The invasion of Syria and Lebanon

At two in the morning on 8 June 1941 columns of the 7th Australian Division, British cavalry, the 5th Indian Brigade and the Free French moved north out of Palestine and Transjordan. They were crossing the border of the French mandated territory of Syria and Lebanon, which since the summer of 1940 had been governed by men loyal to Marshal Pétain’s government at Vichy. When day broke, radio broadcasts and leaflets dropped from aircraft brought the inhabitants a proclamation by General Georges Catroux, who, in the name of General Charles de Gaulle, announced the end of the mandate and the independence of Syria and Lebanon. The British hoped that the French in the Levant would put up no more than a token resistance for honour’s sake, and that some of them would go over to Free France. The very first hours showed that this would not happen. General Henri Dentz’s Army of the Levant put up stiff resistance, and the next day, 9 June, Australians and British commandos had to fight hard to force the Litani river. A five-week war had begun in which Frenchmen fired on Frenchmen on a far larger scale than in the autumn of 1940 at Dakar and in Gabon.

Why Syria

Syria and Lebanon were not an end in themselves for the British. In the spring of 1941, however, they had become a gateway through which the Axis powers could reach the rear of Egypt, Palestine and Iraq. When the British were fighting Rashid Ali al-Gaylani’s government in Iraq in May, the Vichy government opened the Levant’s airfields to German aircraft flying to Baghdad and released weapons from French depots to the Iraqis. The German air detachment Fliegerführer Irak flew through Syria to Mosul, and from mid-May the RAF bombed the Vichy airfields in Syria at which German aircraft were refuelling. On 27–28 May the Deputy Prime Minister, Admiral François Darlan, signed the so-called Paris Protocols, which confirmed that the Syrian airfields were at the Germans’ disposal. Vichy never ratified them, but in London and Cairo it looked as though the French were handing the Levant over to the Reich.

The Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, did not want this campaign. He was simultaneously fighting in Iraq, preparing a new blow in the Libyan desert after the failure of Operation Brevity, and had just evacuated his troops from Crete. He could send to Syria only forces scraped together from what was left. But he was under pressure from Winston Churchill and the Free French. Catroux insisted that the Army of the Levant would go over to de Gaulle as soon as it saw Allied troops, and on 21 May Churchill wrote back to Wavell that if the Germans could take Syria and Iraq with “petty air forces, tourists and local revolts”, the British must not shrink from similar risks. On 31 May the surrender of Baghdad ended the war in Iraq, but the decision to enter Syria had already been taken and was not reversed.

The paradox was that the Germans were in fact leaving Syria. After Rashid Ali’s fall the remnants of their air force withdrew through the Levant, and Hitler, absorbed in preparations for the attack on the USSR, had no intention of defending French mandates. As the British official history observes, the British entered Syria out of fear of the Germans just when the Germans had decided to withdraw from it so as not to give the British a pretext. The question whether the French would have resisted the Germans was therefore never put; in its place arose another, painful one: would they fire on the British and on their compatriots under the Cross of Lorraine?

Forces and plan

The Army of the Levant was stronger than the Free French had believed. The British estimated it at about 25,000 regulars and 20,000 locally raised troops; other tallies speak of some 35,000 men in all. According to the Australian official history, Dentz had 18 battalions of regular infantry, including four battalions of the Foreign Legion, as well as Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan and Senegalese regiments, two regiments of Chasseurs d’Afrique with about 90 Renault R35 tanks, some 150 armoured cars, 30 batteries of artillery, and eleven battalions of Levantine troops on whose loyalty the French could not fully rely. The Vichy air force had about 90 aircraft at the outset and almost doubled that number during the campaign thanks to reinforcements from North Africa, which the Germans allowed to stage through their airfields in Greece. At Beirut lay the large destroyers Guépard and Valmy and three submarines. Dentz’s troops knew the ground, had had several months to prepare positions, and had the advantage in armour.

The forces at the disposal of the commander in Palestine, General Henry Maitland Wilson, numbered about 34,000 men: according to the most frequently cited figures, 18,000 Australians, 9,000 British, 2,000 Indian troops and 5,000 Free French. The core was Major General John Lavarack’s 7th Australian Division, which had only two brigades, because the third was shut up in Tobruk. To it were added units of the British 1st Cavalry Division, including the horsed Cheshire Yeomanry; Brigadier Wilfrid Lloyd’s 5th Indian Brigade, seasoned in Eritrea; and General Paul Legentilhomme’s Free French division: six battalions, including two battalions of the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion, one battery and a few tanks. For lack of lorries only one of its brigades could go into action at first. A commando battalion – Lieutenant Colonel Richard Pedder’s No. 11 (Scottish) Commando – was to land from Cyprus. The coast was covered by Vice-Admiral Edward King’s squadron of cruisers and eight destroyers, while the air force, the weakest element of the whole undertaking, numbered about 50 front-line aircraft. Wavell himself called the operation a gamble.

Wilson was ordered to take Beirut, Dentz’s headquarters, the airfield at Rayak in the Bekaa Valley, and Damascus. The terrain dictated the plan. Two mountain ranges run parallel to the coast, the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon with the massif of Mount Hermon, and the only good roads ran along the sea, up the Litani valley and across the plains east of the mountains. Wilson decided to advance in three columns. The main thrust, on the left flank, was to be made along the coast road to Beirut by Brigadier J. E. S. Stevens’s 21st Australian Brigade. In the centre Brigadier Alfred Baxter-Cox’s 25th Australian Brigade was to take Marjayoun and push on to Rayak. On the right flank the 5th Indian Brigade was to take Daraa and let the Free French through towards Damascus. The columns from Iraq, which were to strike from the east, could join the fighting only later.

8 June: across the border

The troops moved up to the border by night and spent 7 June waiting in the olive groves of Galilee. The commanders hoped the French would be readier to give in if they saw Australians in their distinctive slouch hats rather than helmets, and some of the soldiers went into the attack wearing hats. Early in the morning Catroux proclaimed that Free France had come to end the mandate, to recognise Syria and Lebanon as free and independent states, and to conclude a treaty with them guaranteeing that independence. The British Ambassador in Cairo, Sir Miles Lampson, declared that his government associated itself with this assurance, and promised to lift the blockade if the inhabitants supported the Allies.

On the coast the first to cross the border were men of the Australian 2/14th Battalion and sappers, on the evening of 7 June, four and a half hours before zero hour. Two small parties, led by Australian and Palestinian guides through the Jewish kibbutz of Hanita, were to cut communications and prevent the demolition of the coast road on the steep headland of Naqoura near Iskandaroun. They were too late: the French blew in the cliff face, tearing a gap some 30 metres long in the road, and the coastal column could get through only on the morning of 9 June. The main body of the 21st Brigade therefore went through the mountains, via Bint Jbeil and Tibnine. After skirmishes with Algerian spahis the leading troops reached Tyre at about two in the afternoon; its mayor had earlier assured them by telephone that the Australians would be welcome there. British armoured cars that drove on northwards were, however, stopped by gunfire from the north bank of the Litani. By evening it was clear that the French meant to hold the line of the river.

In the centre the 25th Australian Brigade took French border posts in the dark, but was halted before fortified positions at Khiam and outside Marjayoun, which it captured only on the afternoon of 11 June. On the right flank the 5th Indian Brigade had surrounded Daraa by six in the morning and quickly took it, and in the evening it was brought to a halt in heavy fighting at Sheikh Meskine, some 25 kilometres further north. The Royal Fusiliers approached Quneitra. There the French commander received envoys under a flag of truce and agreed to a ceasefire so that civilians could be evacuated, then announced that fighting would resume at noon – and at that hour his artillery opened fire. During the night the French abandoned Quneitra and Sheikh Meskine, and at ten in the morning of 9 June the Free French passed through the Indian positions, setting off for Damascus. The British official history writes that the campaign began in a strange atmosphere of unreality, which quickly dissipated. The Vichy French not only fought well but showed great bitterness at the use of their own countrymen against them: Free French emissaries who tried to parley were greeted with insults or with gunfire.

9 June: crossing the Litani

The bridge over the Litani, some 27 kilometres from the border, was the key to the coast road. It was to be seized from the rear by the commando battalion – 20 officers and 400 men – which the landing ship HMS Glengyle had brought from Port Said. On the night of 7–8 June, however, the surf was so heavy that the ship’s captain judged that the boats would capsize, and turned back to Egypt. A second attempt was made the following night, but the commandos and the Australians knew little about each other and their plans had been coordinated in haste. At dawn on 9 June the party under Major Geoffrey Keyes, son of Admiral Roger Keyes, landed by mistake south of the river mouth, which could not be seen behind the sandbar, while the other parties landed a few kilometres to the north, straight onto well-sited French positions. In confused fighting Lieutenant Colonel Pedder and two other officers were killed; some of the commandos had to surrender, while others fought their way through to the Australians with prisoners. According to the British official history, the battalion lost nearly half its strength.

The Australian 2/16th Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel A. B. MacDonald was to attack the bridge if the commandos failed. A few seconds before the attack a scout shouted that the bridge had just been blown. The river was 30–40 metres wide and flowed fast between steep banks lined with poplars, and on the hill beyond it the French had their main defensive positions. The men cut telephone wires from the poles and twisted them into a rope, with which Corporal Haddy, though wounded by a mortar fragment, swam the river and tied it to a tree on the far bank. The first canvas boat, with nine men in it, was hauled across on the rope. On the south bank mortar bombs killed the company commander, Captain Johnson, and wounded three officers; the company’s only unscathed officer, Lieutenant F. H. Sublet, led his platoon through bamboo thickets and orchards until he held a bridgehead some 400 metres deep. More parties crossed after him, six men at a time.

In the morning the French destroyers Guépard and Valmy shelled the Australians from the sea and were driven off by the fire of Australian field artillery. In the afternoon, during a pursuit off Sidon, the French hit the British destroyer HMS Janus and got away thanks to their superior speed. On land, after a ten-minute bombardment, Captain Horley’s company took the hill above the river, defended by men of the 22nd Algerian Regiment, in twenty-five minutes, capturing 38 prisoners. Nearer the sea some of the Australians and Keyes’s commandos crossed in the only boat that had reached the bank, and around noon they took the redoubt commanding the river mouth. In the evening sappers began building a pontoon bridge, and early on 10 June the rest of the 21st Brigade crossed the river and overwhelmed the last defenders. Such was the Battle of the Litani River, the first major battle of the campaign. Popular chronologies state that the British and Australians “crossed the Litani River, repelling Vichy forces”; in fact the crossing lasted from dawn on 9 June until the morning of 10 June and was paid for with heavy losses, especially among the commandos.

Moshe Dayan at Iskandaroun

Among the guides accompanying the Australians were members of the Palmach, the strike companies of the Jewish Haganah, formed in May 1941 with British knowledge and support in case of a German invasion of Palestine. The Syrian campaign was the Palmach’s first operation. Arabic-speaking members of these units had for weeks been slipping into Lebanon on reconnaissance, and on the night of the invasion two Palmach companies, led by Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon, were sent with the Australians to cut communications, protect bridges and culverts from demolition and guide the columns. Dayan, a 26-year-old Haganah member who had come out of a British prison in February, went – as a comparison of his own account with the Australian official history shows – with the Australian party of Lieutenant P. J. Kyffin of the 2/14th Battalion, which set out from Kibbutz Hanita across the mountains towards the coast road. According to the Australian official history, the party numbered three officers and fifteen men, among them three Jewish guides and one Arab guide. At about five in the morning of 8 June, north of Iskandaroun, it came under fire from a stone police post. The Australians and the guides stormed the post, set up a captured mortar and machine gun on the roof, and for several hours beat off approaching French units, taking about 30 prisoners and an armoured car. Two of the Jewish guides were wounded. One of them was Dayan: as he was observing the French positions through binoculars, a sniper’s bullet struck the binoculars, and fragments of glass and metal destroyed his left eye. He waited several hours to be evacuated. The eye could not be saved, and the damage to the socket did not even allow an artificial eye to be fitted, which is why Dayan wore a black patch from then on.

Some accounts describe this episode differently: that Dayan “commanded an Australian unit” during the crossing of the Litani on 9 June and became famous when his story was published a day later. All three details need correcting. Dayan did not command Australians; he was a guide and the leader of a Palmach group working alongside an Australian section. He was wounded not at the Litani but a few kilometres beyond the border, near Iskandaroun, on the morning of 8 June – the day before the battle on the river; popular accounts that speak of securing “bridges on the Litani” confuse this episode with the later crossing. Nor do the sources confirm that his story was reported in the press at the time. He became famous only some years later, as a commander in the war of 1948 and Chief of Staff of the Israeli army, when the patch became his trademark.

The first days

After crossing the Litani the 21st Australian Brigade advanced along the coast, running into French rearguards every few kilometres, and on the evening of 12 June came up against Sidon, where the French held a strong position. In the centre the Australians took Marjayoun on 11 June, but the road on to Rayak was so strongly defended that Lavarack gave it up and sent most of the 25th Brigade across the mountains towards Jezzine to outflank the coastal defences. On the road to Damascus the Free French reached a fortified position at Kiswe, only a dozen or so kilometres from the city. Their attacks on 11 and 12 June broke down and General Legentilhomme was wounded; command in this sector passed to Brigadier Lloyd, who concluded that a prepared attack would be needed. By 13 June the Allies had lost about 500 men, and the French showed no inclination to talk. Wavell had to send the British 6th Division from Egypt, although he was short of troops for the offensive planned in Libya a few days later.

The clashes between Frenchmen were especially bitter. The Free French had counted on their former comrades coming over to them, and instead they ran into soldiers for whom they were traitors fighting alongside the “ancestral enemy”, the English. Vichy propaganda presented the defence of Syria as a matter of France’s honour. On the road to Damascus legionnaires of the 13th Demi-Brigade fought legionnaires of the 6th Foreign Infantry Regiment, wearing the same uniforms and badges.

Place in the war

The campaign that was meant to be a short march lasted five weeks. In mid-June the French went over to counter-attacks at Marjayoun and Quneitra and temporarily regained some ground. Damascus fell only on 21 June. It was then that the columns from Iraq entered the fight: Habforce, which crossed the desert and besieged Palmyra, which held out until 3 July, and Major General William Slim’s 10th Indian Division, which took Deir ez-Zor on the Euphrates on 3 July. On the coast the Australians broke the last line of defence on the Damour river, in the approaches to Beirut, on 5–9 July. Dentz asked for a ceasefire, the fighting stopped one minute after midnight on 12 July, and on 14 July an armistice convention was signed at Acre. According to Australian and British figures, Allied losses amounted to about 4,600 killed, wounded and captured, including more than 1,500 Australians, of whom 416 were killed. After the war Dentz stated that his army had lost 1,092 killed. Of almost 38,000 Vichy soldiers and officials, fewer than 6,000 went over to the Free French; the rest were sent back to France.

The victory closed the northern route to the Middle East to the Germans and gave the British air and naval bases far from the Suez Canal, covering the oil pipeline from Iraq to Haifa. It consumed, however, troops that were missing in the Libyan desert, and two weeks later the operation itself was overshadowed by the German attack on the USSR. Wavell, exhausted by conducting campaigns in Greece, Crete, Iraq, Syria and Libya at the same time, lost his command in June. The Anglo-Gaullist alliance was put to a severe test: de Gaulle regarded the armistice terms, negotiated without him, as disregarding Free France’s rights in the Levant, and the dispute nearly led to a break with London. The promise of 8 June was formally kept in the autumn of 1941, when Catroux proclaimed the independence of Syria and Lebanon, but in practice the French were unwilling to give up power in the Levant. Lebanon gained full sovereignty in November 1943, and after the bloody Levant Crisis of 1945 French troops left Syria and Lebanon in 1946. One of the guides wounded at Iskandaroun on 8 June, Moshe Dayan, a quarter of a century later directed the Six-Day War as Israel’s Minister of Defence.