The Iraqi siege of Habbaniya

At three in the morning on 30 April 1941 the British Embassy in Baghdad radioed the RAF base at Habbaniya that large units of the Iraqi army were leaving the capital and heading west. At dawn reconnaissance aircraft from the base saw at least two infantry battalions with artillery on the plateau that rose just above the airfield. At 6 a.m. an Iraqi officer arrived to see the base commander with a letter from his superior: all flying was to cease immediately, and no one was to leave the base. This was how the government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, which had seized power in Baghdad at the beginning of April, chose to respond to the British landing at Basra. One of the most important RAF bases in the Middle East, full of training aircraft, pupils and civilians, found itself under siege.

A base on the Euphrates

Habbaniya lay on the Euphrates, some 80 kilometres west of Baghdad, on the road from Baghdad through Fallujah and Ramadi to Transjordan and Palestine. It was built in the mid-1930s under the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930, which allowed the RAF to maintain bases “west of the Euphrates”; it was opened in October 1936, and units were moved there from the old base at Hinaidi near Baghdad, which the British left at the end of 1937. It was a staging post on the air route from Egypt to India, and Imperial Airways flying boats alighted on nearby Lake Habbaniya.

In peacetime the base was a model garrison with swimming pools, cinemas, playing fields and gardens, but from a military point of view it would have been hard to find a worse site. The cantonment was surrounded by an iron fence some 11 kilometres long, meant to keep out thieves, and the airfield lay outside it. A few hundred metres to the south rose a plateau 30–60 metres high, from which the whole base could be seen laid out below. All services depended on a single power station and a single conspicuous water tower; one well-aimed shell could paralyse the defence.

The base and all British forces in Iraq were commanded by Air Vice-Marshal Harry Smart, a First World War pilot who had known Iraq since the 1920s. Some 1,000 airmen lived there in normal times, along with 1,200 men of the auxiliary Iraq Levies, recruited mainly from among the Assyrians, and also from the Kurds, under British officers; in addition there were some 9,000 civilians – Europeans, people from India and Assyrians with their families. There were also the airmen of No. 1 Armoured Car Company RAF with eighteen old Rolls-Royce armoured cars, built on chassis dating from the First World War. Since 27 April transport aircraft had been flying in soldiers of the 1st Battalion, King’s Own Royal Regiment, from Shaibah, and about 300 of them had reached the base. Together with guards, mechanics and support personnel, some 2,500 men were available for the defence, but there was no artillery apart from a few mortars.

The aircraft were numerous only on paper. Habbaniya was home to No. 4 Service Flying Training School, which according to the British official history had 78 aircraft: 32 Hawker Audax biplanes, 8 Fairey Gordons, 29 twin-engined Airspeed Oxford trainers, 3 Gloster Gladiator fighters, one Bristol Blenheim bomber and 5 Hawker Hart trainers; only four of them were neither obsolete nor purely training machines. Other sources give slightly different figures, because the base’s strength changed from week to week. Six Gladiators flew in during April. There were almost no combat pilots: the aircraft were flown by instructors and even pupils, among them a group of Greek airmen training in Iraq. From the beginning of April Smart had been preparing for the worst. The Audaxes, which normally carried light 20-pound bombs, were modified to take two 250-pound bombs; the Oxfords, which carried no bombs at all, were fitted with racks for eight small bombs; and instructors and pupils practised bombing and air gunnery.

On 29 April the British Ambassador in Baghdad, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, advised all British women and children to leave the capital. Two hundred and thirty of them were escorted to Habbaniya, from where they were to be flown to Shaibah; several hundred other people took refuge in the British Embassy and the American Legation in Baghdad.

Why Habbaniya

By the end of April Rashid Ali and the four colonels of the “Golden Square”, who in fact ruled Iraq, were in a trap. The British had landed at Basra on 18 April and, rather than crossing the country to Palestine as the treaty provided, were building a base there. Baghdad’s conditions of 21 April, that no further units should land until the earlier ones had left Iraq, went unanswered. When the Prime Minister learned that more transports were on their way to Basra, he forbade them to unload, but at the end of the month the troops came ashore regardless. Every week of delay made the British stronger.

Rashid Ali did not dare fight openly at Basra, where Royal Navy warships lay. Instead he decided to make a show of force where the British were weakest and so compel them to make concessions. Habbaniya, several hundred kilometres from Basra and full of pupils and civilians, seemed the ideal hostage. The Iraqi leaders counted on the base surrendering or on London, entangled in Greece and Libya, agreeing to talks. They also counted on the Germans: from mid-April Rashid Ali had repeatedly asked the Reich for military help and received assurances that it would come, and in Baghdad it was believed that German aircraft and paratroops would soon appear. Behind this whole policy also stood the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who in May was to call on Muslims to wage a holy war against Britain.

30 April

The troops had left their garrisons around Baghdad, where two of Iraq’s four divisions were stationed, during the night. When the reconnaissance aircraft reported them at dawn, the flying school at once dispersed its aircraft and loaded bombs. To the letter brought at 6 a.m. Smart replied that any interference with the normal training carried on at Habbaniya would be regarded as an act of war. Ambassador Cornwallis, with whom the base was in radio contact, backed him fully. Meanwhile the airmen reported that reinforcements were continually arriving on the plateau and that the Iraqis had occupied Fallujah with its bridge over the Euphrates.

At 11.30 a.m. the Iraqi envoy came again, this time with the charge that it was the British who were breaking the treaty. Smart replied that this was a political matter, which he would pass on to the Ambassador. During the day Iraqi troops occupied the bridges over the Tigris and the Euphrates and reinforced the garrison at Ramadi; Habbaniya was cut off from the world except by air. According to Wavell’s later dispatch, on the first day two infantry brigades with artillery and armoured cars began to concentrate around the base; other sources give 6,000–9,000 soldiers and up to 30 guns. By 1 May, according to British estimates, the besiegers numbered about 9,000, with some 50 guns, light tanks and armoured cars, not counting tribal volunteers. Many of the soldiers, it later turned out, believed they were taking part in an exercise.

Smart faced a difficult decision. The longer he waited, the stronger the Iraqis on the plateau became; if they attacked at night, his aircraft would be useless. The base was practically indefensible, and inside it were thousands of civilians, including British women and children from Baghdad. Nor did he know whether the Iraqi and Assyrian auxiliaries would stand firm against the Iraqi army. There was much to be said for a pre-emptive strike, but the line of the Middle East command was well known: Archibald Wavell, preoccupied with Libya, Greece and East Africa, wanted at all costs to avoid an outbreak of fighting in Iraq. Smart decided to accept the risk and not to attack for the time being. The exchange of letters with the Iraqi commander and the Ambassador’s efforts achieved nothing; not a single Iraqi soldier withdrew.

At Smart’s request RAF Middle East sent eight Vickers Wellington bombers of No. 70 Squadron to Shaibah, followed by ten of No. 37 Squadron. Cornwallis cabled London that he regarded the Iraqi threat to Habbaniya as an act of war justifying an immediate counter-attack from the air. He announced that he would demand the withdrawal of the Iraqi troops, but added that even if the Iraqis gave way, this would only postpone an inevitable clash, and that only a “sharp lesson” would restore control of the situation.

Place in the war

The reply from London came early on the morning of 1 May: the situation had to be restored, and the Ambassador was given full authority to take any steps, including air attack, to force the Iraqis to withdraw. If communications with the Embassy were cut, Smart was to act on his own responsibility. Churchill added a line of his own, according to a telegram quoted in the literature: “If you have to strike, strike hard.” Smart decided to attack at dawn without an ultimatum, so that the Iraqis would have no time to shell the airfield before the aircraft took off. At 5 a.m. on 2 May several dozen aircraft from Habbaniya and the Wellingtons from Shaibah struck the plateau. The Anglo-Iraqi War had begun.

The siege lasted less time than anyone had expected. The instructors and pupils flew from dawn to dusk; the Iraqi artillery shelled the base but failed to destroy it, and night sorties by men of the King’s Own and the Assyrians undermined the besiegers’ morale. On the night of 5–6 May the Iraqis abandoned the plateau, leaving their weapons and equipment behind, and a relief column coming to their aid from Fallujah was destroyed from the air. The British column sent from Palestine reached the base only on 18 May, by which time the siege was long over. At the end of May Rashid Ali’s government collapsed, and he, the Mufti and the leaders of the coup fled to Iran. German help – a few dozen aircraft sent through Vichy Syria – came too late and was too meagre to change anything.

The Iraqi siege of Habbaniya was thus Rashid Ali’s decisive mistake. Instead of forcing the British to make concessions, it gave them a reason for a war that Baghdad could not win without the Germans, and the Germans, absorbed in preparing their attack on the USSR, could not and would not send serious forces to the Middle East. The defence of the base by a flying school and a handful of infantry passed into RAF history as one of its most extraordinary episodes, and its consequences reached far: Iraq remained on the Allied side, the land route from the Persian Gulf to Palestine and Iraq’s oil were secure, and the help Vichy France gave the Germans in Syria led in June 1941 to the British invasion of Syria and Lebanon.