John Broich - Blood, Oil and the Axis: The Allied Resistance Against a Fascist State in Iraq and the Levant, 1941

Copyright 2019 by John Broich

Published in 2019 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording, or otherwise without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

On the cover: Arab Legion Chevys and machine gun crews pose for photographer George Rodger and Life magazine in Amman, Transjordan, summer 1941. Chevys like these had cut the rail line out of Baghdad and dueled the Luftwaffe. Absent is one destroyed by a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt Bf 110 in May.

Book design and typeformatting by Bernard Schleifer
Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-4683-1399-4
eISBN: 978-1-46831-401-4

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This was not your land, or ours: but a village in the Midlands,
And one in the Five Rivers, may have the same graveyard.
Let those who go home tell the same story of you:
Of action with a common purpose...

T. S. E LIOT , To the Indians who Died in Africa

Jack Bartlett. A twenty-one-year-old gardener and member of the Territorial Army artillery, or Saturday soldiers, when World War II broke out, he fought in Belgium and northern France prior to escaping from Dunkirk. Recovered, he and his neighbors shipped out to the Suez Canal zone and on to Iraq, continuing into Syria. Two hundred thirty-seventh (Lincoln) Field Battery, 60th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery.

Harry Chalk. A seventeen-year-old tiler of very modest background from Southend-on-Sea. When World War II broke out he first shipped out to Egypt. After fighting on the Sudan frontier, he and his Southend friends were ordered to Palestine and later Iraq and Syria. First Battalion, First Essex Regiment.

Roald Dahl. Dahl was working for Shell Oil in Kenya and Tanganyika before volunteering for the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1939 as a twenty-three-year-old. He trained at RAF Habbaniya in Iraq before being thrown into a desperate, losing campaign in Greece. His last combat missions were against the French and Germans over Syria-Lebanon in JuneJuly 1941. Eightieth Squadron, RAF.

Jack Hasey. US citizen who made France his adopted home after failing at college; he yearned to fight the threatening Germans on the eve of war. Denied French citizenship, he campaigned in the United States for funds for volunteer ambulance crews and, informally, for America to prepare to fight fascist Germany. Returning to France during its fall, he fled to join Charles de Gaulles Free French in Britain in 1940 before fighting in northeastern Africa and Syria. Thirteenth Demi-Brigade, Free French Foreign Legion.

John Masters. Born into a British family that had resided in India for many generations, Masters was an early career soldier in the Indian Army at the beginning of the war. While training Nepali recruits to the Gurkha Rifles and patrolling Indias border with Afghanistan, he and his men and boys were sent to Basra, Iraq, early in the Golden Square Crisis. Second Battalion, Fourth Gurkha Rifles.

Reading. A young Palestinian from Haifa who worked as an interpreter for the British Armys Sixth Cavalry Brigade, headquartered near there. Suddenly pressed into field service during the improvised invasion of Iraq, Reading did some extraordinary improvisation of his own that seemed to contribute largely to the campaigns success. The name Reading was an alias he used for work; his real name is lost.

David Smiley. A wealthy, aristocratic member of the largely ornamental Royal Horse Guards at the outbreak of the war, Smiley volunteered as a commando operating on the Sudan frontier in 1940. He sought out similarly dangerous work in Iraq and Syria. Royal Horse Guards, First Household Cavalry Regiment.

Freya Stark. Having won renown as a traveler and writer in Arab and Persian lands in the mid-1930s, Stark volunteered with the British Ministry of Information at the outbreak of the war. She then traveled the Middle East, working formally and informally as an envoy, propagandist, organizer, and intelligence gatherer. Her goal was always to draw the British and Middle Eastern Arabs together in what she considered genuine friendship, while watching the forces of ignorance or imperiousness work against her.

Moshe Dayan. A member of one of the semisecret Palmach strike teams of the Jewish Palestinian Haganah paramilitary who scouted the Syria-Lebanon frontier and accompanied an international team to disable a bridge wired with explosives on the eve of the Allied campaign there.

Henri Dentz. A general who had the misfortune of being tasked with offering the surrender of Paris to the Germans, Dentz was then sent by the Vichy regime to its colony of Syria-Lebanon as chief civil and military authority, only to be given the job of collaborating with Axis forces there.

Tony Dudgeon. Born in Cairo to a middle-class family, Dudgeon was a pilot placed in charge of a remote Blenheim bomber squadron fighting the Italians on the Egypt-Libya frontier as a mere twenty-four-year-old. Sent to quiet Habbaniya to recover from the constant stress and losses of pilots on the front lines, he found himself in the middle of a siege that wounded more than one psyche.

Santi Pada Dutt. A doctors son himself, Dutt joined the Indian Armys Medical Service after getting his medical degree in Calcutta. He had sisters active in the anti-imperial Quit India Movement even as he served in a war many of his compatriots argued would only preserve the British Empire. He freely told British colleagues, meanwhile, that that was not his aim. He was steadfast in the face of grave peril to his Nepali Gurkha patients.

John Glubb. An army veteran of the Western Front in World War I, Glubb was then posted to Mesopotamia (later Iraq) for ten years before enlisting as an officer in the Arab Legion of Transjordan (later Jordan). His long-standing personal familiarity with the villages and Bedouin of the Iraq-Jordan-Syria frontier made him a valuable ally in the campaigns of spring 1941.

Fritz Grobba. Called not just an Arabophile but an Arabomaniac by one of his German Foreign Office superiors, Grobba had long dreamed of, and cultivated, an alliance between Germany and Iraq. When a cabal of army officers overthrew the Iraqi government, they immediately requested that Grobba hurry from Germany to act as liaison between the officers and their would-be Axis allies.

Rudolf Rahn. Envisioning himself as one who would nurture a new era of cooperation between France and Germany, the diplomatand NaziRahn had the task of liaising with Henri Dentz in Beirut. His goal was to extract as much military cooperation from the Vichy French in Syria-Lebanon as possible, in the hope that this would strengthen ties and serve as a model collaboration for a new world order.