The Battle of Jezzine

On the evening of 13 June 1941, the sixth day of the Allied invasion of Syria and Lebanon, an Australian infantry battalion boarded lorries near Marjayoun and set off without lights along a winding mountain road to the north. After a night-long march and several hours of fighting, the men of the 2/31st Battalion took Jezzine on the evening of 14 June – a Christian town in the mountains of Lebanon from which a side road ran down to Sidon on the coast. The next day the French abandoned Sidon. It was the Australians’ greatest success in the first week of the campaign, but that same day the Vichy government’s forces went over to a counter-offensive that halted the whole Allied advance for several days.

Some lists state under 13 June that the Australians were breaking through the French defences towards Beirut and “won the Battle of Jezzine”. Two clarifications are needed. First, 13 June was the day the brigade set out for Jezzine, and the day the Australians made their first, unsuccessful assault at Sidon. According to Gavin Long’s Australian official history, the town itself was taken on the evening of 14 June, although some studies date this to 13 June. Second, the capture of Jezzine did not end the fighting for it. From 15 June the French attacked the town for several days, and fighting in the area continued into July.

Three roads north

The offensive that Henry Maitland Wilson launched from Palestine and Transjordan on 8 June advanced along three roads. On the left flank, along the coast, Brigadier Jack Stevens’s 21st Australian Brigade had forced the Litani and was pushing on towards Beirut. In the centre Brigadier Alfred Baxter-Cox’s 25th Australian Brigade was to take Marjayoun with its fort and then advance up the Litani valley towards Rayak in the Bekaa Valley. On the right flank the 5th Indian Infantry Brigade and General Paul Legentilhomme’s Free French were advancing from Daraa on Damascus. Both Australian brigades belonged to Major General John Lavarack’s 7th Australian Division. On the Vichy side stood General Henri Dentz’s Army of the Levant, made up largely of colonial units, the Foreign Legion and local formations, with tanks – which the Allies almost entirely lacked in this campaign.

The first week brought disappointment. Archibald Wavell and Wilson had expected the French to offer token resistance at most. Lavarack recalled after the war that Wavell had expressed the hope that the Australians would be in Beirut within a day or two at the most. Instead the French defended themselves methodically, making use of mountains, gorges and demolished bridges. The 25th Brigade took Marjayoun only on the afternoon of 11 June, and a cavalry detachment sent in pursuit was held up on 12 and 13 June on the roads north of the town by accurate artillery fire from the mountains. At Kiswe, a dozen or so kilometres from Damascus, the Free French attacks of 11 and 12 June broke down and Legentilhomme was wounded. According to the British official history, by 13 June the Allies had lost some five hundred men, and progress on all three axes had come to a halt.

The night march

On 12 June Lavarack changed his plan. He concluded that the country around Marjayoun gave the defender too many advantages, and decided to shift most of the 25th Brigade westwards, across the mountains, to Jezzine. From that town a side road led to Sidon, so the brigade could support the 21st Brigade’s advance on the coast and cover its right flank. Only the 2/33rd Battalion, the cavalry and a battery of artillery were to remain at Marjayoun. Meanwhile Australian sappers had thrown a makeshift bridge across the Litani west of Marjayoun, its central pier a huge boulder in the river bed. The bridge was ready on the afternoon of 12 June.

Only one road led from the valley to Jezzine, and it wound around steep mountainsides. Under Brigadier Baxter-Cox’s plan the advanced guard was to be formed by Lieutenant Colonel Selwyn Porter’s 2/31st Battalion, with a detachment of the 9th Australian Cavalry Regiment, artillery and sappers. At 9 p.m. on 13 June the column set off in British three-ton lorries. It drove all night without lights. On the hairpin bends the lorries had to reverse up to three times, guns had to be unhooked and manhandled round, vehicles got stuck in mountain streams, and one overturned. Nobody had been posted as a guide at a fork, so part of the column drove off towards Sidon and had to be turned back. At one bend the sappers spent two hours widening the road before heavy vehicles could get round. Long judges that attaching mechanised cavalry to a column moving through a mountain gorge was a mistake: every broken-down tracked vehicle blocked the whole road. In the end Porter ordered one disabled tank to be pushed over the precipice.

Green Hill

At dawn on 14 June the head of the column reached the village of Kafr Houn, where women came out into the street to welcome the newcomers. Beyond the village the first shots rang out. Cavalry scouts reported that the French held a strong position on the so-called Green Hill, which dominated Jezzine. A few kilometres short of the town Porter was shot in the thigh, but judged the wound not serious and carried on in command. After a reconnaissance and a conference with Brigadier Frank Berryman, the division’s artillery commander, he decided to attack with two companies. A section of field guns was sited only about nine hundred metres from the enemy position.

The attack went in at 6 p.m. The slopes of Green Hill fell away in terraces a metre high every few paces, planted with vines and trees. The Australians ran and jumped down from terrace to terrace so fast and so widely dispersed that one of the companies reached the road without loss, though it was under rifle and machine-gun fire. It helped that the commander of the machine-gun platoon attached to the battalion let each gun fire independently at any French post that gave itself away. The French defended the hill but lost it. The attacking companies had four killed and eight wounded.

Although the men had neither slept nor eaten for twenty-four hours, Porter ordered them to press on. The last stretch to the town led down a cliff so steep that the men slid from terrace to terrace, clutching at vines and branches. There was no more resistance. At about 8.30 p.m. the Australians entered Jezzine, through whose streets riderless French horses were wandering. The inhabitants offered the exhausted soldiers bread and water, and at the police station they were given wine and food. Long states that the French had two infantry companies and two cavalry squadrons in Jezzine, and after the campaign Dentz told Lavarack that he had intended to garrison the town strongly on 15 June – one day too late.

Sidon

During those same days the battle for Sidon was being fought on the coast – an ancient Phoenician city with mosques and a Crusader castle, then home to some twelve thousand people. Stevens first tried to invite the defenders to talks in order to spare the city, but the French artillery opened fire. On 13 June the 2/16th Battalion attacked through the orange and banana groves south of the city. In the suburbs it was met by French tanks. The Australians had nothing to stop them with, since grenades and anti-tank rifles made no impression on them. Two company commanders were killed, one company was broken up, and the attack collapsed. The French air force, too, attacked that day more heavily than ever before.

On 14 June the 2/27th Battalion outflanked the city through the hills to the east and, after an exhausting night march, attacked the village of Miyeh ou Miyeh. The attack largely failed, but Sergeant Macpherson and seventeen men entered the village from the rear and took several dozen prisoners. In the afternoon artillery and fire from British warships broke up a French counter-attack supported by tanks. During the night the French withdrew from Sidon. On the morning of 15 June an Australian sergeant rode into the city on a captured motorcycle, and the mayor asked the commander of the 2/27th Battalion to stop the shelling. At 4 p.m. Stevens took over the city and declared martial law there.

The Vichy counter-offensive

The capture of Jezzine and Sidon did not open the road to Beirut. On 14 June General Joseph de Verdilhac, Dentz’s deputy and commander of the land forces, decided to strike where the Allies were weakest and to disorganise the attackers enough to be able to shift some of his forces against the expected attack from Iraq. The counter-offensive fell on the almost defenceless Allied rear. On 14 June a column of Tunisian infantry with armoured cars drove a small garrison out of Ezraa on the road from Daraa to Damascus. On the morning of 16 June a strong force with several dozen tanks and armoured cars attacked Quneitra, held by three companies of a British Royal Fusiliers battalion that had only one captured Italian light gun. In the evening, after a whole day of fighting, the British surrendered. By their own account the French took 470 prisoners there.

The most dangerous attack was the one on Marjayoun. On 15 June the commander of its weak garrison, wishing to act offensively, sent most of his battalion on an outflanking move into the foothills of Mount Hermon. It was then that three French African battalions with some twenty tanks struck from the north. On the night of 15–16 June the Australian rearguard abandoned Marjayoun and fell back towards the Palestinian border. For a moment it seemed that nothing could stop the French from entering Galilee. Lavarack had to take the 2/25th Battalion and most of the artillery from Jezzine and placed the hastily assembled forces under Berryman’s command. This group halted the French, but its first two attacks on Marjayoun failed. It was in this fighting that Lieutenant Roden Cutler of the 2/5th Field Regiment performed the first of the deeds for which he received the Victoria Cross.

The 2/31st Battalion was left alone in Jezzine. On the evening of 15 June it beat off an attack by a company and a half of infantry and a squadron of cavalry. On 16 June an Australian anti-tank gun concealed by the road from the Bekaa Valley knocked out three French armoured cars, and French mounted cavalry trying to approach by the road from the north came under artillery and machine-gun fire and lost almost all its men and horses. On 17 June the French attacked the hills north-east of the town with about a battalion. Captain Murray Robson’s Australian company counter-attacked with the bayonet and took prisoner two officers and sixty-five men, mostly Senegalese. The prisoners said that they had marched for four days before the attack, were hungry and had had enough of the war. On 18 June an unsuccessful assault on Hill 1332 cost the lives of the company commander, Captain Houston, and six of his men. That same afternoon French bombers hit the Hotel Egypt in Jezzine, which housed the battalion’s food store and kitchen. Seventeen soldiers were killed under the rubble, and the terrified inhabitants fled to caves in the surrounding mountains.

The counter-offensive inland also halted the advance on the coast. On 17 June Lavarack ordered Stevens to conduct an “active defence” at Sidon, and the next day he sent the 2/14th Battalion from the coast to Jezzine. On 18 June Lavarack, with the staff of I Australian Corps, took command of the whole front from Damascus to the sea, and the 7th Division passed to Major General Arthur Allen.

Place in the war

The French successes proved short-lived. On the evening of 17 June a battalion of the British 16th Brigade, newly arrived from Egypt, retook Quneitra without much of a fight, and a scratch force of soldiers under Major John Hackett recovered Ezraa. The counter-offensive used up Verdilhac’s last reserves. On the right flank the 5th Indian Brigade took the position at Kiswe on 15 June, and on 21 June, after heavy fighting for the suburb of Mezzeh, the Free French entered Damascus. The Australians recaptured Marjayoun on 24 June, and at Jezzine the French began to withdraw at the end of June. The road to Beirut opened, however, only after a hard battle on the Damour river at the beginning of July. In the fighting north of Jezzine Private Jim Gordon of the 2/31st Battalion won the Victoria Cross on 10 July. Some studies link his feat with the Battle of Jezzine itself, although it took place almost a month later. On 14 July an armistice was signed at Acre, ending the campaign.

For the 7th Australian Division – which was fighting its first campaign as a division in Lebanon, without its 18th Brigade, then in besieged Tobruk – this was some of the hardest fighting of the war. Lavarack and his officers later complained that Wavell and Wilson did not understand the difference between the Libyan desert and the mountains of Lebanon, and gave them neither tanks nor enough mortar ammunition. A long, exposed stretch of road near Jezzine, swept by French artillery and mortars, entered Australian memory as the “Mad Mile”, and the town’s name is borne today by the barracks in Townsville in Australia. In Australia the campaign is remembered as the “Syrian” one, although most of the Australian soldiers’ fighting took place on Lebanese soil.

The Battle of Jezzine also showed how bitter this war between the French and the allies of the France of old was. General Georges Catroux, in the name of de Gaulle, had promised the Syrians and Lebanese independence on 8 June, but the Vichy troops defended the mandate with a tenacity that no one in Cairo or Jerusalem had expected. Senegalese and legionnaires faced each other on both sides of the front, and the British, who since May had been bombing the airfields in Syria to cut the Germans’ route to Iraq, now had to commit to the Levant troops needed elsewhere. In those same days, on 15 June, Wavell launched an offensive in Libya intended to relieve Tobruk, and on 22 June Germany attacked the Soviet Union. From then on the Levant was of secondary importance to Berlin, and instead of a German foothold on the Mediterranean the British gained cover for Suez and the Iraqi oilfields from the north.