The Battle of Fallujah

In mid-May 1941 the British forces assembled at the air base of Habbaniya went over from defence to attack. Their first objective was Fallujah, a small town on the Euphrates a few dozen kilometres east of the base, where a steel bridge carried the road to Baghdad across the river. Anyone who wanted to reach the Iraqi capital from the west had to have that bridge. It is often said that on 17 May the British advanced on Fallujah and in five days of fighting drove the Iraqis out of it. The sources describe the course of events somewhat differently. On 17 and 18 May there were preparations and bombing; the attack proper came on 19 May and lasted a single day: after an air bombardment lasting many hours, a detachment of Assyrian soldiers crossed the bridge in half an hour, practically without a fight, and the garrison surrendered. The real battle took place only on 22 May, when the Iraqi army tried to retake the town, and that attempt was beaten off. Five days did indeed pass between 17 and 22 May, but they were not days of continuous fighting.

After the siege of Habbaniya

The Anglo-Iraqi War began on 2 May, when the aircraft of the flying school at Habbaniya and bombers from Shaibah struck at the Iraqi troops that since 30 April had been besieging the base from the plateau above the airfield. After four days of incessant air attack the Iraqis came down from the plateau, and on 6 May soldiers of the British King’s Own battalion and of the RAF’s Assyrian auxiliaries drove them out of the village of Sin el-Dhibban on the road to Fallujah, taking more than three hundred prisoners. That same afternoon forty aircraft from Habbaniya smashed an Iraqi column of reinforcements coming up from Fallujah. The siege was over, but the Iraqi army still held both roads leading out of the base. To the west, at Ramadi, stood a brigade that had breached the dykes and flooded the surrounding country, cutting itself off from the world with water; it could threaten no one, but it blocked the road to Palestine. To the east, at Fallujah, another brigade defended the bridge and the road to Baghdad, likewise shielded by floods.

At the base, command of the ground forces had been exercised since 1 May by Colonel Ouvry Roberts, a staff officer of the 10th Indian Infantry Division from Basra, who had flown in to assess the situation and stayed. From the units he had to hand he formed the so-called Habbaniya Brigade: a battalion of the King’s Own Royal Regiment, companies of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Gurkha Rifles, and Madras sappers flown in from Basra, companies of the Iraq Levies, made up mainly of Assyrians, RAF armoured cars and a few captured Iraqi howitzers. The base’s aircraft, reinforced by machines from Egypt, practically destroyed the Iraqi air force within a week. Air Vice-Marshal Harry Smart, the defender of Habbaniya, was injured in a car accident and evacuated, and command of the RAF in Iraq passed to Air Vice-Marshal John D’Albiac, who had recently returned from Greece.

From 13 May German aircraft appeared over Iraq. Fliegerführer Irak, a small Luftwaffe group sent through Vichy Syria, established itself at Mosul and on 16 May bombed Habbaniya for the first time. The British had to hurry, before the Germans could send more forces and the Iraqi army recovered its spirit.

Kingcol across the desert

Meanwhile relief was coming from the west. At the insistence of London and of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and against the objections of the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell – who considered the expedition too weak and too late and was himself taken up with Libya, Crete and preparations for an offensive in the desert – a force called Habforce was formed in Palestine under Major General John George Clark, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division. The division was only just converting from horses to motor vehicles and had been stripped of its artillery, engineers and services for the benefit of other fronts. The advanced detachment, named Kingcol after its commander, Brigadier James Kingstone, numbered about 2,000 men and 500 vehicles: a Household Cavalry regiment, two companies of the 1st Battalion, the Essex Regiment, a battery of 25-pounder gun-howitzers, RAF armoured cars and services. It had to cover some 800 kilometres of desert, carrying water for five days and food for twelve. Its way was cleared by the Arab Legion, the army of the emirate of Transjordan, under the British officer John Bagot Glubb, known as Glubb Pasha. The Legion – which, unlike some of the soldiers of the Transjordan Frontier Force, did not refuse to cross the border – together with RAF armoured cars and aircraft drove the Iraqi police and the volunteers of Fawzi al-Qawuqji out of the fort at Rutba on the night of 10–11 May.

Kingcol crossed the Iraqi frontier on 13 May and reached Rutba that evening. The command at Habbaniya advised it to bypass the flooded country round Ramadi and approach the base from the south, round Lake Habbaniya, by way of the bridge at Mujara. On 15 May the column was attacked by a German aircraft for the first time. The next day, in heat approaching 50 degrees in the shade, the heavy supply lorries began breaking through the hard crust of the desert and sinking into soft sand; they were dug out again and again until at last the exhausted column had to turn back. Only on 17 May, guided by the Arab Legion along a roundabout route, did Kingcol move on, and on 18 May it reached Lake Habbaniya and the base, having been strafed on the way by German fighters. That same day General Clark and Air Vice-Marshal D’Albiac flew into Habbaniya. They found preparations for the attack on Fallujah under way and decided not to interfere with Colonel Roberts’s plan. The relief force had arrived twelve days after the siege of the base had ended, but its artillery and infantry proved very useful.

The plan

At Fallujah the river was about 270 metres wide, and the bridge was the only crossing. The aim was to capture it intact. Roberts decided first to subject the known Iraqi positions to a long air bombardment to break the defenders’ morale, and then to take the bridge and enter the town in a single swift stroke. The greatest problem was water. The road from Habbaniya to Fallujah was flooded, and the embankment that was to carry a new highway south of the lake had been breached. Three columns were therefore planned. The first, with RAF armoured cars, a company of Assyrians, a detachment of Gurkhas and the captured howitzers, was to cross the Euphrates at Sin el-Dhibban on an improvised cable ferry built by the RAF’s works services, and approach the town from the north-west, from the village of Saqlawiyah. The second, a company of the King’s Own, was to be flown in by transport aircraft and landed on the Baghdad road beyond the town to cut off the garrison’s retreat. The third, a company of Assyrians under Captain Alastair Graham of the Green Howards, supported by six guns from Kingcol’s battery, was to advance straight on the bridge. The Assyrians had practised crossing water in boats in the swimming pool at Habbaniya, since canals and irrigation ditches lay in their path. Each column had sappers.

On 18 May the RAF bombed selected points in Fallujah and on the Baghdad road, deliberately refraining from attacking the town as a whole for the sake of its inhabitants. At dusk the columns set out. The air-landed company came down without hindrance; the other two spent the whole night struggling through canals and floodwater.

19 May: the bridge

At 5 a.m. on 19 May 57 aircraft from Habbaniya, most of them Audax and Oxford trainers converted into bombers, began bombing the Iraqi trenches and positions in and around Fallujah. An hour later leaflets were dropped calling on the garrison to surrender. There was no reply, so the bombing continued intermittently throughout the morning. At 2.45 p.m. came a final ten-minute strike on the trenches by the bridge, after which, covered by the fire of Kingcol’s gun-howitzers, Captain Graham’s Assyrians advanced across open, boggy ground. They met only token resistance, and within half an hour they were across the bridge, which fell into their hands intact. Soon an Iraqi envoy appeared offering the surrender of the town and garrison. About 300 soldiers were taken prisoner; many others threw off their uniforms and melted away among the inhabitants or fled towards Baghdad. Neither the infantry nor the airmen, who flew some 135 sorties that day, suffered any losses. The British official history called it a “fitting climax” to the fighting in the Habbaniya area.

The only immediate response was a German air raid. Aircraft of Fliegerführer Irak bombed and strafed the airfield at Habbaniya, destroying or damaging several aircraft; there were dead and wounded. Colonel Roberts, his task accomplished, returned on 21 May to the 10th Indian Division at Basra, and a small garrison was left in Fallujah: two companies of the King’s Own and a platoon of Assyrians.

22 May: the Iraqi counter-attack

Three days later the Iraqi army struck again, and with a determination the British had not expected. At 2.30 a.m. on 22 May the Iraqi 6th Brigade of the 3rd Division, supported by light tanks – in fact Italian L3 tankettes – advanced on the town from the east. At about three o’clock it broke into the north-eastern outskirts and pushed a company of the King’s Own out of its trenches into the buildings. Two tankettes that drove deep into the town were quickly destroyed, and at dawn a counter-attack by the Assyrians and infantry threw the Iraqis out of the north-eastern part of Fallujah. The attack then shifted to the south-eastern edge of the town, held by the second company of the King’s Own; here the Iraqis made no progress at all.

The British command at Habbaniya sent Brigadier Kingstone with Kingcol units to help. At about ten o’clock, after crossing the floods on improvised rafts, two companies of the Essex Regiment and a squadron of the Household Cavalry reached the town. They were thrown straight into the fight. The infantry cleared the northern outskirts, into which the Iraqis had earlier infiltrated, house by house. By six in the evening the last snipers had been silenced; the rest of the Iraqis fled or surrendered. The British captured six light tanks and took about a hundred prisoners. Aircraft from Habbaniya attacked the Iraqi reserves coming up, which ended the last attempt to fight for the crossing.

According to the British official history, the Assyrians lost twelve men killed and wounded and the King’s Own nearly forty, with exceptionally heavy losses among officers; other studies give a total of about 50 killed and wounded. Iraqi losses were heavy but were never accurately counted. The German air force, which might have played a decisive part in the battle had it struck together with the Iraqi infantry, appeared over Fallujah only on 23 May and strafed the British positions three times, by then changing nothing.

Place in the war

The capture and holding of Fallujah opened the road to Baghdad for the British. General Clark, who had fewer than 1,500 soldiers at his disposal against at least twenty thousand Iraqis in the area of the capital, decided not to wait. He counted on the enemy not realising how weak the British forces were, and on the Iraqi army’s morale having been broken after Habbaniya and Fallujah. An approach from the south would have led through the Shia holy city of Karbala, so he chose to advance in two columns: Brigadier Kingstone along the main road from Fallujah, and Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Ferguson with the Household Cavalry and the Arab Legion by a roundabout route from the north. The columns set out on 27 and 28 May, and though they moved slowly, rumours of their approach grew in Baghdad into a mighty army. At the end of May the prime minister, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, and the colonels of the “Golden Square” fled to Iran, and on 31 May an armistice was signed that ended the war. For the fighting of 19–22 May two British regiments were awarded the battle honour “Falluja”.

The Battle of Fallujah showed what the Iraqis lacked in this war. Their soldiers could fight doggedly, as on 22 May, but their command acted sluggishly and without co-ordination, could neither exploit its numerical superiority nor co-operate with the Germans, and British command of the air and the fear of air attack broke the spirit of one unit after another. The British, for their part, with a handful of infantry, training aircraft and improvised columns in Iraq, won through a speed and boldness the enemy could not match. For them the victory at Fallujah came in the darkest weeks of the spring of 1941, when after the fall of Greece the fate of Crete hung in the balance and in Libya Rommel stood before Tobruk and on the Egyptian frontier; it meant that at least at the eastern end of the Middle East the situation had been brought under control. Iraq, its oil and the overland route from the Persian Gulf to Palestine remained in British hands, and it was from here, in June 1941, that some of the troops who had fought at Fallujah set out against Vichy Syria.