The British land at Basra

At half past nine on the morning of 18 April 1941 eight transports from Karachi, escorted by ships of the Royal Navy and of the Australian and Indian navies, came up the Shatt al-Arab to the quays of Basra. Ashore went the 20th Indian Infantry Brigade, with artillery and the headquarters of the 10th Indian Infantry Division. The previous day, 17 April, RAF transport aircraft had begun flying men of the 1st Battalion of the British King’s Own Royal Regiment from India to the air base at Shaibah, some 20 kilometres south-west of Basra. The landing took place without a shot being fired and was formally lawful: Britain invoked the treaty of alliance of 1930, which gave it the right to move troops through Iraq. In reality it was the first step towards removing the government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, who two weeks earlier had seized power in Baghdad with the help of anti-British colonels, and towards occupying Iraq before the Germans could get there.

War chronologies mention two episodes of this operation. Under 13 April they record that “a small contingent of British reinforcements was flown to the RAF base at Shaibah”, and under 18 April that “in accordance with the Anglo-Iraqi treaty, British troops from India begin landing at Basra”. The second date is accurate. The first needs correcting: according to the British official history, 13 April was the date from which India could begin moving some 390 British infantrymen, as it had announced in an offer accepted in London on 10 April. The same official history and the later despatch of General Archibald Wavell state that the first group of soldiers flew into Shaibah only on 17 April, because their arrival was timed to coincide with that of the convoy; the airlift was completed on 18 April. On 13 April, on the other hand, the cruiser HMS Emerald arrived at Basra, the first of the ships with which the Royal Navy reinforced its forces in the Persian Gulf.

Why Basra

The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 30 June 1930, which replaced the agreement of 1927 and opened Iraq’s way to independence, obliged it in the event of war to come to Britain’s aid as an ally and to place its railways, rivers, ports and airfields at Britain’s disposal. In peacetime the British had the right to move their troops through the country. Since 1937 there had been no British ground forces in Iraq; only two RAF bases remained, at Shaibah and at Habbaniya on the Euphrates, guarded by locally raised levies and armoured cars.

Basra was Iraq’s only large port and the starting point of the road and rail route through Baghdad to Palestine and Syria, an alternative to the sea route through the Red Sea. It also lay right next to Iranian Abadan, site of one of the largest refineries in the world, owned by the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and pipelines ran across Iraq from the Kirkuk oilfields to Haifa and Tripoli. The Government of India had long been committed to holding one division in readiness in case the Iranian oilfields were threatened. In the summer of 1940 the War Cabinet had already once decided to send a brigade to Basra, but in the face of opposition from the Viceroy of India and the commanders in the Middle East, who feared that the appearance of troops would only inflame the situation in Iraq, it reversed the decision, and the division was placed at Wavell’s disposal and sent to the Sudan.

After the coup in Baghdad the Chiefs of Staff in London wanted to intervene, but Wavell, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, had nobody to send: his troops were falling back in Cyrenaica, on 6 April the Germans had attacked Greece, where a British expeditionary corps was fighting, and in East Africa the fighting against the Italians was still going on. As early as March Wavell had suggested that any operations in Iraq should be undertaken by India. On 8 April the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, asked the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, what forces could be sent quickly to Basra. The Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, and the Commander-in-Chief in India, General Claude Auchinleck, almost immediately proposed diverting a convoy that was just loading at Karachi and was due to sail for Malaya. On 10 April the Defence Committee in London accepted the offer. The operation was given the code name Sabine.

The convoy from Karachi and the airlift

The land forces were commanded by Major General William Fraser, commander of the 10th Indian Infantry Division, formed at Ahmednagar in January 1941. His orders were to occupy the Basra–Shaibah area so as to ensure the safe disembarkation of further reinforcements and to establish a base there. Nobody knew how the Iraqi army and the local authorities would behave. Should they attempt to interfere with the landing, Fraser was to overcome them by force and establish himself ashore as quickly as possible; at the same time he had to take care not to violate the neutrality of neighbouring Iran.

Convoy BP7, eight transports escorted by the Australian sloop HMAS Yarra, sailed from Karachi on 12 April. It carried Brigadier Donald Powell’s 20th Indian Infantry Brigade, which included two Gurkha battalions, the 2/7th and 2/8th Gurkha Rifles, and a Sikh battalion, the 3/11th Sikh Regiment, as well as the 3rd Field Regiment (without its guns), two senior officers of the divisional staff and ancillary units. Because the troops had been loaded with a peaceful voyage to Malaya in mind rather than a landing, men and equipment were not stowed so as to be ready to fight as soon as they got ashore. There was no time to restow, so for several days the staffs waited anxiously to see whether the landing would meet resistance.

In the waters of the Persian Gulf, Commodore C. M. Graham, the senior Royal Navy officer in the area, had gathered four small warships at Basra as soon as the trouble in Baghdad began. On 13 April he was joined by the cruiser Emerald, and later by the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes with Swordfish torpedo bombers and the New Zealand cruiser Leander. On 15 April the convoy met at sea the sloop Seabelle, sent out from Basra, and then the sloop Falmouth, which took command of the escort; on 17 April the Indian sloop Lawrence joined, and the force headed for the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab.

Meanwhile, on 16 April, the new British ambassador in Baghdad, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, informed Rashid Ali that Britain intended to exercise the right, provided for in the treaty, to move troops through Iraq to Palestine. The Prime Minister raised no objection. The next day, 17 April, the first aircraft from Karachi landed at Shaibah. Over two days No. 31 (Transport) Squadron RAF flew in some 400 men of the 1st Battalion, King’s Own Royal Regiment. The lift used seven military Vickers Valentia biplanes, four civil Armstrong Whitworth Atalantas and four American Douglas DC-2s that had recently reached India. With the battalion came the 10th Division’s chief of staff, Colonel Ouvry Roberts. The flight across the Persian Gulf was a remarkable undertaking for the time, and the infantrymen, crammed into the cabins of the slow biplanes, were to cover the disembarkation in the port immediately on landing, should the Iraqis try to interfere with it.

The landing

On the morning of 18 April the convoy entered the Shatt al-Arab. It came in two groups, each led by two warships: the first by the gunboat Cockchafer, on which the fugitive Regent Abd al-Ilah had taken refuge two weeks earlier, and the sloop Falmouth; the second by Yarra and Seabelle. Lawrence remained at the river mouth, ready if necessary to put the Iraqi coastal battery at Fao out of action, and Emerald waited at Basra. At 9.30 a.m. the transports came alongside the quays. The landing went ahead unhindered, although units of the Iraqi army were stationed in and around the city. By the evening of 19 April the disembarkation was complete. Fraser assumed command of all British land forces in Iraq.

Wavell later wrote in his despatch that the speed with which British troops had arrived in Iraq took Rashid Ali and his supporters by surprise, which was probably why no organised resistance was met, and that this initial advantage had a great influence on subsequent operations. In those same days RAF Middle East Command, which as late as 7 April had refused Habbaniya any reinforcements, decided to send six Gladiator fighters there; by 19 April there were nine at the base.

Rashid Ali’s conditions

The government in Baghdad understood at once that the treaty had served the British as a pretext. Rashid Ali demanded that the troops that had arrived should pass through the country to Palestine as quickly as possible and that no new ones should land until the previous ones had left Iraq. On 21 April his government formally set out the conditions on which it would accept the presence of British troops: further units could not come ashore before the previous ones had crossed the border, and the number of British soldiers in Iraq must never exceed one mixed brigade. At the same time, urged on by the colonels and by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, he was seeking German help ever more insistently. As early as 17 April, the day before the landing, he had asked the Reich for military assistance in the event of war with Britain.

Ambassador Cornwallis passed the demands on to London. The reply showed that the passage to Palestine had been no more than a legal formula. What His Majesty’s Government wanted was for the troops in Iraq to stay and establish themselves, not to pass through. Cornwallis was to give Rashid Ali no undertakings about troop movements, since a man who had seized power by a coup d’état had no right to expect any. On 20 April Churchill explained to the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, that the main object of sending the troops was to cover and establish a great assembly base in the Basra area, and that what happened “up-country”, with the exception of Habbaniya, was for the time being of much less importance. Treaty rights had been invoked to cover the landing, but force would have been used if necessary. In his memoirs the Prime Minister added that the Americans were increasingly keen to see a great assembly base at Basra for the aircraft they were supplying. London also pressed India to speed up the dispatch of the second brigade of Fraser’s division.

Its place in the war

The landing at Basra sealed the fate of Rashid Ali’s government, although in April nobody yet knew it. Baghdad did not dare to oppose the landing by force of arms, and the British, without asking anyone’s leave, began building a base at Basra that they intended to expand to a size capable of supplying the forces throughout the Middle East. When Rashid Ali learned that more ships were on their way to Basra, he refused permission for them to unload, but at the end of April (on 29 April according to Wavell’s despatch, on 30 April according to the British official history) further units came ashore without incident. The Prime Minister then decided to settle the matter before the British grew stronger still. He struck, however, not at Basra but at the air base at Habbaniya, which his troops surrounded on 30 April. From 27 April aircraft had been ferrying men of the King’s Own from Shaibah to Habbaniya; by 30 April some 300 of them had arrived, and in the first days of May they played an important part in the defence of the base.

On 2 May the Anglo-Iraqi War broke out. On 7 May General Edward Quinan flew in to Basra from India and took command of all land forces in Iraq, and the 21st Indian Infantry Brigade came ashore from the sea. In mid-May command of the 10th Division passed to Major General William Slim, the future victor of Burma. The division moved north from Basra only at the end of May, when Rashid Ali’s government was already collapsing under the blows of the aircraft from Habbaniya and of a column sent from Palestine. An armistice was signed on 31 May.

Basra then became what Churchill had wanted it to be: a great supply base. From it and from Iraq set out, in June 1941, the troops that took part in the fighting against Vichy France in Syria, and in August those that, together with the Red Army, occupied Iran. A large part of the American and British supplies for the USSR later passed through the port of Basra and the Iranian ports on the Persian Gulf. The April landing of a brigade that had arrived aboard ships intended for Malaya was thus the beginning of a British and Indian military presence in Iraq that lasted until 1947. At the cost of a single brigade, sent despite the hesitations of the commanders in Cairo, Churchill secured Iraqi oil for the Allies, together with the overland route from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean.