The fleet sails for Madagascar

On 28 April 1942 a convoy left the port of Durban on the east coast of the Union of South Africa to open what is often described as the first major British amphibious operation against a defended coast since Gallipoli. Eight transports carrying assault troops, escorted by the battleship Ramillies, the aircraft carrier Illustrious, the anti-aircraft cruiser Hermione and six destroyers, sailed north through the Mozambique Channel. Their objective was Madagascar, a French colony loyal to the government of Marshal Philippe Pétain – more precisely, the great bay and naval base of Diego Suarez (today Antsiranana) at the northern tip of the island. The operation was code-named Ironclad.

This was the main body of the British assault force; the slower ships with transport and heavy equipment had left in great secrecy a few days earlier. The slow convoy, designated Y, sailed on 25 April: five cargo ships with vehicles, stores and ammunition, the tank landing ship Bachaquero and two tankers, escorted by the cruiser Devonshire, three destroyers, six corvettes and four minesweepers. The fast convoy Z, which left on 28 April, was to catch it up at sea. Among its transports was the Polish liner Sobieski, which a year and a half earlier had carried troops to Dakar.

Why Madagascar

Madagascar lay beside one of the most important routes of the war. Since the Mediterranean had become too dangerous for British convoys, everything sailing from Britain to Egypt, Iraq, India and Australia went round Africa by the Cape of Good Hope and passed through the Mozambique Channel or along the island’s east coast. This was the route taken by reinforcements and supplies for the Eighth Army in Libya. A submarine base on Madagascar could have paralysed it.

The British remembered that Vichy had already given way to Japan once: in the summer of 1941 it had allowed Japan to occupy southern Indochina, from which the attack on Malaya was launched in December. It was feared that under German pressure Vichy might also hand Madagascar’s ports to the Japanese. The Chiefs of Staff had considered this as early as November 1941, and on 16 December General Charles de Gaulle proposed to Winston Churchill a Free French expedition to the island. For a long time the Prime Minister refused: ships and troops were lacking, and a joint British–Gaullist expedition had had unhappy associations for him since the failure at Dakar in September 1940. The plan, prepared by the Combined Operations staff of Lord Louis Mountbatten under the code name Bonus, was left in a drawer.

The Japanese offensive changed this. After the fall of Singapore and Java, the Imperial Navy’s submarines operated freely in the Indian Ocean, and in mid-March Churchill decided that he could wait no longer. The Free French forces, despite de Gaulle’s pleas, were excluded from the operation, and de Gaulle himself was not even told of it. Besides the memory of Dakar, two recent experiences argued for this: the Gaullists’ unilateral seizure of the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon in December 1941, which had exposed London to Washington’s anger, and the fighting in Syria, where Vichy troops had fought the Free French with particular bitterness.

The danger was not imaginary, although we now know that it was smaller than was believed. The German navy was pressing the Japanese to strike at the shipping lanes of the western Indian Ocean; in talks in Berlin on 27 March the chief of staff of the Seekriegsleitung, Vice-Admiral Kurt Fricke, named Ceylon, the Seychelles and Madagascar as targets more important than Australia. Tokyo promised to send submarines and auxiliary cruisers westwards but revealed no plans for Madagascar, and post-war research does not suggest that it had any. In London, however, this was not known. The April raid by Japanese carriers, the attacks on Colombo and Trincomalee and the withdrawal of Admiral James Somerville’s Eastern Fleet to Kilindini near Mombasa convinced even the sceptics that the operation must not be postponed. Events in France provided a further spur: on 18 April Pierre Laval, an advocate of close collaboration with Germany, once again became head of the Vichy government.

Force 121

Force 121 was formed on 14 March. The land forces were commanded by Major General Robert Sturges of the Royal Marines, the same officer who had led the occupation of Iceland in May 1940; the naval forces by Rear Admiral Edward Neville Syfret, the Cape Town-born commander of Force H at Gibraltar. So that the Admiralty could withdraw ships from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, President Roosevelt agreed to send to Scapa Flow an American task force with the battleship Washington and the carrier Wasp – the same carrier from which Spitfires took off for Malta on 20 April.

The core of the assault force consisted of the 29th Independent Infantry Brigade and No. 5 Commando, followed by two brigades, the 17th and 13th, detached from the 5th Infantry Division on its way to India, on condition that they would sail on once the base had been taken. The troops left the mouth of the Clyde in Scotland on 23 March in the large convoy WS 17, joined Syfret’s ships at Freetown and reached Durban in the second half of April. There the 13th Brigade joined them, equipment was restowed and landing exercises were repeated. Throughout March and April aircraft of the South African Air Force photographed Diego Suarez, and South African Beaufort and Maryland bombers were moved to Lindi in Tanganyika to support the landing.

Smuts and the limits of the operation

In Durban the expedition was visited by the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, Field Marshal Jan Smuts. Since the beginning of the year he had been warning London about Madagascar, and now he pointed out a weakness in the plan: taking Diego Suarez alone would not close the island to the Japanese, because other ports would remain, above all Majunga (Mahajanga) on the west coast and Tamatave (Toamasina) on the east. The Chiefs of Staff considered his remarks but had no troops for a larger operation. Churchill stipulated that Madagascar could be held permanently only by a strong fleet and air force operating from Ceylon, and once the base had been taken he wanted to hand responsibility for the island to General Archibald Wavell, the commander in India. The commandos and the brigades of the 5th Division were to sail on quickly, and the garrison was to be provided by African units.

Everyone hoped that it could be done without a fight. The island’s garrison, under the Governor-General Armand Annet, numbered about 8,000 men, mostly Malagasy riflemen, of whom, according to various estimates, between 1,500 and 3,000 were in the Diego Suarez area. The British had a many-fold superiority, but the experience of Dakar and Syria made them reckon with resistance.

At sea

The two convoys met at noon on 3 May, and on the same day a second carrier from the Eastern Fleet, Indomitable, joined them with two destroyers. On the night of 4/5 May the force, more than 50 warships and merchant vessels, approached the west coast of Cape Amber. The government in Vichy knew nothing, and de Gaulle, who had not been forewarned, protested vehemently after the event.

Place in the war

At dawn on 5 May the troops landed in Courrier Bay and Ambararata Bay to the west of Diego Suarez. Contrary to hopes, the French resisted: Admiral François Darlan called on Annet to defend the honour of the flag, and for two days the Vichy forces held the fortifications in front of the base. They were broken only by a daring dash by the old destroyer Anthony, which landed 50 Royal Marines in the rear of the defences. By 7 May the base was in British hands. According to the figures given in the literature, the British lost 109 killed and 283 wounded. On 30 May Japanese midget submarines torpedoed Ramillies in the bay, which showed that the fears had not been entirely groundless, although that was as far as it went.

Annet did not surrender, and the Battle of Madagascar went on for another six months. In September the British, this time together with African and South African troops, occupied the rest of the island, including Majunga, Tamatave and the capital, Tananarive, and on 5 November 1942 Annet asked for an armistice, which came into force the following day. The island was then placed under Free French administration. Operation Ironclad was the first large British landing of the war carried out by combined naval, land and air forces, and the first test of methods that were used on a far larger scale in North Africa in November. It secured the route round the Cape of Good Hope, along which reinforcements for Egypt and India sailed throughout 1942.