Most Australians who served in the Middle East spent time in Syria and Lebanon, or ‘Syria’ as they tended to call the two. As all three Australian divisions were stationed there at various times between mid-1941 and mid-1942, the number was probably in excess of 50 000. Some stayed there forever, killed in the short, bloody and purposely downplayed campaign of June and July 1941. The League of Nations had given France a mandate to occupy Syria and Lebanon in the early 1920s and, despite strong demands for independence, the mandate still held when France fell in 1940. Vichy forces, sympathetic to the Nazis, subsequently took control in the area. The population was more than three million, three-quarters of them in Syria, and most of them Arabic and Muslim.

The Campaign

As in the Libyan campaign of January and February 1941, an Australian division was the core of the invasion force sent into Syria in June 1941. This time it was the 7th, in its first campaign as a formation. It would fight alongside British, Indian and Free French troops. The campaign was initiated after the British Government heard the worrying news that German aircraft had staged in Vichy-held Syria in May while seeking to interfere in British operations in Iraq. Moreover, with Free French leaders urging that they could swiftly topple the Vichy regime in Syria, Churchill insisted that Wavell send a force to accompany the Free French, who constituted the equivalent of an ill-equipped brigade. Gavin Long summarises the Allied forces as ‘9 good Australian, Indian and British battalions, and 6 Free French battalions of doubtful quality’, against eighteen good Vichy French battalions.