It all started in April 1941 when an Iraqi politician named Rashid Ali staged a coup with German support and marched on an RAF training school and air base at Habbaniya, just to the west of Baghdad.

Iraq at that time was, politically, an ally of Britain’s, with an Anglophile royal family. The British had governed under a League of Nations Mandate until 1932, since when there had been a treaty of friendship between the two countries. In addition to providing the British with a crucial stepping stone in their lines of communication between India and Egypt, their two bases in Iraq also protected the oil that flowed from Basra and Kirkuk and which supplied much of Britain’s empire – including, crucially, Britain’s Mediterranean fleet and her army in North Africa. However, opposition to the British grew steadily throughout the 1930s, due in large part to Britain’s support for Jewish immigration into Palestine in the inter-war years. This anti-British sentiment was encouraged by the Germans, and Iraq quickly became a hotbed of Arab resistance. We should also remember that in early 1941, it looked like Britain would lose the war. She was fighting alone. So it was in this context that a group of Arab nationalist army officers known as The Golden Square, encouraged by the Axis powers, overthrew Iraq’s Anglophile government in April 1941. Suddenly, Britain’s access to her crucial oil supplies was threatened.

Your interest in the events at Habbaniya began with your father’s wartime diaries, and you drew heavily on diaries, letters, and personal accounts. How did those personal recollections shape your research, and how much about the battle did they reveal or even contradict the official records?

I discovered these diaries after my father died, and I never got a chance to talk to him about what he did in the war. So, in a sense, writing a story about these events was a way to get to know my father. But in the course of my research, I discovered that there was very little in the way of joined-up history on the episode. There were a number of first-hand accounts (Freya Stark, Somerset de Chair, Tony Dudgeon), and plenty of material in the National Archives, but I quickly discovered that the episode had been deliberately underplayed in the official record. By and large, my father’s diaries – which were written as events unfolded – matched what I found in those other personal records. However, they are unique in that they were written from the perspective of one of the pupil pilots who fought in the battle, and provide a completely new angle that I was unable to find elsewhere.

The defence of RAF Habbaniya has often been described as improbable, even reckless and you have called it ‘World War Two’s Rorke’s Drift’. What was the crucial factor that allowed a small group of pilots flying training aircraft to defeat a significantly larger and better-equipped force?

In my view, there were three crucial factors. First, the foresight and inventiveness of a number of RAF officers who used their own initiative to get the RAF training school and its biplanes ready for action – sometimes in ways that were not approved by officialdom; second, the self-belief of the instructors and pupils themselves that they even stood a chance; and third, the awe in which the British were still held by the Iraqis themselves, who never had the confidence, in the face of a ferocious preemptive assault by the training school, to take what so easily could have been theirs.

The pilots at Habbaniya were mostly instructors and trainees rather than frontline pilots. How did this affect the way the battle was fought?

That’s a good question. I think it undoubtedly affected the attrition in the first few days, as after 24 hours, they had lost a third of their force, and after three days, over half. By May 6th (day 5), the day the siege was broken, they were close to collapse. Although you would expect instructors to be proficient pilots, few had had any recent combat experience.

The book argues that the battle had far greater strategic significance than might have been recognised previously. How do you think the wider war in the Middle East and Mediterranean have unfurled differently should Habbaniya have fallen?

Towards the end of April, the Iraqis cut off the oil pipeline from Kirkuk to Haifa. If they had managed to capture the RAF station at Habbaniya, the Luftwaffe would have been able to use it as a base to attack Basra (where Britain’s other base was located) and so choke off the sea-borne tanker route, as well as block or at least delay British reinforcements from India bound for Egypt. Without oil from the east, General Wavell would have had to rely on oil shipped from the west, via the Mediterranean. It is questionable in these circumstances whether he would have been able to survive Rommel’s assault, and it is likely that Egypt would have fallen. How would that have affected American public opinion? And would Germany have still felt the need to declare war on the United States after Pearl Harbour, with a weakened Britain cut off from its empire? That, of course, is a stretch. But even supposing the US still joined Britain in the war against the Nazis, the loss of Egypt would have meant that the Allied advance up the Italian peninsula would not have been possible, and D-Day would have met much stiffer opposition.

In terms of the German-backed coup Iraqi forces, how much of their perspective on the events of May 1941 is documented and understood?

There is quite a lot understood of the political situation from the Iraqi perspective, and the rise of Iraqi nationalism throughout the 1930s, quite a bit of which was recorded by the Germans. However, there is very little written from the Iraqi perspective about the Anglo-Iraqi War itself. The one crucial element we do know is that the Iraqi generals did not make the case to their own men about their intentions towards RAF Habbaniya. The Iraqi troops believed they were on a training exercise.

You also describe the campaign as one of the most underreported episodes of the Second World War. Why do you think the story slipped through the cracks of popular and official histories?

The official histories downplayed the episode for two reasons. First, because Britain still relied heavily on Arab acquiescence and goodwill to be able to maintain their power in Egypt and the Middle East, both during the war and after. A crushing victory against the Iraqis was not something the British wanted to shout about. Second, the official history was written from the Army’s perspective, and the story was just as much about the RAF’s incredible bravery and initiative as it was about the Army’s – and in particular Wavell’s – lack of foresight. So most of the credit for restoring the situation went to the Army’s relief column, which arrived late in the day and after the siege had been broken. Yes, they subsequently marched on Baghdad and put to flight a vastly superior Iraqi force, but in the official history, they conveniently overlooked the fact that it was an RAF training school, with little help from Wavell, that had made it possible. Subsequently, popular historians have followed the official line that this was a ‘sideshow.’ To paraphrase Churchill – some sideshow!

And what are the projects that are occupying you now? More untold epics of less well-known theatres of war, or a particular area of research?

I am primarily a fiction writer, so my current project is to turn The Big Little War into historical fiction. The story is so incredible that it almost writes itself. Thereafter, I hope to expand it into a series of historical novels covering little-known World War Two war stories. Watch this space!