Howard Gerrard

Heroic description of the struggle of the Iraqi people against war criminal ChurcHitler and his murderous petroleum company cabal…. Oh, wait; wrong war.


In 1941 the Iraqi government changed for the worse (as far as the UK was concerned). Iraq had sort of a strange setup; nominally independent (there was a German Embassy in Baghdad) but “protected” by Great Britain. Four Iraqi colonels (“The Golden Square”) decided they had enough of British quasi-occupation and staged a coup. Iraqi army units occupied a plateau overlooking the RAF base at Habbaniya and sent word that because they wear conducting a live fire training exercise, no airplanes could take off and no one could leave. Since the base only had 12 days of rations, it couldn’t withstand much of a siege.


The base had a couple of companies of “local levies” (which turned out to be surprisingly effective since they were composed of Assyrian Christians and Kurds and therefore had no love for the rest of Iraq). In the meantime, Britain was scraping the bottom the barrel to find units to send to Iraq. A couple of Indian Army brigades were landed at Basra, which surrendered without a fight, a “mobile” force quipped with home-made armored cars and a fleet of city buses and trucks leased in Palestine started eastward across the desert, and some Wellingtons and Blenheims flew in from Egypt.


The Habbaniya base was a training center a flew a miscellaneous assortment of aircraft, including Gladiators, Audaxes, Harts, Oxfords, and the notorious Vickers Valentia, credited with avoiding air attacks by being so slow that opponents inevitably overshot.


Habbaniya gathered an assortment of bombs for its aircraft and proceeded to pummel the Iraqi besiegers. Some Royal Hellenic Airforce pilots there for training were more than happy to chip in. The base also discovered that the two WWI 18-pounders that were used as war memorials in front of the administration building had never been demilitarized, and after liberal application of paint stripper and a shipment of 18-pounder shells flown in on cargo planes from Basra they were brought into action (for disinformation, the British released news reports that the artillery had been transported on specially equipped aircraft).


In the meantime, the Germans quickly did a deal with the Vichy government in Syria and staged some Me-110s and He-111s to northern Iraq. These were surprisingly ineffective; you would think the rag-tag desert column would have been easy prey but there were only four vehicles destroyed, one man killed, and few more wounded. The trek across the desert ended anticlimactically, because the base had already raised the siege through its own efforts. The Golden Square collapsed and Iraq went back to being a rear area.


This is the usual Osprey Campaign book; a relatively slim paperback with nice color paintings and good maps; a more than adequate account of a side show to the Big Show. These tend to be pricey for their volume, but I got mine for half price off a remainder shelf.
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A workmanlike account of the campaign which does not sugar-coat the mistakes that Douglas MacArthur committed in his defense of the archipeligo. Where I mark down the book is that some of sources given are kind of weak or even obsolete by the standards of the 2012 date of publication; there is no mention of William Bartsch's books on the Army Air Force's role in the campaign, no mention of John Whitman's "Bataan" (still about the best account of the ground war), no mention of H.P. Willmott's strategic overview of the campaign and no mention of D. Clayton James' biography of MacArthur.… (more)