At the height of World War II, while the Germans were setting their sights on Moscow, Free French, British and Australian forces launched an assault on the Vichy French army in the Middle East on 8th June 1941. This joint initiative of Churchill and de Gaulle - codename "Operation Exporter" - led to one of the most shocking conflicts of World War II. Was this an attempt by the Allied forces to cause mass desertions from the Vichy forces to the Free French? Or were Churchill and de Gaulle motivated to reassert their respective control of the Middle East? The fight caused the loss of 10,000 lives, numerous ships and an estimated 200 aircraft. The Australian forces, under the command of Lieutenant General John Lavarack, carried out the bulk of the fighting and suffered the most casualties. The Vichy Army was overcome, but even during the bitter campaign, the Free French airmen refused to fire on their Vichy compatriots. Henri de Wailly here presents the story of this extraordinary campaign by the British, Australian and Free French forces against Vichy French forces in Syria and Lebanon, the true extent of which has largely been forgotten.

An “almost absurdly colorful” history of the WWII battle for the Levant: “In places . . . the material is like Casablanca meets The English Patient” (The Wall Street Journal). In the spring of 1941, the Allied forces had one last hope: that the Axis would run through its fuel supply. In Blood, Oil and the Axis, historian John Broich tells the vital story of Iraq and the Levant during this most pivotal time of the war. Four Iraqi generals staged a pro-German coup in Iraq, they established military cooperation between the Axis and the Middle East. The Allies responded with an improvised and unlikely coalition: Palestinian and Jordanian Arabs, Australians, American and British soldiers, Free French Foreign Legionnaires, and Jewish Palestinians. All shared a common desire to quash the formation of an Axis state in the region. Taking readers from a bombed-out Fallujah, to Baghdad, to Damascus, this definitive chronicle features numerous memorable figures, including Jack Hasey, a young American who fought with the Free French Foreign Legion; Freya Stark, a famous travel-writer-turned-government-agent; and even Roald Dahl, a young Royal Air Force recruit and future author of beloved children’s books.

On October 28, 1940, the Italian army under Benito Mussolini invaded Greece. The British had insisted on guaranteeing Greek and Turkish neutrality, despite the fact that Greece was never more than a limited campaign in an unlimited war as far as they were concerned. The British, however, were never quite sure that Greece was not their last foothold in Europe, and they harbored dreams of holding on to this last bastion of civilization and of protecting it with a diplomatic and military alliance—a Balkan bloc. These dreams bore little relation to military and economic realities, and so the stage was set for tragedy. In Diary of a Disaster, Robin Higham details the unfolding events from the invasion, though the Italian defeat and the subsequent German invasion, until the British evacuation at the end of April 1941. The Greek army, while tough, was small and based largely upon reserves. They were also largely equipped with obsolete French, Polish, and Czech arms for which there was now no other source than captured Italian materiel. Transportation was also lacking as Greece lacked all-weather roads over much of the country, had no all-weather airport, and only one rail line connecting Athens with Salonika and Florina in the north. Added to the woes of the Greek military, the British commander-in-chief for the Middle East, Sir Archibald Wavell, faced huge logistical challenges as well. Based in Cairo, he was responsible for a huge theatre of operation, from hostile Vichy French forces in Syria to the Boers in South Africa nearly six thousand miles away. His air force was comprised of only a handful of modern aircraft with biplanes and outdated, early monoplanes making up the bulk of his force. Radar was also unavailable to him. His navy was woefully short on destroyers and often incommunicado while at sea. While Wavell had roughly 500,000 men under his command, he was severely limited in how he could use them. The South Africans could only be deployed in East Africa and the Austrians and New Zealanders could not be employed without the consent of their home governments. In short, Churchill had instructed Wavell to offer support that he did not really have and could not afford to give to the Greeks. Higham walks readers through these events as they unfold like a modern Greek tragedy. Using the format of a diary, he recounts day-by-day the British efforts though the failure of Operation Lustre, which no one outside of London thought had any chance of stemming the Nazi tide in Greece.

Jonathan Fennell captures for the first time the true wartime experience of the ordinary soldiers from across the empire who made up the British and Commonwealth armies. He analyses why the great battles were won and lost and how the men that fought went on to change the world.

Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 is widely regarded as irrational to the point of suicidal. How could Japan hope to survive a war with, much less defeat, an enemy possessing an invulnerable homeland and an industrial base 10 times that of Japan? The Pacific War was one that Japan was always going to lose, so how does one explain Tokyo’s decision? Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? Did they have a concept of victory, or at least of avoiding defeat? Or did the Japanese prefer a lost war to an unacceptable peace? Dr. Jeffrey Record takes a fresh look at Japan’s decision for war, and concludes that it was dictated by Japanese pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by the United States. He believes that Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, but argues that the road to war in 1941 was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations and that both sides suffered from cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Record finds that the Americans underestimated the role of fear and honor in Japanese calculations and overestimated the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a deterrent to war, whereas the Japanese underestimated the cohesion and resolve of an aroused American society and overestimated their own martial prowess as a means of defeating U.S. material superiority. He believes that the failure of deterrence was mutual, and that the descent of the United States and Japan into war contains lessons of great and continuing relevance to American foreign policy and defense decision-makers.

A detailed study of the Syrian and Lebanon campaign of World War II. In June 1941, Australian, British, Indian and Free French forces invaded the Vichy French-controlled mandate of Syria and Lebanon. They faced an enemy that had more artillery, tanks and aircraft. They fought in rocky, mountainous terrain, through barren valleys and across swollen rivers, and soon after the initial advance faced a powerful Vichy French counter-attack on key strategic positions. Despite these difficulties, the Allies prevailed, and in doing so ensured that the territory did not fall into German or pro-German hands, and thus provide a springboard from which Axis forces could attack British oil interests in Iraq, the key territory of Palestine or the Suez Canal. This book examines the high military and political strategy that lay behind the campaign, as well as the experiences and hardships as endured by the men on the ground. The battles in Syria and Lebanon were complex actions, often at the battalion level or below, and this work uses extensive war diaries and available records to make sense of the actions and examine how they affected the wider campaign.