Blood, Oil and the Axis

The Allied Resistance Against a Fascist State in Iraq and the Levant, 1941

Abrams Books

Contents

"To Extinguish Peace from the Earth"

Where the Middle East and the World Stood in Spring 1941

This is the story of how close the European Axis came to achieving a massive triumph in Iraq and the Levant in spring 1941. Imagine Germany and Italy acquiring an oil supply sufficient for all of their war needs along with a pipeline that would deliver that oil to a convenient Mediterranean port and to a rail network that could deliver the oil through Turkey to the Axis-occupied Balkan States. Imagine in that moment the Axis gaining an ally with a modern, British-trained army of around thirty to fifty thousand in the Middle East. Imagine that the Axis gained a port and air base about thirty miles from the Allies' most important non-American fuel supply and refinery in Iran. And imagine Germany suddenly commanding an army on the northern border of Palestine, with its population of a half million Jews, and that army invading, perhaps holding the Jewish population hostage.

This is not sensational conjecture; each of these things seemed on course to happen in spring 1941. And they seemed bound to happen not in the event of some grand or lucky stroke by the Axis but simply in the absence of a quick reaction from the Allies. That is, all it would have taken for this potential to become reality was the absence of a desperate response by an extraordinary, makeshift alliance — the subject of this book.

The crisis in Iraq and Syria-Lebanon was a low point among a series of low points for Britain and its allies — allies that did not yet include the United States. It had been almost a year since the fall of France and the headlong flight of British forces from the beaches of Dunkirk before the German war machine. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had rallied Britain to keep up the fight — hardly a forgone conclusion — after the catastrophic loss of its chief ally, but since then had found no new ally to take France's place. Britain, therefore, could only toil at its own defense, not turn the tide back on occupied Europe, keeping its fighter planes close above its ports and cities, beating back German bombers as best they could.

The battle for western Europe was over, and the Axis had won. The battle for the world now pivoted on the Suez Canal and the sphere that orbited it, about two thousand miles in circumference. Where there weren't actual battles being fought, nearly every land within that circle struggled and strained in spring 1941 — whether from propaganda wars or fierce internal debates about fascism versus antifascism (more on that below) — or was weighing its ability to maintain its neutrality in this viper pit. The circle included Greece, Turkey, and Mediterranean islands like Crete and Malta; Egypt, Italian Libya, and Sudan; the Red Sea and the lands adjoining it; and the Levantine lands of Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, as well as Iraq and other lands.

The main prize in this fight was the Suez Canal itself, a choke point of world trade and Europe's gateway to India and points east. If the Axis could control the Canal and the Red Sea shipping lanes beyond, it would control a huge fraction of the world's shipping, police access to the Mediterranean, and halt its enemies' troop and logistical movements. The other main prize in this circle was neutral Turkey. If the Axis surrounded Turkey, it could force the nation into its fold and win its vital rail lines and Black Sea gateways.

In early spring 1941, therefore, the Axis and the Allies were battling all around this ring of fire. The Germans were blitzing and bombing their way across Greece and Yugoslavia despite the efforts of brave resisters. (The experiences of Royal Air Force pilot Roald Dahl will offer a glimpse of those desperate efforts in the pages to come.) The British and their allies, meanwhile, were fighting a seesaw desert war with the Italians and the newly arrived German Afrika Korps on the Egypt-Libya frontier. The Indian Army was fighting a brutal peak-to-peak battle against dugin, veteran Italian forces on the fringe of the Red Sea. And Crete, an island of great tactical importance, was about to be overrun by German paratroopers.

But on the eve of the Iraq-Syria crisis there were other battles, less bloody but no less critical, between fascist and antifascist forces across the region. These were contests in the political or moral spheres between those who sided with the Allies, often called the Democracies, and those who sided with the fascist powers. These debates extended from the lands of northwestern Africa, the colonies of defeated France, now under the sway of the collaborationist Vichy regime, all the way across northern Africa through Italian Libya, British-occupied Egypt, through the Middle East to the neutral countries of Afghanistan and Iran, and into British-dominated India. The question of which side countries should support was mixed up with the question of how to free themselves from European domination or meddling. Nationalist leaders asked themselves whether their countries should adopt fascism, with all of its apparent vigor, or whether they should throw their lot in with the antifascists and strive for liberal democracy.

In retrospect it might seem that the choice should've been obvious: fight fascism and all of its evils. But that meant asking peoples who did not enjoy democracy — peoples whose freedom in any real sense had been denied by colonizers or meddlers — to fight for other people's democracies, and then hope that democracy was eventually extended to themselves. Besides, sources suggest that few people in those lands were well informed about the wider implications of fascist terrors like Kristallnacht or the early signs of the imminent Final Solution. It was far easier to see the Germans, who held no colonies in that broad region, as simply the enemies of their enemies — the British and French interlopers. The Germans, furthermore, were adding triumph to triumph by spring 1941, and had long courted public opinion across North Africa, the Middle East, and beyond through their propaganda channels and embassies, a fact exemplified in this book by the figure of German consular agent Fritz Grobba, envoy to Iraq. At the same time, Grobba's foil in this book, British Middle East emissary Freya Stark, lamented that British efforts at winning hearts and minds had been neglectful at best, and bullying at worst, in the region.

Debates about fascism versus antifascism extended well beyond this ring centered on Suez. Fascism was seductive, and before history revealed its genocidal nucleus to any with eyes to see, there were many — and many prominent — people taken by its simple, singular idea of power, the singular ruler, and the singular race. This went even for Britain, which was leading the fight against fascism in spring 1941, where there were infamous figures like the black-shirted Oswald Mosley, placed under house arrest during the fall of France, and press magnate Lord Rothermere, who peddled appeasement in the papers he owned and encouraged Adolf Hitler in his personal correspondence with the dictator before the war. These were notorious cases, but they represented a much broader, amorphous base of those attracted to fascism's antilabor and anti-Jewish currents.

George Orwell — a prescient observer if ever there was one — thought it possible, even after Churchill rallied the nation to keep up the fight, that the British public might still support a snap election to replace Churchill's coalition in spring 1940. As a journalist speaking with and observing his fellow Englishmen, Orwell sensed that working people who did not feel represented by the Westminster elite already felt subordinated, so why would it matter if a fascist new order swept away the plutocratic in Britain? Orwell asked an influential newspaper editor whether he thought the public would accept negotiations with the Axis. "Hells bells," the man replied, "I could dress it up so that they'd think it was the greatest victory in the history of the world." And amid an upper class whom he sensed already leaned toward authoritarianism, Orwell felt an unspoken, perhaps unconscious, hope that Britain would lose and so end the liberal democratic experiment with all of its noise, disorder, and labor sympathy.

In the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt was doing his best to outmaneuver isolationists in Congress and coax along a public that had no taste for what appeared to be a European matter and the concern of the unpopular British Empire. Two out of three American voters wanted no part in a war with Germany in the spring of 1940 — even if Britain's life were at stake. So Roosevelt negotiated with Congress to win what concessions he could, to at least make the United States "the arsenal of democracy," by supplying some old warships to Britain in fall 1940, and winning the Lend-Lease Act, which started sending munitions across the Atlantic in 1941. In the United States there were many eager to fight the fascists, but there were also those who excused or even welcomed German warmaking. They said that Hitler was misunderstood, simply recovering Germany's World War I losses, or was a righteous champion against what they called Bolshevism or the "Asiatic" assault on "pure" Anglo-Saxon blood. The profascist radio giant Father Charles Coughlin, whose shows had audiences of many millions, praised fascist Germany and Italy and openly hoped for the defeat of Britain. Influential anti-Semites like Henry Ford and Anglo-Saxon racial supremacists in America First and the Silver Legion of America believed that Hitler was a much-needed corrective to an imagined global Jewish conspiracy and the expansion of the Bolshevik/Slavic horde. Jack Hasey, on the other hand, a young American who appears later in this book, was quite decidedly ready to fight the fascists. And while his compatriots stood by, he was battling for his life against fascist armies.

So the titanic brawl between fascism and antifascism wasn't just fought in the battlefield but was contested as a sort of spiritual civil war in most every nation. And this book tells part of that story while it tells about a particular high-stakes campaign in Iraq and the Levant. In those lands, too, there were those who embraced pluralism and democracy, and those who embraced authoritarianism. There were Palestinians who fought alongside the British; Iraqis who looked to Benito Mussolini's Blackshirts as models; Syrians who rallied to de Gaulle and the Free French; and Jews who offered to work for the Germans. And there were members of each of those groups who fought for the opposite side. In this story, the righteousness and choices of individuals get the spotlight, not the righteousness of nations.

Iraq, in particular, had its own struggle over which way to go in a world dividing between fascist and antifascist. And it was this cleavage that triggered the emergency portrayed in this book. In spring 1941, a group of four senior army and air force officers in Iraq, calling themselves the Golden Square, overthrew the government and decided to throw their lot in with the Axis. In part they were motivated by their personal authoritarian political leanings, essentially the idea that the whole country should be operated like an army with them at the top; and in part they were motivated by personal connections to Germans and Germany. They also believed that the Axis — which looked unstoppable — offered the best chance to bolster their position and snuff out long-standing British colonial meddling in the country.

Then, Vichy France agreed to allow Germany to use air bases in Syria and an obscure port in colonial Lebanon to allow the passage of arms to Iraq. Both the Iraqi revolutionaries and their new Axis partners envisioned Iraq being the heart of a new state or federation stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean after the war. While those Iraqis believed the new kingdom would be allied with fascist Germany and Italy, the Axis was sure it would be a mere vassal state.

The Iraqi coup and French-Syrian complicity was a moment of grave danger to the Allied effort in North Africa, with the Iraqi oil supply — critical for the Royal Navy — closed off, the Suez Canal imperiled, staunch British ally Transjordan nearly surrounded, and the Jewish community of Palestine preparing for the worst — and in graver peril than nearly anyone could imagine since the Final Solution would be implemented in the lands that Germany conquered at the end of 1941.

Understanding this danger, and understanding how the Axis nearly established itself in Iraq and the Levant, requires a bit of understanding about North Africa and the Middle East on the eve of World War II. That great swath of the world, running from northwestern Africa to India and beyond, was mostly divided among European colonies; and where Europe did not preside over literal colonies, it oversaw spheres of influence. From the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, the French took possession of vast areas of western and northwestern Africa, including Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, often replacing Ottoman influence there. Tunisia's neighbor Libya was attacked by Italy in 1911, and Mussolini finished its takeover by around 1934. Egypt, other than the Suez Canal Zone and a Royal Navy base at Alexandria, had won a large measure of independence from the British in 1922; but that came to an end with the coming of war, because a treaty with Egypt permitted Britain to reoccupy the country if another power threatened it — and the all-important canal that linked Britain to India. So Cairo became the British Empire's most important headquarters outside London. Northeastern Africa was divided between sparsely populated lands variously split between British and Italian over-lordship. The importance of these were that they harbored air and sea bases from which the rivals could compete for control of the Red Sea lifeline to India and points east.

The Arabian heartland in the Levant had been divided among those who defeated the Ottomans there in World War I. To the British went Iraq Palestine, with little Transjordan given in turn to Britain's World War I ally, Sharif Hussein, and his son Abdullah, a key figure in this story. To the French went Lebanon, with its significant Christian Arab population, and Syria. These were theoretically granted to the British and French by the League of Nations as so-called mandates in return for those empires' "improving and uplifting" them, a civilized fiction meant to put a modern, genteel burnish on the tarnished name of imperialism. In fact, Arab leaders throughout the region who'd long-resented Ottoman dominance dreamed of their own independent nations or a federation of states extending from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf now that the war was over. Meanwhile, British Mandate Palestine saw the growth of a sort of state within a state in the form of the new "Jewish national home" facilitated by British policy. This conflicted with Arab aspirations for their own independent national homes.

East of Iraq was Iran, which had fought ceaselessly to remain free of the Ottoman Empire and now, in the post-Ottoman world, carefully balanced its friendships with world powers to remain so. Iran enjoyed a large oil supply, with accompanying refineries right on the Persian Gulf, located very near Iraq's port of Basra. When World War II broke out, most British oil came from the United States, but the oil refined at Abadan, Iran, was another key source for the Allies. Iran also had a key rail corridor running north to south from the Persian Gulf to the Soviet Union, which later would become a key lifeline in the Soviets' resistance against Germany. The loss of Iranian neutrality to the Axis, perhaps because of an Axis victory in Iraq, would have been a terrible blow to the Allies.

East of Iran was neutral Afghanistan, and while it straddled no oil, it was long eyed with suspicion by the British as a potential staging ground for the invasion of neighboring India. At the beginning of World War II, before Stalin was betrayed by Hitler's Operation Barbarossa in summer 1941, the British feared Soviet meddling in Afghanistan. They would have done better to fear an invasion from an army led by Indian fascist Subhas Chandra Bose, who in spring 1941 was negotiating with the Germans for the financing and arming of just such a force. That story will resume in the pages to come.