![]() Each had a powerful mind, with a proclivity for unorthodox solutions tempered by common sense. Both realized they were fighting a world conflict, one that required difficult strategic choices. Each was an author and historian, and each prided himself on his prodigious memory and command of detail. ![]() Each was a veteran of the Boer War and World War I, in which Wavell had lost an eye. Why this should be so is puzzling at first glance. In fact, by the spring of 1941, the relationship between “Archie” Wavell and Churchill had settled into one of fragile antipathy. ![]() This change did not come as good news to Britain’s harassed Middle East commander in chief, General Sir Archibald Wavell. In Churchill’s mind, the time for patient diplomacy had passed. If Britain’s position in the Middle East unraveled, Churchill’s Mediterranean strategy would collapse. Churchill feared that an Iraq in the hands of Rashid Ali and the Golden Square, working with the Axis Armistice Commission in Syria and a very active Italian legation in Baghdad, would promote mischief in Iran and in the Vichy-dominated Levant. Basra especially, in Churchill’s mind, offered a strategic base of key importance, “in view of the undoubted Eastern trend of the war.” More important, pipelines running from the Kirkuk oil fields in northern Iraq to Haifa fueled Britain’s war machine. It severed the vital air link, and a supplemental land route, between India and the eastern Mediterranean. The coup in Baghdad threatened British interests for at least three reasons. Their drive to the Egyptian frontier had left thirty-six thousand British troops marooned at Tobruk. Furthermore, Erwin Rommel had launched a surprise March attack into Cyrenaica with a reinforced German division and four divisions from Italy. The British were heavily invested in a campaign to drive Italian forces from East Africa. ![]() In the first week of April, German forces had thundered through Yugoslavia and into Greece, forcing the British to coordinate the evacuation of three divisions and an armored brigade from Greece as well as prepare Crete’s defenses to withstand an imminent German airborne invasion, predicted by Ultra intelligence. #Ibomber defense great britain full#The last thing that Churchill wanted in the spring of 1941 was an unstable Iraq, at the very moment his hands were full with other genuine crises. ![]() Coups directed against prime ministers had been a recurrent, even predictable feature of Iraqi politics since 1936, but this one directed at the regent constituted a first. On April 1, 1941, the Golden Square sent the regent packing. The government of Iraq’s four-year-old King Faisal II, directed by his uncle Abd al-Ilah, who served as regent, was pro-British but feeble. The grand mufti had been welcomed by Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Kailani, a lawyer, Arab nationalist, and founder of the Hizb al-Ikha, or Brotherhood Party, and the leaders of the “Golden Square,” a clique of Pan-Arabic colonels who acted as self-appointed arbiters of Iraqi politics. Since October 1939, Baghdad had become the residence of the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husaini, a charismatic, soft-spoken, blue-eyed, Jew-baiting archenemy of British policy in Palestine and a colleague of Heinrich Himmler. When the British prime minister ordered an invasion of Iraq in 1941, it was neither the first nor last time a Western power meddled in Mesopotamian affairs.īritish Prime Minister Winston Churchill had many compelling arguments for invading Iraq in May 1941, several of which today seem remarkably contemporary. Churchill’s Counterfeit Nation | HistoryNet Close ![]()
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