By Jeff Burgess © 2001
Numerous ceremonies were held earlier this year to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Persian Gulf War. While watching one of them on television I was impressed with the determination of our British allies to continue the ongoing military campaign to contain Saddam Hussein. It made me so curious that I did some research.
I discovered that Britain's military involvement in the modern Middle East began during the First World War, when they captured much of the region from the Turkish Ottoman Empire. They obtained protectorate status over Iraq after the war and ruled it as a colony and controlled its important oil industry. In 1932 they granted Iraq independence but they retained the right to transport their troops across the country and to operate two Royal Air Force (RAF) airbases there.
Iraqi nationalists, as you might imagine, were unhappy with this arrangement. They were encouraged by the military successes of Hitler in the early years of WWII because German agents were promising to help kick the British out of the Middle East and to prevent the Jews from establishing a nation in Palestine. Subsequently, at the beginning of April, 1941, a military coup in Baghdad put an Iraqi nationalist named Rashid Ali in power and he appealed to the Axis for help. (One of the conspirators was Khairallah Talfah, the uncle that raised Saddam Hussein.) Ali promised the Germans and Italians unrestricted use of all airfields in Iraq for any forces they were willing to send to help fight the British.
Britain's military was already fully engaged in Greece and Africa, but the British knew they could not afford to lose control of Iraq's oil, or to have hostile forces gain a foothold east of Egypt. In mid-April they responded to the coup by landing troops at Iraq's Persian Gulf port of Basra to supposedly assert their right to move troops across Iraq. Some of these troops were airlifted to reinforce the British airfield located at Habbaniya, along the Euphrates River west of Baghdad.
Ali warned the British that no additional troops could enter Iraq until the first batch had moved on. But the British ignored his threat and began landing a large contingent of Indian troops at Basra. Ali responded by sending thousands of Iraqi troops to surround Habbaniya on the night of April 29.
While Iraq had several airfields of its own, the British one at Habbaniya had modern maintenance and repair facilities and plenty of high-octane fuel. If the Iraqis captured it and turned it over to the Germans, Hitler would be firmly established in the region. This was a real possibility, as Habbaniya was isolated by hundreds of miles of desert and had insufficient troops, despite the reinforcements, to protect it from a ground attack. They had 64 operational aircraft but they could only put 39 planes in the air at a time due to a pilot shortage. And most of their aircraft were obsolete biplanes because Habbaniya was a pilot training facility, not a combat base. The surrounding Iraqi troops occupied high ground and had artillery and tanks, while the outnumbered British defenders had none. And the Iraqi air force, which numbered about 70 aircraft, included some modern warplanes.
Despite the unfavorable odds, the RAF launched a surprise air attack against the Iraqi ground forces surrounding Habbaniya on the morning of May 2. It included all of the planes the flying school could put in the air, plus a few Wellington bombers flying from the other British airfield in Iraq, located near Basra, 300 miles away. The RAF's motley collection of planes and pilots from Habbaniya recorded 193 sorties on the first day of their bombing campaign.
The Iraqi ground forces responded with heavy anti-aircraft fire and began shelling the airfield. And the Iraqi air force responded by strafing and bombing Habbaniya and harassing the RAF flights. By the end of the day, 22 RAF planes had been destroyed or damaged beyond use. The non-stop bombing, however, had inflicted heavy losses upon the Iraqi troops and significantly reduced their volume of fire.
Subsequently, on the second day the RAF shifted the focus of its air campaign to the Iraqi airfields. They succeeded in destroying numerous Iraqi planes on the ground and effectiveness of the Iraqi air force quickly declined. On May 6 the Iraqi troops on the escarpment by Habbaniya could not take any more of the RAF's continual bombing and they fled in disorder.
The British at Habbaniya assumed that the worst of their troubles were over, as they knew relief was on the way. But on May 16 several fighters and bombers from Germany's Luftwaffe, painted with Iraqi markings, successfully attacked them. The Germans had flown from occupied Greece, refueled in neighboring Vichy French Syria, and then flown to the Iraqi city of Mosul, where they had made their base.
Hitler, however, was preoccupied with planning his upcoming invasion of the Soviet Union and the warplanes he had sent to Iraq were too little and too late. Despite being attacked by the German planes, a British relief force from Palestine was able to relieve Habbaniya. British troops from Habbaniya and Basra then converged on Baghdad. Mussolini sent a few Italian biplane fighters to help, but Iraqi resistance crumbled in the face of the British advance. Rashid Ali and his supporters gave up and fled the country at the end of May and Iraq surrendered. The German and Italian air units fled Iraq by way of Vichy Syria, they way they had come. (The Allies would subsequently invade Vichy Syria in June.)
It may be that in those dark days of early 1941, when Britain stood alone against the Axis, that the RAF's #4 Flying Training School at Habbaniya stopped the war from being lost before the United States joined the fight. If Hitler had succeeded in gaining a military foothold in Iraq, the British would probably have been driven out of the Middle East and the Mediterranean Sea would have been an Axis lake. The Germans would have had control of the region's oil, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. They could have joined with Muslim nationalists to drive British forces out of Africa and India. And the country of Israel would certainly not exist.
In fact, these things would probably have happened anyway if Hitler had sent most of his Wermacht, especially the Luftwaffe, into the Middle East and North Africa in 1941, instead of invading the Soviet Union. He "cast away the opportunity of taking a great prize for little cost in the Middle East," said Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill. But Hitler was obsessed with the destruction of communism and so the Battle of Habbaniya was an important turning point of the war. We should consider it as Desert Storm #1.
END
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References
Dudgeon, A.G.: Hidden Victory: The Battle of Habbaniya, May 1941, Charleston, Tempus Publishing, 2000.
Lyman, Robert: Iraq 1941: The for Battles Basra, Habbaniya, Fallujah and Baghdad
Raugh, Harold Jr.: Wavell in the Middle East 1939-1941: A Study in Generalship, London, Brassey's, 1993.
Shores, Christopher: Dust Clouds in the Middle East: The Air War for East Africa, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Madagascar, 1940-42, London, Grubb Street, 1996.
Warner, Geoffrey: Iraq and Syria, 1941, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1979.
Winston, Churchill: The Second World War (6 volumes), Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
