibban (Sin el Dhibban in British sources) on the road to Fallujah, and with it the pumping station on which the base’s water supply and drainage depended. The King’s Own infantry and the Levies, with close support from the Audaxes, drove them out after sharp fighting and, according to the official history, took twelve officers and more than three hundred men prisoner; other accounts give a total of 408 prisoners for that day. In the afternoon airmen spotted a column of motorised infantry and artillery coming up from Fallujah to the rescue. Some forty aircraft from Habbaniya attacked it from low level with bombs and machine-gun fire near Sin adh-Dhibban and Nukta, where it had collided with the retreating troops. The last pilot to turn back to base saw, according to the RAF history, only “a solid mass of flame 250 yards long” and the flashes of exploding ammunition. More prisoners were taken; according to some accounts the Iraqis lost more than a thousand men killed, wounded and captured in the space of two hours. The Iraqi air force responded that afternoon with three raids on the base.

The destruction of the columns between Habbaniya and Fallujah is often dated to 7 May. Both British official histories, however, place it, like the fight for Sin adh-Dhibban, on the afternoon of 6 May. 7 May was the first day on which Habbaniya was no longer surrounded; according to most accounts it was then that Churchill, unaware of Smart’s accident, sent him a telegram: “Your vigorous and splendid action has largely restored the situation. We are all watching the grand fight you are making. All possible aid will be sent. Keep it up!”

According to figures cited in the literature, the five days of fighting cost the defenders 13 airmen killed, 21 seriously wounded and four men unfit for action through nervous exhaustion; other figures give a total of 34 killed, in the air and by shellfire on the ground. The school lost 22 of its 64 aircraft, and ten pilots were killed or seriously wounded. Iraqi losses at Habbaniya are estimated at 500–1,000 men, not counting those taken prisoner.

London against Cairo

The attack on the plateau was London’s decision, not Cairo’s, and from the first day of the war the Prime Minister and the Commander-in-Chief Middle East were at odds over who was to wage it and with what. Until then operations in Iraq had come under the command in India, at the request of Archibald Wavell himself. On 2 May the Defence Committee decided to transfer command in northern Iraq to Cairo, because only from there – from Palestine – could help reach Habbaniya quickly. Wavell, who in those same weeks was evacuating his troops from Greece, defending Crete and Tobruk and finishing the campaign in East Africa, replied that he had serious misgivings. He was stretched to the limit everywhere and could not risk part of his forces on a venture which, in his view, would achieve nothing. He advised negotiating with the Iraqi government and accepting a Turkish offer of mediation. The force he could assemble in Palestine was, by his account, one motorised brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division, short of transport and weapons, a field artillery regiment, a lorried infantry battalion and squadrons of the Transjordan Frontier Force of doubtful value in a fight against fellow Muslims: without tanks or armoured cars, too weak and too late. Its departure might also cause unrest in Palestine and deprive him of his only reserve against Syria.

Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff did not give way. They replied that Turkish mediation was out of the question and that negotiations could be considered only on the basis of an Iraqi capitulation with guarantees for the future. Rashid Ali had been acting in collusion with the Axis from the start and was waiting for its help, and the landing at Basra had made his plot break out prematurely; bold action without delay therefore stood a good chance. The Chiefs of Staff took full responsibility for sending troops from Palestine. On 5 May, his 58th birthday, Wavell took over command in northern Iraq against his will; “a nice birthday present you have given me”, he wrote to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, John Dill. He warned once more that prolonged fighting in Iraq would endanger the defence of Palestine and Egypt, but he carried out the order. He brought General Henry Maitland Wilson from Greece to command in Palestine and Transjordan, and on 8 May he also took over command in southern Iraq, where General Edward Quinan had arrived from India.

The force assembled in Palestine was named Habforce (from Habbaniya Force) and was commanded by Major General George Clark, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division. Before the Chiefs of Staff’s telegram reached Cairo, the close siege of Habbaniya had ended, so the task changed: the main body of Habforce was to restore and hold the line of communication across the desert, while a flying column, Kingcol – named after the commander of the 4th Cavalry Brigade, Brigadier James Kingstone – some 2,000 men and 500 vehicles strong, was to reach the Euphrates as fast as possible. Its way was cleared by the Arab Legion from Transjordan under John Bagot Glubb, lent by the Emir Abdullah, and the fort at Rutba, bombed from 9 May onwards, was taken on the night of 10–11 May by RAF armoured cars that had driven from the Western Desert of Egypt in five days. Kingcol crossed the Iraqi border on 13 May and reached Habbaniya on 18 May, almost two weeks after the siege had ended. The column, sent under pressure from London and against Wavell’s advice, was overtaken by events: the defenders of the base had managed on their own, and Habforce now served not to relieve it but to advance on Baghdad.

Place in the war

The blow of 2 May decided the outcome of the war almost before it had properly begun. Rashid Ali lost his air force in the first week, and his troops at Habbaniya, beaten and demoralised, fell back to Fallujah and Ramadi and breached the dykes to shield themselves behind floodwater. The Germans, on whom Baghdad had been counting, decided to help only after the fighting had broken out. At the beginning of May Hitler resolved to send a small air detachment to Iraq, and Admiral François Darlan agreed to let German aircraft land en route at airfields in Vichy-controlled Syria. In mid-May several dozen Luftwaffe aircraft appeared at Mosul, later joined by a dozen or so Italian fighters, but there were too few of them, fuel and spare parts were lacking, and Hitler, absorbed in preparing the attack on the USSR, in a directive of 23 May put off any larger decisions on the Middle East until that campaign was over.

The forces from Habbaniya and Kingcol took Fallujah on 19 May and beat off an Iraqi counter-attack, and at the end of the month they stood outside Baghdad. On 30 May Rashid Ali, the Mufti and the colonels of the Golden Square fled to Iran; on 31 May the mayor of Baghdad signed an armistice; and on 1 June the regent, Abd al-Ilah, returned to the capital. On 1 and 2 June Baghdad saw a pogrom of the Jews known as the Farhud. The help Germany had given by way of Syria settled the question of a British invasion of Syria and Lebanon in June 1941, and in August British and Indian troops from Iraq, together with the Red Army, occupied Iran. The dispute over Iraq added to Churchill’s growing distrust of Wavell, whom the Prime Minister removed from Cairo in June.

The defence of Habbaniya has gone down in RAF history as one of its most remarkable episodes: a flying school with decade-old aircraft, instructors and pupils, backed by a few hundred infantrymen and Levies, forced several times its number of troops to retreat before relief arrived. It also mattered far beyond Iraq. Had the base fallen and the Germans managed to send more substantial forces to Baghdad, Britain might have lost Iraqi oil, the overland route from the Persian Gulf to Palestine, and the bases from which Syria and Iran were later occupied and through which supplies to the USSR later flowed. Five days of fighting on the Euphrates in May 1941 ensured that the whole region remained on the Allied side until the end of the war.