I first came across the name Habbaniya as a 14-year-old schoolboy. I can remember surreptitiously leafing through the pages of a tattered, hard-cover diary inscribed ‘India – Iraq 1939-42’. My father’s handwriting was barely decipherable, but the entry headlined ‘Habbaniya, May 2nd, 1941’ was every bit as gripping as my current bedtime reading, Biggles Goes East. Every other page was pinned or clipped with maps, photographs, letters and press clippings.
It sounded thrilling: “War! I went up at sunrise in the back of Broadhurst’s Audax, without a parachute like a fool.”
What was an Audax? I was determined to find out.
The diaries came in three volumes and had lain gathering dust for years. My father, who had recently died, had had what his contemporaries called a ‘good war’, and he had the medals to prove it. The diaries covered multiple well-known theatres – the North West Frontier, Burma, Egypt and the Rhine – plus one that was little known to the schoolboy historian, a place called Habbaniya, in Iraq. What I read about it, and in particular a series of twenty-eight diary entries that covered May 2nd-31st 1941, was astonishing. I could find very little in the history books, nor did any of his medals reference Iraq. My history teacher shrugged his shoulders. These were the days before Google. I drew a blank. The diaries went back on the shelf. I returned to Biggles.
Perhaps that was where they would have stayed, had it not been for a news article many years later that described Coalition forces coming across a desecrated British war cemetery in the aftermath of the First Iraq War in what was then known as Camp Habbaniya. Under the rubble, and the weeds, and the smashed headstones, lay the bones and ashes of over a hundred British aircrew and army personnel who had been killed at the RAF station there in May 1941. I recognised two of them – Ian Pringle and Pete Gillespy – as names which cropped up on practically every page of my father’s diary entries between January and May 1941. Hooked once more, I retrieved the diaries from their shelf and began to read them in earnest. With the arrival of the internet, research material was a bit more plentiful than it had been when I was a teenager. But what I discovered was no less amazing.
Habbaniya airfield in Iraq, 1941
It all started in April 1941 when an Iraqi politician named Rashid Ali staged a coup with German support and marched on the RAF training base at Habbaniya. Iraq at that time was an ally of Britain, providing the British with a crucial stepping stone in their lines of communication between India and Egypt. Furthermore, most of the oil that the Empire ran on – including, crucially, Britain’s Mediterranean fleet and her army in North Africa – was sourced out of Kirkuk and Basra. Habbaniya had been chosen by the RAF as a place to train fledgling pilots – including Roald Dahl – on the basis that it was safe, far from the front line. Nothing, supposedly, ever happened there.
The timing could not have been worse for the British. In early 1941 they were fighting alone against the Nazis. To the east and north, they faced a pincer movement which threatened Egypt and the Suez Canal. General Wavell, C-in-C Middle East, who was responsible for defending over a million square miles with, initially, just 100,000 troops, had had some early successes against the Italians in Operation Compass in Libya over the winter of 1940/41, and for a while, he was hailed a hero in the British press. But the honeymoon was short-lived. In February Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps landed in Tripoli, and before long Wavell had ceded the bulk of the territories he had won from the Italians, his army forced back to the borders of Egypt.
Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean, the Germans had begun building up forces in Romania and threatening Greece, and in March 1941, at the behest of Churchill, 50,000 of Wavell’s troops – troops which could barely be spared in the face of Rommel’s advance – were sent to aid the Greeks. To add to his pressures, Wavell was also fighting on a third front: to the south, in Ethiopia, his forces were still battling the Italians.
This was the situation at the end of March 1941. In early April, it suddenly, and dramatically worsened. On 6th April two British generals, Neame and O’Connor, were captured by a German patrol in the Western Desert. On the same day, the Germans launched their invasion of Greece and the Greek army fell back, forcing the British expeditionary force onto the defensive. In little over a week, they were having to evacuate by sea. On 11th April, Rommel began the siege of Tobruk.
Into this maelstrom, while fighting desperately on multiple fronts, Wavell was confronted by a further crisis: Iraq. In addition to marching on RAF Habbaniya and threatening Wavell’s lines of communication with India, Rashid Ali had also cut the oil pipeline from Kirkuk to Haifa. All the British had in theatre to resist the Iraqis was a ragbag of superannuated old biplanes and training aircraft. The flying school there could muster just 39 pilots – instructors and pupils – and some threadbare infantry elements, mostly Assyrian camp guards. It amounted to a very ‘thin red line.’ To make matters worse, rumours were reaching Wavell and the War Cabinet in London that preparations were underway to send Luftwaffe units to reinforce the Iraqis via Vichy French-held Syria.
The scene, then, was set for one of the most remarkable battles of the Second World War which, had it been lost, would likely have crippled Britain’s power in the Middle East. If Iraq and its access to the Persian oil fields had fallen to the Germans, Syria would not have been far behind, and Wavell could hardly have held out in Egypt. If Egypt and the Suez Canal had fallen, how could Britain have carried on, and how would American public opinion have reacted? Even if she had struggled on until Pearl Harbor and the Americans had joined in the war against the Nazis, the advance up the Italian peninsula would not have been possible. Without it, the D-Day landings would have faced much stiffer opposition.
As I soon discovered, of all the battles of the 20th century, there has never been a more underreported campaign that had such strategic significance. There was also a very good reason why I had been unable to find an Iraq medal amongst my father’s collection – no campaign medals had ever been awarded to the trainee pilots and crews who saw most of the action, despite a casualty rate of over thirty per cent. Why was this, and why had the official history glossed over the episode? The Big Little War seeks to answer those questions, as well as to finally shed light on an incredible story of heroism and ingenuity in the face of seemingly impossible odds that, had it failed, could have altered the course of the war.
James Dunford Wood is the author of The Big Little War: The Incredible Story of How 39 Pilots From an RAF Flying School Changed the Course of WW2.
