The Armistice of Acre

One minute after midnight on 12 July 1941 the guns fell silent in Lebanon and Syria. Five weeks after the start of the Allied invasion of Syria and Lebanon, with Australians, British, Indians and Free French in possession of Damascus, Palmyra and the Euphrates valley and standing a few kilometres from Beirut, the French High Commissioner in the Levant, General Henri Dentz, asked for a ceasefire. In the morning his envoys crossed the front line on the coast road and were escorted to Acre in Palestine. There, in the officers’ mess of a British barracks on the outskirts of the town, the terms were negotiated all day. At ten in the evening General Henry Maitland Wilson and Dentz’s deputy, General Joseph de Verdilhac, initialled the convention, and on 14 July, the French national holiday, they signed it in its final form. The campaign in which Frenchmen had fired on Frenchmen was over. It soon turned out, however, that the armistice, negotiated without the participation of General Charles de Gaulle, had very nearly brought about a break between him and the British.

Chronologies usually record under 12 July that “the Vichy French capitulate in Syria”. That is a simplification. On 12 July the ceasefire came into force and the terms were initialled, while the convention itself – called the Convention of Acre (Saint-Jean-d’Acre) or the Armistice of Acre – was signed on 14 July. Nor was it a capitulation in the strict sense: the Vichy army surrendered its heavy weapons but was granted the honours of war and kept its personal arms and its own command until repatriation.

The last days of the campaign

At the beginning of July the position of the Army of the Levant was deteriorating fast. In the east, after the capture of Palmyra and of Deir ez-Zor on 3 July, British and Indian columns were out on the roads to Homs and Aleppo. The decision came on the coast, however. Some twenty kilometres south of Beirut, on the Damour river, at least five French battalions held positions on steep ridges and in mined banana groves. During the night of 5–6 July Major General Arthur Allen’s 7th Australian Division crossed the river. The frontal attack stalled, but an outflanking move through the mountains succeeded, and on the morning of 9 July the defence of Damour collapsed. On 10 July the Australians broke the last resistance at Khalde, a few kilometres from the Lebanese capital. The battle for Beirut was lost.

General Dentz had nothing left to fight with. According to the British official history, 55 aircraft lay destroyed or beyond repair on Syrian airfields, and the rest of his air force was withdrawing northwards. Ports, airfields and railways were under constant air attack. Vichy tried to send reinforcements from France, but Turkey refused to let troops pass through its territory, and on 4 July a British torpedo bomber sank the transport Saint-Didier, carrying arms and ammunition, in the Gulf of Antalya. The Germans, busy since 22 June with the war against the USSR, had no intention of getting involved in the defence of the French mandates; the question of Luftwaffe support for Dentz, considered in June, came to nothing, and sources differ as to whether he rejected German help or sought it in vain.

As early as the end of June the Vichy government, in which foreign and military policy was in the hands of the Deputy Prime Minister, Admiral François Darlan, had let it be understood through American diplomacy that Marshal Philippe Pétain was ready to authorise Dentz to discuss an end to the fighting. The intermediary was the American consul general in Beirut, Cornelius Van H. Engert, who on the morning of 11 July handed Dentz a memorandum with the British terms. That evening a radio message reached the new Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Claude Auchinleck, who had taken over from General Archibald Wavell on 5 July: Dentz proposed that the fighting stop at midnight and was ready to negotiate on the basis of the memorandum. He stipulated, however, that the French government had authorised him to negotiate only with the British, not with the Free French.

The proposal was considered at once by the Middle East War Council under the Minister of State, Oliver Lyttelton, who had arrived in Cairo on 5 July. Engert warned that Dentz might be playing for time in the hope of a last-minute rescue. The British therefore rejected his reservations and demanded that he send plenipotentiaries to a British post on the Beirut–Haifa road by nine in the morning of 12 July at the latest; otherwise the fighting would resume. The ceasefire took effect as planned: according to the text of the convention, hostilities ceased on 11 July at 21.01 Greenwich Mean Time, that is, one minute after midnight local time.

The negotiations at Acre

Dentz did not go to Palestine himself. He sent his deputy, the commander of land forces in the Levant, General Joseph de Verdilhac. Time magazine wrote shortly afterwards that the choice fell on him because he was better disposed towards the British and less hostile to de Gaulle than the High Commissioner himself. The French delegation arrived on 12 July at Sidney Smith Barracks on the outskirts of Acre, named after the British admiral who had defended the town against Napoleon in 1799. On the Allied side sat General Wilson, as General Officer Commanding Allied forces in Palestine and Syria, Air Commodore L. O. Brown of the RAF and Captain J. A. V. Morse of the Royal Navy. General Georges Catroux, de Gaulle’s delegate in the Middle East, was also present, but Vichy wanted nothing to do with the Free French, so he could not sign the convention; he expressed his consent to its terms in a separate letter. These were, as journalists noted, the first negotiations on ending hostilities between the British and the French since Napoleonic times.

After a long discussion, at about ten in the evening of 12 July, Wilson and de Verdilhac initialled the draft. The terms had been approved beforehand by the British government, and they were now sent to Vichy. According to Time, Vichy’s representatives pretended for a while that they would not accept them, then left the decision to Dentz, who had no choice anyway. On 14 July, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the convention was signed at Acre by General Wilson, acting on behalf of the Commanders-in-Chief in the Middle East, and by General de Verdilhac on behalf of the French High Command. According to Time’s report, as de Verdilhac was unscrewing his pen the lights in the room went out, and the document was signed by the headlamp of a motorcycle that a dispatch rider wheeled into the room.

The terms of the convention

The convention had 22 articles and, as the British themselves admitted, was lenient towards the defeated. The Allied forces were to occupy the territory of Syria and Lebanon, while the French units were to concentrate in designated areas by 15 July and remain under their own command until repatriation. The French received full honours of war: officers, NCOs and men kept their personal weapons, though the rank and file without ammunition, while guns, coastal batteries, anti-aircraft weapons and vehicles passed under British control. Warships, ports, airfields, aircraft, fuel stocks, railways, telegraphs, radio stations and the submarine cable were to be handed over undamaged. British prisoners were to be released immediately, including those who had been taken to France; until they returned, the British reserved the right to hold an equal number of French officers. Officials were to remain at their posts until replaced, French schools, hospitals and missions were guaranteed respect for their rights, and Syrian and Lebanese soldiers and officials who had fought on the Vichy side were not to be prosecuted. The British could take the local “special troops” (troupes spéciales du Levant) into their own service. The execution of the convention was supervised by a five-member control commission in Beirut, in which the British had three members and the chairman.

Article 8 proved the most important for the future. Every soldier and official was to choose for himself whether to join the Allied cause or return to France. The British pushed this principle through against the wishes of de Gaulle, who wanted the Army of the Levant to pass under his orders as a whole, or at least for the Free French to be able to canvass freely in its ranks. A secret protocol attached to the convention, meanwhile, forbade any personal contact between Frenchmen of the two camps that might influence the soldiers’ choice. Vichy officers could thus urge their men to return to France unhindered, while the Gaullists had no way of answering them.

The outcome of the choice

The result was painful for de Gaulle. According to the British official history, of 37,736 soldiers and officials only 5,668 – roughly one in seven – went over to the Free French. The rest were shipped back to France in eight convoys between 7 August and 27 September. When it emerged that some British prisoners had been taken out of Syria, even after the convention was initialled, the British held Dentz and some thirty senior officers in Palestine as hostages until the prisoners returned.

Losses in the campaign were high for a war that many had not wanted to fight. The British, Australians and Indians lost about 3,300 men, prisoners included, according to the British official history, and the Free French about 1,300. The Vichy authorities announced in August 521 killed, 1,790 wounded, 1,037 missing and 3,004 taken prisoner, and after the war Dentz spoke of 1,092 dead.

De Gaulle’s anger

During the negotiations de Gaulle was in Brazzaville, the capital of Free France in Africa. He regarded the terms of the convention as a humiliation: Pétain’s men had been negotiated with over his head, Free France had been left out of the text, and the principle of free choice together with the ban on canvassing robbed him of the soldiers he had been counting on. Something else troubled him even more. The convention placed the occupation of Syria and Lebanon in British hands, and de Gaulle had long suspected that London meant to use the war to take France’s place in the Levant. He declared that Free France was not bound by an agreement it had not signed.

In the second half of July he flew to Cairo. By the accounts of both sides, his meeting with the Minister of State, Lyttelton, on 21 July was extraordinarily stormy. De Gaulle announced that unless the British changed the way the convention was being implemented, the Free French forces in the Middle East would cease to be subordinate to the British High Command within three days. The threat of a break in the alliance, at a moment when the British needed calm in the Levant, had its effect. Lyttelton agreed to an agreement “interpreting” the convention, confirmed by his letter of 25 July: the Free French were given freedom to recruit among Vichy soldiers and to take over the local troops and the civil administration. In an exchange of letters on 7 August the British government gave assurances that it had no political aims in Syria and Lebanon other than winning the war and no intention of undermining France’s position. Thus arose the Lyttelton–de Gaulle agreements, which the Free French invoked over the following years in every dispute with the British over the Levant.

Civil authority in both countries was assumed by General Catroux as Delegate General of Free France. On 8 June, the first day of the campaign, he had promised the Syrians and Lebanese, in de Gaulle’s name, the end of the mandate and independence. Formally he kept his word in the autumn: Syrian independence was proclaimed on 27 September and Lebanese on 26 November 1941. In practice the French retained full power in the Levant, while the British mission under General Edward Spears increasingly openly supported the local nationalists. The British official history observes that as early as the summer of 1941 the Syrians felt that the promised independence was slipping away from them once again, and that one unpopular French regime had replaced another.

Its place in the war

The Armistice of Acre ended the only campaign of the war in which Frenchmen fought Frenchmen on such a scale, and the last of a series of spring crises in the Middle East. After their defeats in Greece and Crete, the British had within two months gained control of Iraq and the Levant, closing to Germany the way to Middle Eastern oil and into the rear of Egypt. They gained air and naval bases far to the north of the Suez Canal, covered the pipelines and the Basra–Baghdad–Haifa route, and for the first time obtained a direct link with Turkey. On the same 12 July the Anglo-Soviet agreement on joint action against Germany was signed in Moscow, and a few weeks later troops set out from Iraq – now pacified and covered from the west – which together with the Red Army occupied Iran in August 1941.

For Vichy France the loss of the Levant was its most serious territorial loss since the defeat of 1940, and the fighting in Syria its bloodiest clash with its former allies after Mers-el-Kébir and Dakar. Even so, Vichy presented the defence of the Levant as a matter of honour, and the return of almost 32,000 soldiers who had rejected de Gaulle as proof of loyalty to the Marshal. In September 1941 Vichy awarded Dentz a high distinction of the Legion of Honour. After the liberation he was arrested and in 1945 sentenced to death for collaboration with the enemy; de Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and Dentz died in Fresnes prison in December 1945.

The political consequences proved the most lasting. The Anglo-French dispute over the Levant that began with the Convention of Acre dragged on until the end of the war. In November 1943 the Free French authorities arrested the President and ministers of Lebanon, provoking a crisis that ended with the recognition of the country’s full independence, and in May 1945 the French shelling of Damascus led to the Levant Crisis and a British ultimatum. In 1946 the last French troops left Syria and Lebanon. De Gaulle never forgave the British for what he regarded as the ousting of France from the Levant, and the mistrust born in the summer of 1941 at Acre and in Cairo cast a shadow over his relations with London long after the war.