The ties that bind

Remembering Imperial adventures in the Levant

This year marks the 85th anniversary of Operation Exporter, the name given to the World War II allied campaign in Lebanon and Syria to defeat the Vichy French and prevent their Germans allies from using Syrian airfields to launch attacks on British forces in Egypt and protect the Suez Canal.

The Vichy – the name given to the French government that collaborated with the occupying Germans – had previously allowed the Germans to conduct aerial attacks from Syria to support Iraq nationalists led by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in May 1941.

The Allies wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen again, and so, on June 8 1941, in a two-pronged attack, British, Australian, Indian and Free French troops advanced into southern Lebanon from Palestine towards Beirut and Damascus, and from Iraq to Tripoli and Palmyra.

In the Lebanese theatre of operations, there was bitter fighting around the Litani River, Damour, Marjayoun and Beirut, but the Vichy army, which included thousands of Lebanese and Syrian soldiers, were eventually defeated on July 12. Two years later, General Catroux, who was appointed to run Lebanon and Syria in the interim, declared Lebanon independent.

Over 1,000 of the allied soldiers who died during the campaign are buried at the Beirut Commonwealth War Cemetery. Every November, on Remembrance Sunday, it is customary for the British and Australian ambassadors to Lebanon, along with other envoys, to gather to pay their respects to the war dead. A mile across town, there is a lone British army grave, its occupant, a tiny player in an arguably bigger drama.

Fifteen years later in October 1956, there was another imperial Middle East adventure, this time given the name Operation Musketeer, but more commonly known as the Suez Crisis, the failed Anglo-French-Israeli plan to overthrow Egyptian president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, after he nationalized the strategic waterway.  

By then the Cold War was in full swing, and once again, the fear that Syrian airfields would be used, this time by the Russians, to join the battle in support of the Egyptian president.

The British Royal Air Force, which had a base in Cyprus, sent a Canberra bomber on a top-secret reconnaissance mission to fly over Lebanon and assess if reports from the US embassy in Damascus, which suggested that over 100 MiG jets were parked in the desert, were true.  

It should’ve been a simple in-and-out operation, but while flying over Lebanon on its way back to Cyprus, the plane was spotted by a frontier post in the eastern Syrian city of Abu Kamal. Soon, three Syrian Air Force jets were scrambled to intercept.

The less-manoeuvrable British plane stood no chance and was quickly shot down over the Bekaa Valley. The two British pilots bailed-out but the observer, Flying Officer Roy Urquhart-Pullen, who was positioned in the belly of the plane, was not so lucky, dying from injuries most likely sustained when exiting the plane with a parachute.

The Canberra crashed in the swampland of Ammiq, where the two surviving crew were set upon by angry Lebanese before being handed over to the local police.

This was a highly embarrassing incident for the British government. The two injured pilots were discreetly repatriated to Cyprus by boat, while Urquart-Pullen was buried with little fuss in the Anglo-American Cemetery, just down from Hotel Dieu Hospital, off the Damascus Road.

Roy Urquart-Pullen lies there today, a few metres from the grave of the MP and former Economy Minister, Basil Fuleihan, and assorted expatriates who never made it home.

In a further twist of fate, his wife Ellen, to whom he had been married for 22 months, joined the British Foreign Office and was posted to Beirut in the 60s. But it wasn’t until 1997, on a separate trip to Lebanon, that she eventually visited her late husband’s grave. “I went alone,” she told me in a phone conversation 15 years ago. “The cemetery was a lovely place but it felt strange,” adding “We’d only been married for 22 months but we were happy for that short time and we had a good life.”

The failure of what the Arab World calls the Tripartite Aggression, marked the beginning of the end of Britain and France’s global influence, while Nasser became a hero to the Arab world.

But it doesn’t quite end there. One of the three Syrian pilots that engaged the Canberra bomber was a certain Lieutenant Hafez el-Assad. And we all know what he went on to do.