The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean 1935–1949. Simon Ball

Libyan plateau which pushed out into the Mediterranean, gave it its strategic attraction: not only a short flight from the Narrows but in range of Greece and the Aegean. In Cunningham’s mind a string of airfields from Sollum to Derna could protect his fleet around Malta whilst attacking the northern shore. ⁷ Cunningham’s military opposite number, Wavell, doubted whether even this modest plan was achievable. As Cunningham committed his thoughts to paper in Alexandria, Wavell recorded his in Cairo: he did not believe he could even get his troops over the Egyptian-Libyan border. The newly appointed air commander, the RAF’s best Whitehall warrior, Arthur Tedder, used his own message home to gloat that ‘the air has come into its own with a vengeance in the Mediterranean’. ‘I need hardly say,’ he toasted his fellow aviators in the Luftwaffe, ‘I have refrained from saying, “I told you so”.’ ⁸

      The limited ambitions of Britain’s Mediterranean leaders failed to take into account that enemies considerably less formidable than the Germans were now willing to twit them. Germany and France had agreed, even before the fall of Crete, that aid should flow to a pro-Nazi revolt in Iraq led by Rashid Ali. Rashid Ali had the enthusiastic assistance of Britain’s old friend, the Mufti. Darlan had even been allowed into Berchtesgaden to see Hitler in order to seal the deal. ⁹ As they spoke, the first German aircraft were landing in Syria. Within days, supply trains were running along the railway from Aleppo to Mosul. The French were running a calculated risk. Darlan knew that such an act of aggression could well provoke a British attack on Syria. In preparation for this eventuality he had replaced the High Commissioner in Syria with a tough Alsatian general, Henri Dentz. Dentz preferred subterfuge–sadly undermined by British decryption of Luftwaffe signals–or deterrence to avoid war, but he was quite willing to fight the British if they came. ¹⁰

      If the British commanders in the Mediterranean had had their way, Darlan and Dentz’s gamble would have paid off. They had no intention of invading Syria. Indeed they sought to maintain cordial relations with Dentz. The gamble was undone by Churchill, reading the Enigma traffic in London and demanding revenge. ‘If the French Army in Syria will come over to us,’ Churchill wrote, ‘then Vichy would have a future as the colonial power in the Levant.’ If, as it seemed, ‘they are going against us, or maintaining an attitude of malevolent passivity’ then the British should look elsewhere. Their new friends would be the ‘Syrian Arabs’. ‘I am not sufficiently acquainted with Syrian affairs to be able to formulate a plan,’ the Prime Minister admitted, ‘but I cannot doubt that our Islamic experts can easily do so.’ ¹¹

      Churchill’s intelligence-fed take on Vichy was defensible enough, his faith in the ‘wisdom’ of Arab nationalism, or the competence of his own ‘Islamic experts’, less so. The leaders of Arab nationalism in Syria were most certainly looking for allies against the French, but had already found them elsewhere. One of the bargains Darlan made with Hitler was for the withdrawal of the Reich’s premier orientalist, von Hentig, from Syria. His sin was his success with indigenous politicians. Von Hentig’s successor, the equally dynamic Rudolf Rahn, was no less successful. It was not hard to see why. Despite the promises they had made in 1936, the French had delayed any transfer of power to indigenous politicians until the eve of war, when they suspended the constitution and appointed their own placemen to rule the country. The former Prime Minister, Jamil Mardam, was revealed, by the gleeful opening of the books by France’s new placemen, to be corrupt on an almost industrial scale. Although the French delighted in his discomfiture, they regarded corruption as a venial sin. That sin they attributed to Mardam’s rival Dr Shahbandar, with his anti-fascist and secular principles. Thus the French colluded with Mardam, first to have Shahbandar murdered as a British agent and an enemy of Islam, then to pervert his trial, and finally to whisk him across the border to a safe exile in Iraq. With Mardam having fled and Shahbandar dead, the field was left open for the other main leader of the National Bloc, Shukri al-Quwwatli, to emerge as the unchallenged spokesman of Syrian nationalism. Quwwatli used his new platform to celebrate openly the coming victory of the Axis and the great benefit to the Arabs thereof. ¹² There was a notable increase in the number of German ‘tourists’ crossing into Syria from Turkey. The most visible Abwehr operative in the region, Paula Koch, was inevitably dubbed ‘the Mata Hari of the Levant’. Lebanon’s leading nationalist politician, Riad Solh, was closely linked to Koch. ¹³

      The choice between definitely anti-British and possibly pro-Nazi Frenchmen, or definitely anti-French but possibly pro-Nazi nationalists, was hardly appetizing. The means by which Britain might subvert such alignments were not in good repair when the point of crisis arrived. The man supposedly coordinating policy for Wavell was Colonel Illtyd Clayton. Clayton, by virtue of family connections–his older brother had been Lawrence of Arabia’s boss–had spent his entire professional life enmeshed in the intrigues of the Arab world. He, if anyone, was the Islamic expert for whom Churchill sought. At the exact moment he was called upon, however, he was having little success in controlling the civil war that had broken out between the secret organizations in Cairo and the Levant. The long-time Middle East hand that he was, Clayton still preferred working with his old French contacts. ‘Time and time again,’ complained one SOE leader whom Clayton held in check, ‘we have asked’ to be allowed to to cooperate with anti-French heterodox sects, such as the Druze, disillusioned by Dentz’s open favour towards orthodox Sunnis. ‘The answer given by Clayton has always been’, his interlocutor reported, ‘“No; nothing must be done to upset Dentz; we can always get the Arabs when we want them; we are staking everything on Dentz swinging over entirely to our side; or at any rate resisting any attempt by the Germans to occupy Syria”.’ ¹⁴

      In retrospect, it was clear that Clayton had misread Dentz, but he was not solely grasping for a shop-worn former amity. In his desire to bluff the British, Dentz had cast an indulgent eye on some cross-border contacts. Clayton and Dentz were fighting for the soul of Colonel Robert Collet. Collet’s soul had both material and symbolic value, for he was by far the most famous Frenchman in the Levant. Everyone had to have their own Lawrence of Arabia; von Hentig was Germany’s and Collet had been France’s. In the inter-war period French governments and news-reels had made a cult of Collet, leading his highly colourful Circassian cavalry who, the propagandists had their audience believe, were his ‘children’, looking up to him as a ‘father’ if not a demi-god. The Circassians were not just there for show, although their fair-skinned women were undoubtedly a favourite of orientalist pornography Collet’s men had shown an enormous aptitude and appetite for butchering their racial and religious rivals in the massacres that had done so much to cement French rule. Dentz, however, was far from trusting his glamorous subordinate. Word reached him that the Circassians openly mocked the French for their wretched military performance against the Germans and the British. He had them confined to their barracks, and resorted to the low trick of having the carburettors removed from their lorries so that they could not decamp en masse to Palestine. Yet neither did Dentz wish to drive Collet into British hands. A ludicrous game developed between them. Each weekend Collet would announce that he was ‘going to Beirut’, pile a few Circassians into his car and then drive in the opposite direction across the Palestinian border to Haifa. The Circassians could then desert in safety and Collet would sit down and talk to Clayton’s men. He would then drive to Beirut for the weekend, all under the eyes of Dentz’s spies, who reported each move. It was not until the end of May 1941, when Collet finally took the momentous decision to desert, that Dentz ordered him to Damascus and court martial. One might call this game of shadows a draw between Dentz and Clayton since, when Collet finally fled to Transjordan, about half of his original Circassians came with him to fight with the British. ¹⁵

      Clayton viewed Arab politicians as tarts; they had been bought by the Nazis, but they would be happy to be bought by the British when the time came. It hardly helped the British cause