The French government was heavily involved in the recent UN negotiations that led to the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. But French President Chirac was widely derided when he then announced that France would contribute only 200 troops to the international peacekeeping force. Within two weeks, France increased its commitment to 2000 personnel, part of a planned 15,000-man UN force in Lebanon.
France has a long history in this region. When the Treaty of Versailles divided the defeated Ottoman Empire in 1919, the League of Nations decided that four of its territories in the Middle East should be League of Nations mandates temporarily governed by the United Kingdom and France. The British were given Palestine and Iraq, while France was given mandate over the region of Lebanon and Syria.
In September 1920 France declared the creation of the State of Greater Lebanon, declaring Beirut as its capital. The new territory was granted a flag, merging the French Tricouleur with the Lebanese cedar. When the French government capitulated to the Germans in 1941, their mandate territories in the Middle East sided with the Nazis.
United Press correspondent Henry Tilton Gorrell was on the front lines during the fighting between the Allies and the Axis-supporting French Vichy government. In this fourth installment from his soon-to-be-published memoir “Eyewitness” (written in 1943 and currently being edited by GraniteGrok contributor Ken Gorrell), Henry reports on the fierce battles waged by the Allies to keep the region free from Nazi control.
The Allies had to take a lot of Vichy’s insolence prior to their decision to kick over the bucket and occupy North Africa, but the boys who swallowed the most were the Australians during the Syrian Campaign of June-July 1941.
Imagine a tough bunch of troops being told to go to war “with an olive branch in one hand and a grenade in the other.” And how’d you like to have been in their shoes when, proffering the olive branch under a white flag, they were mowed down by murderous machine-gun and mortar fire.
We learned in Syria that it doesn’t do to mix politics with war; that it doesn’t pay to act the part of gentlemen with guys who just don’t want to play. That sort of business cost the Diggers (Australians) a lot of casualties, especially since a French Fascist by the name of General Henri Dentz was in command in Beirut.
Now that some of the men of Vichy have been unmasked, perhaps the censor will have no objection to the truth being told concerning the Syrian Campaign. After all, many of the boys who fought Dentz’s crowd of madmen are back home now, and all Australia knows about it. So why shouldn’t the world?
Many times were we war correspondents cursed, and with reason, by the Aussies in Syria whose buddies had become casualties in the fighting for Beirut. They’d heard the B.B.C. tell the world the night before that everything was lovely, although perhaps our former allies, the French, were being just a bit trying.
“Why don’t you guys tell the truth? Why don’t you tell ‘em there are Diggers being killed around here by French soldiers? Why, my pal was killed yesterday…etc.?” And so it went. We had to gulp, apologize, and swallow it, because we knew the boys were right. In their eyes we were a pack of liars. But what was the use of telling them it was the censor’s fault, not ours? How to explain that Downing Street was using kid gloves, hoping to appease their former allies, now enemies, the men of Vichy?
The straw that broke the camel’s back so far as I was concerned, though, was the half-hour pounding we got from the guns of the French Fleet. A French cruiser and destroyer shelled the Hell out of the Aussies as they fought a bloody hand-to-hand battle with the Foreign Legion at the Litani River, north of Tyre. This was a definite act of war against the British Empire. But the world heard nothing about it, for there was still a chance the “the misguided elements of Vichy” could be brought round and made to see the light. After dodging shrapnel from French naval guns on the rocky Syrian coast, Harold Laycock of the Christian Science Monitor and I rushed our dispatches to the censorship in Jerusalem only to find that there wasn’t a hope of the story being approved for publication. It’s all past history now. Nevertheless, it is well worth mentioning, if only to ensure that history accurately records what the British were up against after the Germans took over France and installed their Quislings in the Vichy cabinet.
General Dentz and company were a cold-blooded bunch of Fascist cut-throats. Because these French officials were working hand-in-glove with Berlin, they gave orders whereby Allied soldiers were killed and wounded unnecessarily. Although short lived, the Syrian Campaign was at times most intense.
I marched into Syria with the Australians at 3 a.m. on June 8th, 1941. “It’s going to be a delightfully mixed show,” an Australian brigadier told me, “for we don’t know whether we’re going to war of not.” His men were to sneak up on French outposts to prevent them from blowing up the cliffs along the coast road, blocking that point of entry. “We’ve got to do everything from frontier patrol to policing captured villages and towns, while avoiding land mines and other traps. And, they say we have to be nice about it.” He chuckled, then continued, “We’re even instructed to leave some of our men behind to act as a reception committee for Frenchmen expected to desert into Palestine come morning. My boys are tough, and they’re scratching their heads a bit, but we’ll do the best we can. As for the olive branch and the hand grenade,” he added with a wink, “I’ve told my Diggers to drop the heaviest one the first, should they run into trouble.”
As the column pressed on to the Litani River, Dentz’s forces opened up on them with all they had. The Aussies, still not sure how to strike the delicate balance implicit in their orders, hauled out the olive branch and sent it forward with a group of “Parliamentarians” under a white flag. The whole lot of them were mowed down by machine-gun fire. The Aussies then decided to toss a few grenades and hold their line. That night as the Australian Field Commander prepared for “fun and games,” I talked with a French pilot held in the Tyre jail. He had been captured after inadvertently landing his aeroplane after the British occupation of the formerly-French airstrip. I referred to British gratification that the French had not committed all their forces to battle against the Allies, but he shook his head grimly and warned us that it was only a strategic move.
“We are soldiers,” he said, “and General Dentz has ordered us to resist. Every man will fight.”
The battle began along the Litani River at dawn the next morning. My report of the battle, contained in a dispatch submitted that day, was stopped by the censor.
It struck me that in resisting at the Litani the bulk of the French prisoners had been acting merely as automatons, under orders. The French Foreign Legion, which bore the brunt of the Aussie attack is noted for its blind obedience. A French non-commissioned officer said to me:
“We gave our superiors our word as soldiers of France that we would fight. They told us we must fight against the British to preserve French honor.”
* **
Damascus, which through the ages had been the prize of hundreds of battles, falling to generals such as David, Darius, and Alexander the Great, again found besieged forces within its gates. His line broken, Dentz’s emissaries emerged from Beirut under white flags. An Armistice Convention was signed shortly after at Acre, Palestine. Vichy French General Dentz, surly to the last, was not there, sending as his representative the General de Verdillac.
With the signing of the Acre Armistice Convention the Syrian campaign came to a formal end and took its place in history as another episode in World War Number II. The entry of the Australians in Beirut a few days later marked the forced abandonment of Hitler’s Middle Eastern dreams. Lebanon and Syria had been snatched from Vichy domination, put out of Hitler’s reach.
Lebanon gained its independence during World War II after Vichy government forces were defeated by the Allies. The French left the country in 1945
