Diverse paths lead diverse folk
the right way to Rome.
Chaucer, A Treatise on the Astrolabe
The East African campaign has been called a ‘side-show’ by men who were not there. Perhaps it was. Every confrontation seemed like a side-show to someone, and yet what at the time was called ‘The Abyssinian Campaign’ has all the ingredients of a great battle, and a unique place in the strategy of the Second World War.
The story begins a few weeks after Italy declared war. On 3 August 1940 three battalions of the Italian army and fourteen battalions of colonial infantry, together with pack-artillery, medium tanks and armoured cars, moved across the border into British Somaliland, in the ‘horn of Africa’ It was a small country compared with neighbouring Abyssinia, which the Italians had conquered in 1936, and its defence force consisted of a battalion of the Black Watch, two Indian and two East African battalions and the Somaliland Camel Corps. After two days of heavy fighting the British force was evacuated on 15 August 1940 under a strong rearguard action by the Black Watch.
Churchill was angry. He felt that defeat at the hands of the Italians – for the one and only time on record – would boost the morale of the Italian army in Libya just when ‘so much depended on our prestige’. Italy’s propaganda service made the most of the British expulsion from its African holding. It was a black mark for General Wavell, and Churchill’s black marks were accumulated like trading stamps: when you had a certain number of them, you were traded in for someone else.
To make matters worse for Wavell, he had Abyssinia’s Emperor Haile Selassie sitting in Khartoum, waiting for the British to restore his country to him. He had arrived in Egypt by flying boat as long ago as 25 June. The Foreign Office in London had packed him off on one of the last cross-Europe flights before France collapsed, without warning anyone that he was on his way back to Africa. With the British defeat in Somaliland, he had become an even more embarrassing encumbrance with whom all communication was difficult, since the emperor insisted upon speaking Amharic. The only available interpreter of Amharic spoke only Arabic and, on at least one occasion, the Arabic interpreter spoke only French, thus requiring a third interpreter.
In January 1941, after General O’Connor’s victories at Sidi Barrani in the Western Desert, the 4th Indian Division was taken from the fighting and brought 2,000 miles south to East Africa. The 5th Indian Division was brought to Khartoum. West African troops and some South African brigades were moved to Kenya. There were several reasons why Churchill bullied Wavell into a three-pronged assault upon this million-square-mile rectangle of land. Beside his obvious chagrin at having been ejected from British Somaliland by the Italians, and the wish to remove, once and for all, the Italian dream of joining East African possessions to Libya by conquering Egypt, there was a broader strategy behind the move.
Churchill wanted to bring South Africa into a fighting war, and by taking South African army and air force units northwards into areas of greater strategic importance (instead of using them as garrisons, which is all the South African government had promised) there was a chance of blooding them and granting them a victory not too far away from their homeland. Removing the Italians would be a popular action at home in South Africa. The South Africans were not entirely sure about the wisdom of engaging in war against Germany, but Jan Christiaan Smuts – their premier and C-in-C – had won the vote in Parliament by a narrow margin. A victory for the South African fighting men would reinforce pro-British Smuts in his present shaky political position.
Wavell was not privy to Churchill’s thinking on the matter. He was no politician and not, in the global sense, a strategist. Wavell did not want to attack Abyssinia; he preferred to wait until the rifles he had supplied to the natives brought about a popular revolt against Italian rule – or at least to wait until the rainy season had ended. Wavell sent a specialist in guerrilla warfare, Captain Orde Wingate, to get a revolt started, but Churchill was not prepared to let large bodies of fighting troops stand idly by, waiting for a revolt to start. He wanted this battle won and the troops – South Africans included – moved north into Egypt to face whatever proved to be the next crisis.
Few campaigns can match this Abyssinian one, either for the fierceness of its fighting or the colourful nature of its combatants. The 5th Indian Division, arriving at Keren, included such units as the 5th Mahratta Light Infantry Regiment, 3/2 Punjab, Skinner’s Horse, the Worcesters, motor machine-gun companies of the Sudan Defence Force and the 1st Transvaal Scottish with its own pipe band. On the Italian side there were Blackshirt Legions, the Savoia Grenadiers and Alpini units.
The landscape was equally exotic. In this land of precipitous mountains, high plateaux, gorges and ravines as well as tropical lowlands, Keren was a road and rail junction and the key to the north. Standing at 4,000 feet above sea-level, the country surrounding Keren was like a lunar landscape. To seal the mighty gorge the Italian engineers exploded charges under 200 feet of cliff and blocked the road. ‘Keren,’ said one account, describing that moment when the defenders sealed themselves inside, ‘was like a great medieval castle whose portcullis has fallen.’
The 4th Indian Division had been chosen because of their experience of mountain warfare.1 Facing them were crack troops of the Bersaglieri battalion of the Savoia Grenadiers, commanded by a young and energetic colonel. Five days of fighting cost the Italians nearly 5,000 casualties, including 1,135 dead. The Allied casualties were no fewer. The siege of Keren lasted 53 days and the British commander had to pause and bring in another division before finally taking the town.
None of the Allied troops who fought at Keren would dismiss Italian troops as lacking the ability to fight. Some of the most bitter fighting of the whole war was seen in East Africa. The RAF, the South African Air Force and Rhodesian squadrons were using antiquated planes such as Gloster Gladiators, Westland Lysanders, Vickers Wellesleys and Vickers Vincents. Without the air superiority they gained with these machines the Allied forces would never have been able to take Keren. The Italian commander was the Duke of Aosta, who was married to a French princess. He was described by Churchill as ‘a chivalrous and cultivated man, partly educated in England’.2 Churchill may have intended to say ‘educated partly in England’, but with Churchill you can never be sure.
Other Allied components included a battalion of the French Foreign Legion and the Highland Light Infantry. Exotic names abounded: a mobile force was called ‘Flit’ (after a well-known brand of insect repellent) and the commanding general’s aircraft was called ‘Mrs Clutterbuck’. The official war artist Edward Bawden depicted the campaign in several superb watercolour paintings now to be seen at the Imperial War Museum in London.
One column, ‘Gideon Force’, was commanded by ‘Gideon’ Orde Wingate, who said he was given nothing but ‘sick camels and the scum of the Cavalry Division’. With them he brought the ‘Lion of Judah’, otherwise known as Haile Selassie, back to his capital over some of the worst going in the world. The Force included 700 camels, 200 mules and some horses, the emperor and his guard, together with a propaganda unit which had its own printing press, Amharic type-faces and many coloured inks. The emperor’s party was said to be able to follow the trail without a compass, using just the smell of the dead camels. Fifty-seven were counted on one day alone. One officer of the Cavalry Division wrote:
Slowly, at the rate of about two miles an hour, we passed on over desolate ridges where the scrub had been burnt away by the fires of earlier hamlias [camel caravans]. The sun rose hot over a blackened landscape. Dead camels lay stinking in the heat at the foot and top of every khor where the broken ground had proved too much for them. The blood of crippled camels, newly slaughtered, was drying on the rocks. Frightened living camels shied away from the corpses; their drivers sometimes vomited. Hundreds of vultures, gorged with flesh, lurched heavily around.3
On 5 May 1941 Haile Selassie was back in his capital at Addis Ababa. It had been a campaign of remarkable chivalry which recorded no rape, murder, plundering or bombing of civilians. In defence of Keren the Italians fought fiercely and their final withdrawal from there was deft and skilful. The final skirmishes of the campaign in East Africa went on for seven months after the fall of Addis Ababa. It would provide time enough to reflect upon the strangely mixed quality of the Italian army. Some units proved brave and efficient while others were either unwilling to fight, or too disorganized to be formidable adversaries. Some said the Italians suffered from a shortage of the sort of officers that a large educated professional middle class could supply.4 German liaison officers remarked on the low standards of training and the lack of initiative of junior officers. In part it was a matter of weapons. Italy lacked a strong industrial base and had failed to improve weapons which, although good enough in the early 1930s, were outmoded by the 1940s. There was a prevailing feeling among all Italian soldiers, except perhaps those in the elite Fascist regiments, that they were fighting on the wrong side; that the English, French and Americans were traditional friends, and the Germans and Austrians Italy’s implacable foes.
As the mopping-up continued Churchill’s reasoning proved sound. Italian East Africa was Italian no more. It was the first Allied strategic victory of the war, and came at a time when the Allies desperately needed victory of any sort. Here was a clear demonstration of what air superiority over a battlefield could achieve and how unity among disparate forces could win the day. South African, East African, West African, British, Indian, Sudanese and Cypriot troops had taken part and South African soldiers, once committed to serving in only southern Africa, were now a part of the main Allied battle forces. But the campaign had done nothing to ease Churchill’s doubts about Wavell. When the two men met for the first time in August 1940 it had been clear to everyone that they were totally incompatible in temperament and outlook. The record suggests that Wavell, taciturn, wary and professional, probably thought Churchill an interfering politician who knew nothing about generalship. Churchill, exuberant, bellicose or laudatory as the mood caught him, certainly found Wavell uncooperative and narrow-minded. The subsequent exchanges between them had done nothing to change these first impressions.
The victory brought a vital change, enabling President Roosevelt to declare the Red Sea to be no longer a ‘war zone’. This meant that United States shipping was once more permitted, by government and insurance conditions, to sail to Suez. American tanks, guns and planes could now be shipped around the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt.
The war had widened. With cool nerve, the 4th British Indian Division had been pulled south after the battle for Sidi Barrani and used for the assault on the Italians in Keren, where the fiercest fighting took place. Afterwards it was rushed north to fight the Vichy French at Damascus in Syria. With equal facility, the 5th South African Brigade was sent north to Egypt as soon as victory in East Africa was assured. A further indication of the growing scale of the war was the way in which precious Hawker Hurricane fighter planes were being brought to Takoradi in the Gold Coast, some in crates to be assembled ashore, others flown from the decks of aircraft-carriers. From Takoradi the little planes made an astounding journey right across the continent, landing in northern Nigeria, and again in Khartoum in the Sudan before reaching Cairo. They were usually escorted by one twin-engined Bristol Blenheim as an ‘insurance policy’.
For anyone who considers the campaign in Italian East Africa a side-show, the skirmish at RAF Habbaniyah in Iraq must rank as insignificant. But let us suspend judgement for a moment.
Iraq has held a place in the history of the RAF since the First World War, when Australian and New Zealand pilots flew Maurice Farman Longhorn biplanes to cover a British army advancing up the River Tigris to fight the Turks. A postwar mandate put it under British control and Winston Churchill (when secretary of state for the colonies) and Sir Hugh Trenchard (the ‘Father’ of the RAF) proposed that this huge area of desert, a barren place of stone and sand, could be policed successfully with a few fighter planes and bombers converted to carry soldiers. It would save the British taxpayer the cost of twelve infantry battalions, a cavalry regiment, a pack battery and engineers which it was estimated would otherwise be needed to keep order among the Arabs.
This was the time when Giulio Douhet published his influential book Command of the Air,5 a time when the American flyer Billy Mitchell demonstrated that his bombers could sink battleships. So why not make Iraq the first country to be garrisoned from the air? The idea seemed to work. Villages that harboured trouble-making Kurdish tribesmen were bombed. Flyers worked in conjunction with RAF Rolls-Royce armoured-car crews which were supplied from the air. One air force officer, Hugh Dowding, thought that punishment without bloodshed would be equally deterrent. After his commander had gone on leave, Dowding ordered that before a bombing raid all the villagers should be warned by leaflet, in time for them to escape to safety, and this became the standard practice.6 By the time the mandate ended in 1932, a pro-British monarchy was installed in Baghdad, oil-drilling had started in the north and concessions had been granted. The RAF remained behind: a treaty provided them with two bases, defended by locally recruited ‘levies’, and the right of passage in time of war. The levies were mostly loyal and disciplined Assyrians who hated the Arabs with a deep passion and made a vital contribution to the British presence.
By 1941 this almost landlocked country, with just a tiny strip of coast on the Persian Gulf and a small fertile region watered by the mighty rivers Tigris and Euphrates, was pumping oil through two big pipelines to the Mediterranean. One of these pipelines crossed Vichy French Syria, and its use was denied to the British. The other pipe went through pro-British Jordan, and its outlet at Haifa in Palestine was used to fuel British forces in the Middle East. For some the oil brought great changes and political turbulence as military coups became commonplace. The warring nomadic tribes still fought barbarous skirmishes using Lee-Enfields and Turkish rifles left over from the First World War, while the rich lived quiet lives in fine houses with servants, silk and silver. Successive Iraqi governments always found enough money to keep a small army and air force well equipped with guns and planes.
The Germans had always shown interest in the region. Their archaeologists and explorers have written some of the standard works on the desert and its history. Some of its most breath-taking wonders are still to be seen in Berlin’s Pergamon museum. But the German interest has been political and military too, and their espionage network was well entrenched in the area and ready to encourage anti-British Arab nationalism. It came as no surprise that Rashid Ali’s clique, which seized power in April 1941, was supported by Germany or that the coup should come immediately following Britain’s humiliating defeats in Greece and Cyrenaica. Unlike previous coups this one hoped to get rid of the British altogether and May was the month of high floodwater when any British relief force would find its movement impeded.
That Rashid Ali took power from the pro-British regent Emir Abdullah Illah (who ruled in the name of the young King Faisal II) was no great surprise. That it was done without killing him was more a matter of good luck than of good will. The doctors who arrived at the regent’s Baghdad home with a death certificate endorsed ‘heart failure’ were too late. The intended victim had left in the back of the American minister’s car and the RAF flew him out of their nearby airfield.
Rashid Ali el Gailani was not the young sleek Arab the name might suggest but a plump bespectacled man of middle age who, while serving as prime minister, had acquired a reputation for duplicity in a region where duplicity was seldom remarked upon. He was known to be a Nazi sympathizer and the British were alarmed by his coup. Britain’s proprietorial feelings towards the Suez Canal, about Iraq’s oilfields, and communications between Egypt and India, prompted a quick reaction to the Baghdad palace revolution. Garrisoning from the air was temporarily suspended. The 20th Indian Infantry Brigade, waiting in Karachi for embarkation on ships to Singapore, was suddenly given an about-turn and rushed to Basra in southern Iraq. Faced with Iraqi objections, the British blandly denied that the newly arrived men had come to seize control back from the pro-German clique; the Indian Brigade was just passing through Iraq ‘en route to Palestine’.
About 60 miles from Baghdad, and close to the River Euphrates, there was a lake used by Britain’s ‘Empire’ flying boats which hopped from water-landing to water-landing all the way to India and beyond. Here too, within a steel fence, were comfortable bungalows with lawns and flower beds, a polo ground and a golf course that the RAF had built in an attempt to forget that just a stroke or two away lay a sandy bunker that stretched to the horizon. This was Habbaniyah: RAF No. 4 Flying Training School. There were no up-to-date fighting planes here – the RAF had none to spare – only 27 Airspeed Oxfords and 32 Hawker Audaxes, as well as some Gloster Gladiators and such remarkable museum pieces as Fairey Gordons and Vickers Valentias.
As one of his first political moves Rashid Ali said he would permit no further landing of troops in Basra. He wanted to limit the number of British troops in Iraq at any one time. Let those passing through pass through, he said, before any more arrive. In London it became known that Rashid Ali had signed a secret treaty with the Germans and the Italians on 25 April. A variety of intelligence material indicated that Rashid Ali was waiting for German armed assistance and that the disembarkation of British troops at Basra had proved an unwelcome impediment to his plans.
In a climate growing ever more tense, it was decided to move British women and children to safety. Some went to the American legation, some to the British embassy, and some were to be flown out of the country altogether. On leaving Baghdad, they were held up by Iraqi soldiers, but eventually were allowed to proceed to RAF Habbaniyah, where there were now 1,000 RAF personnel. These were mostly ground crews, administrative staff and flying instructors, as well as 1,200 Iraqi levies – Arabs, Kurds and Assyrian Christians – employed by the British. In addition 350 infantrymen of the King’s Own Royal Regiment had been flown in.
At about this time Rashid Ali’s men occupied the oilfields and switched the pipeline controls so that all the oil would flow to (Vichy) Syria and none to (British) Palestine. Red lights flashed: this was a serious threat. The British had persuaded Shell and Anglo-Iranian Oil to build at Haifa a refinery capable of supplying 2 million tons per year. This fuel was required by the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet. Additionally the refinery was supplying high-quality oils that were vitally important since the war had cut off Romanian supplies.
Iraqi army units (an infantry brigade accompanied by a brigade of mechanized artillery) soon arrived at Habbaniyah and occupied high ground outside it. The RAF cleaned up and oiled two ancient howitzers, relics of the First World War, which had been used to ornament the lawn outside the depot. In addition there were 18 armoured cars and the infantry’s mortars and machine-guns. They fitted some of their Audax biplane trainers, and Oxford twin-engined trainers, with bomb racks, and the theory of bomb-dropping was hastily taught to pupil pilots. It was sobering to remember that the Iraqi air force was equipped with American bombers and Italian fighter planes.
On the morning of 1 May the Iraqis were to be seen siting their pom-pom anti-aircraft guns and bringing their armoured cars as close as possible to the RAF runways. A message from the Iraqi commander dictated that all flying was to cease on pain of aircraft being fired upon. The British replied that the training schedule would continue normally and reprisals would follow any such act of war. An RAF plane did a circuit without incident. The British then sent a note to the Iraqis saying that they must move, as the present disposition of Iraqi troops constituted an act of war. That night, the British decided that if the Iraqis were still there at dawn they would improvise a bombing raid.
The Audaxes and Oxfords were wheeled out under cover of night and took off so as to be in the air by 5 am. They were joined by eight twin-engined Vickers Wellington bombers of 37 Squadron from Shaibah near Basra. These ‘Wimpys’ were the only modern effective aircraft that took part in the fighting in Iraq. Twisting and turning without any proper formations, and narrowly missing mid-air collisions, the British planes bombed the Iraqi positions. As Iraqi pom-poms shot at the planes, Iraqi artillery bombarded the RAF station. One Oxford was shot down in flames and a Wellington was hit by shells on landing. The rest got down safely, though many were riddled with bullet holes.
The base was subjected to attacks throughout the day and was bombed by Audaxes of the Royal Iraq Air Force. No vital damage was done before RAF Gladiators chased them away. The artillery fire was a greater threat. ‘But though the station church sustained some damage, owing to the powerful attraction invariably exercised by places of worship upon indifferent gunners, the water tower was never hit,’ said an Air Ministry account.7
Transport aircraft were loaded with women and children and climbed away while RAF Audaxes staged diversionary attacks. When they landed the Audaxes were moved to the polo ground where trees hid them, but take-offs now had to be negotiated through the main gates! Wear and tear on the aircraft was becoming severe, so that only four Oxfords of the original 27 were serviceable, and it was decided that only instructors should fly the remaining aircraft. But the arrival of some Bristol Blenheims persuaded the British to bomb the columns that supplied water, fuel and ammunition to the Iraqi positions. Then they went to make bombing attacks against nearby Iraqi airfields.
Suddenly, and without warning, on the fifth morning of the siege the plateau was empty. The Iraqis had gone. The ‘Habbaniyah air force’ pursued them, and motor buses which the Iraqis had seized from Baghdad streets to move their infantry were bombed on the road. The announcement that successful operational flights by pupils would mean a remission of further training set the pupil pilots demanding an opportunity to fly, and they were needed.
The British success at Habbaniyah did not deter Rashid Ali. On 12 May he went, together with his ministers and other dignitaries, to Baghdad airport to await the arrival of a German liaison team led by Major Axel von Blomberg (a son of the famous field marshal). Blomberg was to set up a headquarters to direct forthcoming Luftwaffe operations against the British in Iraq. Iraqi police levies on airfield defence duties had not been briefed about the visitors, and when a Heinkel bomber flew into view they opened fire at it. One bullet went through the fuselage, and in a bizarre stroke of fate mortally wounded Blomberg.8 The following day Baghdad heard the exiled Mufti of Jerusalem broadcast a call for all Islamic countries to join the fight against the British.
More fighting broke out in Basra, where disembarked Indian troops were somewhat piqued to find themselves subjected to the brutal fire of 2-inch and 3-inch mortars that the British had supplied to the Iraqi army. They were still waiting for theirs, as were most other Indian units. Fighting spread even to the civil population and the British disarmed the police force.
The next day, an RAF Bristol Blenheim at Mosul in northern Iraq was fired upon by a German plane. There were reports that many German aircraft were operating from Mosul and that supplies of arms and ammunition were arriving there on the railway from Syria. Clearly the Vichy French were not only permitting transit facilities but actively supporting German intervention on the side of Rashid Ali.
There were worries about what sort of intervention the Germans might mount. On 20 May the Luftwaffe parachute troops began the assault on the faraway island of Crete. If the Germans were serious about reinforcing Rashid Ali, such airborne forces would be the ones needed. But by 29 May, the Crete fighting ended with Kurt Student’s Air Division decimated and the wrecks of 151 Junkers transport aircraft scattered across the Cretan landscape. A small collection of transports were scraped together and assigned to support the Iraqi revolt9 but it had come at the wrong time as far as the German airborne forces were concerned. Rashid Ali and his associates, together with the Italian and German ministers and the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, fled to Persia. The coup was over and the British reinstalled the regent in Baghdad.
But the story doesn’t end there. Before the outcome of the Habbaniyah fighting was settled, some RAF flyers reported back to H 4 (a desolate RAF landing strip on the oil pipeline) in Transjordan after a routine reconnaissance over Syria. (Like those in its neighbour Lebanon, the French in Syria had declined all invitations to join in the war against Germany and Italy.) A big German transport plane was parked on Palmyra airfield. It seemed to be in the process of refuelling for an immediate take-off, its destination undoubtedly Iraq.
The RAF flyers had noticed that the refuelling was being carried out by hand, and pouring from cans of fuel was a slow procedure. One of the pilots suggested to his superior that, given a fighter plane with some incendiary ammunition, he could make sure the German aircraft never took off again.
‘Are you two young gentlemen aware that we are not at war with Syria?’ asked the man behind the desk.
‘Yes, sir,’ the flying officer replied, ‘I know, sir; but I think it would be a bloody good idea if we were.’
That was in fact how the British went to war with Syria. Permission was granted, and after eating a hasty lunch while an aircraft was prepared they flew off with two supporting Tomahawk fighters to attack the Germans.
In fact London knew well what was happening. Enigma decrypts had revealed that unmarked Heinkel He III bombers and twin-engined Messerschmitt fighters were flying to Syria. London judged the German commitment to be strictly limited, but took no chances. A British column set out from Palestine and the troops in Basra were summoned into action.
In the confused and terrible fighting that followed – sometimes in temperatures of 120 degrees (49 C) – Frenchman fought Frenchman and Arab fought Arab in a deeply felt struggle. And, at a time when the British fortunes were very low, Emir Abdullah of Transjordan sent his small but efficient Arab Legion into the battle on the Allied side. Feelings ran even higher when German aircraft bombed (Vichy) Beirut and hit a school and a mosque. Whether this was a navigational error, or a deliberate attempt to have the RAF wrongly blamed for it, has never been established.
On 27 June Luftwaffe Enigma signals revealed that Vichy France was about to send infantry reinforcements to Syria. The troopships were to be escorted by units of the French fleet: one battleship, four cruisers and up to six destroyers. Air cover was to be supplied by the Luftwaffe. It looked as if the war was about to intensify, and France become a full ally of Germany. The Admiralty sent Royal Navy submarines to concentrate against the troopships and the escorting warships. Then, on 2 July, news came that the plan was cancelled. A deep sigh came from those who saw what a catastrophic clash had been so narrowly avoided.
The fighting ended with the British taking control of Syria and Lebanon, but the wounds would never heal. The defeated French servicemen were invited to join de Gaulle’s Free French and fight the Germans, but almost all chose to go back to France. De Gaulle, taking seriously his self-declared role as head of state in exile, and pressured by the British (and unofficially by the Americans too), promised the people of the French mandates of Syria and Lebanon their independence.10 There was uproar. De Gaulle’s announcement not only upset the Vichy government, which felt that such decisions were theirs, but also made his Free French soldiers ask why they were fighting and dying for territory in order to give it back when it was taken.
It all ended in farce. In breach of the armistice terms, the Vichy French tried to spirit their prisoners of war back to Germany. This resulted in some senior Vichy officers being put under arrest in their hotel until the POWs were found and handed over. At the signing of the armistice a drunken Australian photographer fell over a cable and put out all the lights. In the darkness and confusion someone stole the gold-decorated képi of a French general.
Afterwards Churchill remarked that: ‘Hitler certainly cast away the opportunity of taking a great prize for little cost in the Middle East.’ Wavell never saw it in that light. When ordered to send a relief column from Palestine to Iraq, he let it be known that Palestine (with its ruler in league with Rashid Ali, and much anti-British feeling prevalent) could not spare soldiers from its garrison. Showing no sympathy for Britain’s problems in Iraq, Wavell irritably replied: ‘Your message takes little account of realities. You must face facts … a settlement should be negotiated as early as possible.’
Having intercepted an Italian diplomatic message saying that Rashid Ali had used up all his bombs and shells, London (chiefs of staff) replied testily: ‘Settlement by negotiation cannot be entertained except on a basis of climb-down by the Iraqis … realities of the situation are that Rashid Ali has all along been hand in glove with Axis Powers …’11
‘I am deeply disturbed at General Wavell’s attitude,’ wrote Churchill, who felt that the essence of war was the rapid movement of forces.12 He had urged Wavell to exploit the situation and break into Baghdad ‘even with quite small forces … running the same risks as the Germans are accustomed to run and profit by’.13
Only grudgingly had Wavell obeyed the direct order to send a column to Habbaniyah, which he thought was ‘a non-vital area’. Even then he pointed out that ‘it is not capable of entering Baghdad’, and repeated his advice to find a political solution for Iraq. He had always, he said later, ‘disliked Iraq, the country, the people and the military commitment’.
Wavell’s dislike of Iraq seems to have led him to underestimate its importance. In a telegram dated 25 May, he said that his main task was the defence of Egypt and Palestine and added that this ‘would be made more difficult but would not be greatly jeopardized by hostile control of Iraq’. His opinion is difficult to sustain: Palestine and Egypt would have been outflanked by an Axis-controlled Iraq, and Wavell’s army, navy and air force depended upon Iraq’s oil wells and the pipeline.
Wavell’s concern in Syria, Palestine and Iraq, just like his caution in East Africa, came from his belief that all military action, and even cross country movement, required ‘the cooperation of the local population and tribes’. Whatever the morality of this assumption it is not always the case in reality. This was proved when Churchill pressed Wavell into action.
That Churchill took any threat to Iraq very seriously is indicated by the way in which British military intelligence in Palestine sought out the extreme Zionist Irgun Zvai Leumi. They recruited Iraqi Jews to penetrate and spy upon the Rashid Ali organization. One of the volunteers was David Rashiel, Irgun chief of staff, who came from a prosperous Baghdad family and who, in the course of the revolt, was caught and executed by the rebels.14
When Wavell was sacked the following month, June 1941, most people put it down to his military failure in North Africa. The reasons for that failure and the injustice of Churchill’s decision have been picked over many times, but there can be no doubt that the roots of Churchill’s discontent were sunk much deeper.