The landing on Madagascar

Before dawn on 5 May 1942 British troops climbed down from their transports into landing craft in Courrier Bay and Ambararata Bay on the west coast of the northern tip of Madagascar. Operation Ironclad had begun, aimed at Diego Suarez (today Antsiranana), the great bay and naval base of a colony loyal to the government of Marshal Philippe Pétain. The British hoped the French would surrender at the first summons. They were wrong: the troops of Vichy France fought for two days, and only on 7 May did the last fortifications above the bay lay down their arms.

Popular lists record under 5 May the start of an invasion meant to prevent the French island from falling into Japanese hands, and under 7 May the surrender of Diego Suarez, Madagascar’s most important port, adding that the Vichy forces managed to withdraw “in good order”. The first two statements are accurate. The third needs a qualification: most of the defenders of the base itself were taken prisoner, and only their remnants escaped south. What did remain intact was the bulk of the forces of Governor-General Armand Annet, which had taken no part in the fighting in the north at all, and it was they who prolonged resistance for another six months.

The plan and the forces

The invasion force, which sailed from Durban at the end of April, numbered more than 50 warships and merchant ships. The naval forces were commanded by Rear Admiral Edward Neville Syfret in the battleship Ramillies, and air power came from two carriers, Illustrious and Indomitable. The land forces were under Major General Robert Sturges of the Royal Marines. The first wave consisted of Brigadier Francis Festing’s 29th Independent Infantry Brigade and No. 5 Commando, followed by the 17th and 13th Brigades of the 5th Infantry Division, which were to sail on to India once the base was taken.

The plan was shaped by the terrain. The bay of Diego Suarez cuts deep into the northern tip of the island and almost severs Cape Amber from the rest of Madagascar. Its entrance, a narrow channel on the east, was guarded by coastal batteries on the Orangea peninsula. A frontal assault from the sea threatened a repeat of Dakar. Sturges therefore decided to put his troops ashore on the other, western side of the cape, where the French did not expect a landing, because the waters around Courrier Bay are strewn with reefs and shoals and large ships had never been taken in there at night. From there the infantry were to march a few dozen kilometres overland and take Antsirane, the town and naval base on a peninsula inside the bay, from the rear. A feint was staged on the east coast to distract the defenders.

The French had some 8,000 troops on the whole island, mostly Malagasy riflemen, with some Senegalese soldiers and a few hundred Europeans. Estimates of the strength around Diego Suarez vary in the literature from one and a half thousand to several thousand men. The defence had eight coastal batteries, the armed merchant cruiser Bougainville, several sloops and submarines, and about thirty-five aircraft, chiefly Morane-Saulnier MS.406 fighters and Potez 63 aircraft. On land, south of Antsirane, ran a line of fortifications known as the Joffre Line: trenches, two redoubts and pillboxes, anchored on swamps at both ends. British intelligence had no clear idea of it.

5 May: the landing

During the night of 4/5 May minesweepers led the transports through the reefs, and shortly before dawn the first landing craft reached the beaches. Surprise was complete. No. 5 Commando took the coastal battery above Courrier Bay, whose crew, according to British accounts, was caught asleep, and on the other beaches the troops came ashore almost unopposed. During the day several thousand men landed, together with Valentine infantry tanks, light Tetrarch tanks and artillery. The only British loss at sea was the corvette Auricula, which struck a mine in Courrier Bay and sank the next day.

At the same time the carrier aircraft of the Fleet Air Arm went into action. Swordfish from Illustrious attacked the ships in the bay, sinking the armed merchant cruiser Bougainville and the submarine Bévéziers, while Albacores from Indomitable bombed Arrachart airfield, destroying several fighters on the ground. Other aircraft dropped leaflets calling on the garrison to surrender. In the morning Syfret and Sturges sent Annet a summons to capitulate, with an assurance that the island would remain French. The governor refused. He did not yet know that Admiral François Darlan, commander-in-chief of the Vichy armed forces, was cabling him to “defend the honour of the flag firmly” and make the British “pay dearly”.

The 29th Brigade set off from Ambararata Bay along the road to Antsirane. On the first day it covered more than 30 kilometres, breaking weak resistance at a pass with the bayonet, but towards evening it came up against the Joffre Line. The first assault, supported by a few tanks, broke down under the fire of a well dug-in defence.

6 May: deadlock

The next morning the British repeated the frontal attack and failed again. French anti-tank guns and artillery knocked out more tanks; by the end of the day ten of the twelve vehicles Sturges had brought to Madagascar had been destroyed or disabled. A battalion of the South Lancashire Regiment worked round the line through swamps and mangroves, breaking up into small groups in the process, but came out behind the defences, seized the radio station and barracks and took about 200 prisoners. Because communications had failed, nobody at headquarters knew of this, and the battalion had to pull back. Meanwhile aircraft from the carriers bombed the fortifications, and Martlet fighters, the British version of the American Wildcat, shot down two of the three Potez bombers that tried to attack the beaches.

The situation was becoming dangerous. The men were exhausted by marching in the tropical heat, water was running out, and every day of delay gave the French time to bring up reinforcements from the interior. In the evening Sturges planned a night attack by the 17th Brigade, which had by now come up from the beaches. Syfret added a risky idea of his own: the old destroyer Anthony was to slip in the dark through the entrance of the bay, under the guns of the Orangea batteries, and land a party in the port of Antsirane itself, behind the French line.

At about 8 p.m. Anthony raced into the bay at full speed under fire from the shore and came alongside the quay. Fifty Royal Marines from the battleship Ramillies under Captain Martin Price leapt ashore. The destroyer pulled away at once, and the marines plunged into the town. They seized the artillery command post, the barracks and the naval depot, and their shooting and exploding grenades caused, as a British report later put it, a commotion “out of all proportion to their numbers”. At the same time the 17th Brigade attacked the Joffre Line and this time broke through. The defenders, attacked from two sides, began to lay down their arms. Early on the morning of 7 May Antsirane and its naval base were in British hands, and among those captured were the base commandant, Captain Paul Maerten, and the garrison commanders.

7 May: the surrender

On the far side of the bay, however, the batteries on the Orangea peninsula, which closed the entrance to the port, were still holding out. On the morning of 7 May Ramillies and the cruisers opened fire on them, and after a short bombardment their crews capitulated. That day the Diego Suarez base, with its bay, port, arsenal and airfield, passed into British hands. Minesweepers began clearing the channel so that Syfret’s ships could enter the bay.

The fighting in the air and at sea went on for two more days. On 7 May the Martlets shot down three French MS.406 fighters for the loss of one of their own; in one of the downed aircraft died Jean Assollant, an airman famous in France for his flight across the Atlantic in 1929. The same day Swordfish sank the submarine Le Héros off Cape Amber as she was returning to base. On 8 May the destroyers Active and Panther destroyed with depth charges the submarine Monge, which had tried to torpedo Indomitable; her entire crew was lost. All three sunken submarines belonged to the Redoutable class. In three days of fighting the Vichy air force in the north of the island was almost entirely destroyed, and three Axis merchant ships that had taken refuge there before the war scuttled themselves in the harbour.

Losses

Casualty figures vary with the source. It is most often stated that the British lost 109 killed and 283 wounded in the fighting for Diego Suarez; some studies give 105 killed and 284 wounded. French losses are estimated at about 150 killed and between about 340 and 500 wounded. Most of the defenders of the base were taken prisoner. Their remnants, about a thousand men according to some studies, got away south, together with the sloop D’Iberville and the submarine Le Glorieux, which slipped out of the combat area and reached Toulon in August.

Echoes in London, Washington and Vichy

The Free French were kept out of the operation. General Charles de Gaulle learned of the landing at about three in the morning of 5 May from a telephone call by an Associated Press journalist, and took it as a humiliation: the British were occupying French territory without the participation of the men who had been fighting at their side for two years. His anger and his ostentatious talks with the Soviet ambassador led London to give assurances that Free France would be allowed to administer the island, though in practice this happened only after the fighting was over. The United States, which maintained relations with Vichy, publicly backed the operation as a defensive step, while warning the government of Pierre Laval that any hostile move against the Allies would meet with a response. Vichy protested and spoke of aggression, but beyond its call to resist it could do nothing to help Madagascar.

For the British the operation was a success, if a costlier one than expected. The speed with which it was carried out vindicated the decision taken after the April raid by Japanese carriers on Ceylon and the attack on Trincomalee. Field Marshal Jan Smuts, however, had been right to warn in Durban that Diego Suarez alone would not secure the island: Annet retained control of the rest of Madagascar and its ports, Majunga (Mahajanga) and Tamatave (Toamasina), and London had no troops to go further straight away.

Place in the war

Three weeks after the surrender it turned out that the fears of the Japanese had not been imaginary. On 29 May a seaplane from the submarine I-10 flew over the bay, and on the evening of 30 May a Japanese Ko-hyoteki-class midget submarine, launched from its mother ship, slipped into the bay, torpedoed Ramillies and sank the tanker British Loyalty. The battleship was out of action for many months. The crew of the midget submarine got ashore and were killed a few days later in a skirmish with Royal Marines. It was the only Japanese attack on Madagascar, but all summer the Admiralty feared that the Japanese would find a foothold in the ports still in Vichy hands.

The brigades of the 5th Division sailed for India in June, and their place was taken by East African, South African and Rhodesian units, which in the second half of the year came under the command of General William Platt. Talks with Annet came to nothing, so in September the British resumed operations: they landed at Majunga on 10 September and at Tamatave on 18 September, took the capital, Antananarivo, on 23 September, and set off south after the retreating Vichy forces. On 5 November 1942 Annet asked for an armistice, which came into force the next day, and at the beginning of 1943 power on the island passed to the Free French High Commissioner, General Paul Legentilhomme.

Operation Ironclad was the first large British landing of the war in which warships, carrier aircraft and ground troops acted under a common plan against a defended coast, and the first test of methods that six months later, in November 1942, were used for the landings in North Africa, again against Vichy forces. It secured the route round the Cape of Good Hope, along which reinforcements for the Eighth Army in Egypt and for India sailed throughout 1942. For the Malagasy, on the other hand, it was proof that French rule was not unshakeable: the fighting between the French and the British on their island undermined the prestige of the mother country, which made itself felt after the war in the great uprising of 1947.