“In this ancient land of the horseman, the commanders found they were in no position to reject such a time-honoured way of war.”

By Jonathan Washington

OPERATION EXPORTER, the Allied invasion of Vichy-held Syria (present-day Lebanon) began at midnight on June 8, 1941. 

It was an act of desperation launched because Britain’s vital Suez artery had to be saved. The Vichy French presence in the region posed a threat. With Rommel driving into Egypt from the west, and Greece, including Crete, having just fallen to the Germans, Britain’s dwindling Mediterranean foothold was being lethally squeezed. An Axis attack from Syria at that moment might prove catastrophic. 

The only thing that protected Britain’s Eastern flank was Palestine; it too was under the gun. With the fall of France, the newly incarnated “Vichy” regime controlled a sizeable empire, much of it was readily accessible to Germany. This included Syria and modern-day Lebanon (collectively referred to simply as “Syria”). A single Vichy thrust from there could sweep across Palestine almost unopposed and reach Suez in just a few days. When reports emerged that German aircraft had been spotted landing in Syria, Churchill realized the time for action had come; Vichy Syria had to be taken out. 

The problem for Archibald Wavell, Britain’s CIC Middle East, was that the prime minister hadn’t provided him enough troops to attack Vichy Syria. Most available forces had been positioned in North Africa, Greece, Crete and elsewhere. 

But the clock was ticking. Syria had to be seized before the Germans could flood it with men and materiel. As it stood, the Vichy French were more than capable of defending themselves. Some 40,000 men defended Syria with plenty of artillery and 90 medium tanks. Wavell’s generals tasked with the assault — Henry Maitland-Wilson and John Laverack — had less to work with: three repurposed Australian infantry brigades from Africa and the Bren carriers of the Australian 6th Divisional cavalry regiment. Backing these forces up were just three light tanks. The operation seemed quixotic. 

What was more, the terrain was rugged and mountainous with only three valley routes in.

The planners easily envisioned isolated infantry columns in steep valleys, their flanks vulnerable to ambush. The Bren carriers simply couldn’t manage the ground. It was too steep and heavily bouldered. What’s more, the rocky contours of the land disrupted the line-of-sight required for the No.11 radio sets.

There was however an unlikely force available, and one that would thrive in such an environment: Cavalry. Maitland-Wilson and Laverack did have at their disposal units like the 5th Cavalry Brigade, made up of the Cheshire Yeomanry, the Yorkshire Dragoons and the North Somerset Yeomanry.  

Antiquated and obsolescent in the era of tanks and armoured cars, the units were manned by both genuine countrymen — like Grand National winner Bruce Hobbs — along with amateur horsemen, many of whom joined the yeomanry in early 1939 to avoid getting conscripted into the infantry. Such ‘volunteers’ reasonably but wrongly assumed that the yeomanry would be mechanized before being sent off to war. As part-time soldiers for the summer of 1939, they’d averaged around 20 days of training before being mobilized in September. This covered all their horsemanship training, as well as their soldiering.

There was more wrong with territorial cavalry at the start of the war though than just the simple lack of training. There was the condition of the horses, many of the animals, which had been arbitrarily commandeered from Britain’s surprised rural community by civil servants, were simply too old for active service. 

Despite the liabilities, by early 1940 the regiments found themselves on their way to the Mediterranean. They travelled in an ill-assortment of 24 trains transporting both men and horses across France. Conditions at the embarkation point in Marseille, which were so bad that several horses froze to death, led the incensed troops to go on a rum-fuelled rampage, burning everything in the camp, save their tents. Indeed, the entire deployment to the Holy Land had “chaos” written all over it. The yeomanry seemed a liability, albeit an ancient one.

Yet a year and a half later, the fate of the British position in the Middle East hinged on these same mounted units. As dawn broke over Operation Exporter, soldiers and chargers (specifically of the Cheshire Yeomanry) were leading the way.

The point man of each cavalry patrol nervously clutched his unsheathed sabre, the blade blackened, and so too the stirrups, bridle-bits and anything else that might shine. Those behind him moved equally carefully; the second man in each patrol rode with his bolt-action rifle at the ready. If contact with an enemy sentry or foxhole was made, these two at the front of the column would engage the enemy giving time for the rest of the section to dismount, cock, aim and fire their rifles. The column’s machine gunners would take a moment longer to get their weapons into action.

Soon, commanders had committed all of the mounted regiments to the operation.

In one engagement,  squadron-sized detachment of the Yorkshire Dragoons had fought an hour-long running battle with a force of French Druze cavalry, nearly double its size – and had come within an ace of being outflanked and destroyed. Yeomen had fought off aircraft, they had gone into assaults alongside light tanks and Bren carriers, with mounted and dismounted sections advancing to contact. They were in every sense versatile. But they were also an anachronism.

Indeed, the ancient yeomanry on their horses proved themselves to be a highly mobile force, one that was armed with the same weapons as the infantry did. But they could move further and faster over the broken ground than ordinary foot soldiers could ever hope to. The speed with which they could move (or carry messages) was pivotal in the mountains and valleys where radio communications were spotty.

Despite its suitability for the campaign, the Exporter force was also under constant threat of enemy air attack. As a precaution, they spread out; three-quarters of the Cheshire Yeomanry covered a footprint of a full five miles. They needed to. Fighting off strafing Vichy aircraft would be commonplace. Sometimes firepower did it alone. More often, the mounted troops simply melted into the trees. On one occasion a patrol was caught out by an aircraft on a hill-side. The corporal in charge moved his team along the front of the hill until they had a sheer cliff behind them. This forced the diving aircraft to pull up and bank away. While it circled to line up its next strafing run, the patrol galloped pell-mell down the hill track into cover. 

Dealing with enemy machine gun positions was more of a straightforward matter. When approaching a remote village or possible enemy position, flank guards from the point troop would dismount, as would the troop’s Hotchkiss gun section. These would cover the target from a higher elevation. One section would then loop round to the rear to cut any telegraph wires, and the main body of the troop would then enter and clear the area. 

Such procedures did not prevent a number of fierce battles in these remote villages on the flanks of Allied columns, but they were fought out on the Yeomanry’s terms, and fought successfully. The cavalry could then make up lost time by penetrating ground inaccessible to vehicles much faster than infantry. Nor could the rest of the Allies do what the Yeomanry could do at the formidable river Litani, with its sweeping current and sheer cliff sides. They advanced to contact, swam the fast-flowing river, then climbed the steep slope on the other side, then reformed and began the next phase.

When the Australian 2/3rd machine-gun battalion raced to the River Jordan to cut off the crossing points, they found cavalry patrols from the Yorkshire Dragoons were already there. In fact, by the end of the campaign, the yeomanry ranks were joined by mechanized Australian troops who had given up their Bren carriers and mounted themselves upon captured French horses. In this ancient land of the horseman, the commanders found they were in no position to reject such a time-honoured way of war. After all, they had been training in and patrolling northern Palestine for over a year.

The cavalry division that arrived in Palestine in January 1940 (with 7,800 horses), had done a great deal of its training on the plain of Esdraelon, where many an ancient battle was fought, and where the clash of forces at for Armageddon has been foretold.

It is perhaps no surprise that Churchill was furious when he found out about the mounted division’s existence. He expressly ordered that the division be broken up and re-roled. However, this order was repeatedly disobeyed – the only remaining brigade of cavalry left in June 1941 had been moved then re-named in order to administratively conceal it. Fortunate for Generals Wilson and Laverack that they were.

Jonathan Washington is the author of Fighting Vichy from Horseback: British Mounted Cavalry in Action, Syria 1941. He read History at the university of St. Andrews then worked in publishing in the U.K. and in Beirut. He was a teacher for 12 years and now works in corporate learning and development. The most valuable part of his education was as a part-time Yeomanry soldier himself