Read an Excerpt
Marine Corps Tank Battles in the Middle East
By Oscar E. Gilbert Casemate Publishing
Copyright © 2015 Oscar E. Gilbert
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2506-5
CHAPTER 1
A Brutally Complex World
God does not change what is in a people, until they change what is in themselves. — The Koran, Chapter 13, verse 11
This is not a story of religious wars. Rather it is the story of one country spending treasure and the lives of its citizens to hold together the remaining bits of broken empires. It is fashionable to see the troubles of the Middle East and beyond solely as a struggle between the forces of militant Islam and more secular Western cultures. Make no mistake, humans fight savagely over differences of religion. Religious minorities were and are persecuted. However, far more of the conflict that has plagued the Middle East stems from mundane but familiar evils: blind nationalism, greed, and naked ambition.
Much "religious" conflict stems simply from the very human tendency to use religion to justify sordid personal ambitions. We can clearly perceive human faces behind the religious masks of the nationalists of Revolutionary Iran as it backs Hezbollah (Party of God), or the secular tyrant Saddam Hussein's cynical invocation of Qadissayah (the epic battle that determined the path of mainstream Islamic dynastic succession and still divides Sunni from Shia) as a nationalistic rallying cry.
For most of documented Middle Eastern history, religious persecution — when it flared — was largely a local matter. Because of difficulty of travel and communication the flames of any farhud (religious purge) would burn themselves out before reaching the scale of a national or international disaster. In contrast, secular empires, and later national governments, had the means and the abilities to impose long-lasting and thorough persecution.
Iraq, around which most of this story inevitably centers, has had the misfortune to sit at the intersection of many secular empires as well as lie in the path of barbarian invaders from the steppes of Asia for thousands of years. In the modern era since 1918, both Iraq and the surrounding modern states have been a hotbed of intrigues, dynastic struggles, coups, and wars. Even an incomplete history of Iraq alone is beyond the scope of this book.
After the fall of the decadent Abbasid Caliphate (AD 1258), and rule by the Mongols, Tamerlane, and Persia (modern Iran), in the early sixteenth century, Iraq — like most of the Middle East — fell under the rule of the Ottoman Turks. The Ottomans were astute rulers, adopting many of the practices of the Byzantine Empire, successors of the eastern Roman Empire, which they overran in 1453.
They provided for more or less local governance by subdivision into vilayets, or provinces, along ethnic and tribal boundaries. Under the Ottomans modern day Iraq was divided among three vilayets, governed from Mosul (Kurdish), Baghdad (Sunni), and Basra (Shia). Within vilayets, local rule was exercised through family or tribal chieftains acceptable to the locals. The proximity of the powerful Persian Empire helped assure the protection of the Shia minority.
The Ottoman ruler assumed the title of Caliph, but for most of the Empire's life the real power lay with the janissaries and the mameluke. In a legalistic nicety to sidestep the Koran's proscription against Muslim warring upon Muslim, the Ottomans created these classes of warrior slaves from Christian Europe and the Asian steppes, respectively. Eventually those who wielded the weapons wielded the power, and they governed semi-autonomously, the janissaries from Constantinople, the mameluke from Baghdad and Cairo.
The Ottoman military castes were frozen in time and tradition, and between 1826 and 1834 the power of both castes collapsed. As the power of the Caliph also eroded, secular nationalists came to power, culminating in the rise of nationalist factions within the Turkish Army.
Along the fringes of the dying Empire factions struggled for control over land no major power coveted. Between 1902 and 1936 Ibn Saud and Abdul Aziz slowly consolidated the desert kingdom of Arabia. Another obscure bit of desert that was competed for by two empires lay at the extreme western end of the Persian Gulf. Part of the vilayet of Basra, this patch of desert had had few natural resources, but controlled waterborne commerce from the immense Mesopotamian drainage basin, which included the Ottoman Empire's richest regions. Basra was a major port for the haj — the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, and was a producer of pearls. Under the protection of the Royal Navy and the administration of India, this strategic bit of sand, arbitrarily proclaimed the Emirate of Kuwait, became a British protectorate in 1897.
A seismic shift came with the ill-fated Ottoman decision to side with Germany in the Great War. In October 1918 the Ottomans agreed to an armistice with Britain, and their Empire was partitioned into several protectorates that would reshape regional history.
The French assumed mandate responsibility for modern Syria and Lebanon; the British took Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq. The British favored the Hashemite dynasty as hereditary rulers. The Hashem, descendants of The Prophet Mohammed's clan, should have been naturally acceptable, but too many other factors, not least the first stirrings of nationalism and old-fashioned ambition, were at work. Only Abdullah I of Jordan established an enduring Hashemite dynasty. Ruling until his assassination in 1957, his family succession continues today.
In Iraq the British ignored major regional and ethnic partitions and promoted the Sunni minority which dominated only the deserts of the west. They were immediately faced with revolt, and by 1920 fighting had spread throughout the country. The revolts cost the lives of 6,000 Iraqi and 500 British and Indian soldiers. The British eventually established a colonial government in which many of the senior posts were held by the more amenable Sunnis. They also established a second army, the Iraqi Levies, answerable only to the British, consisting of Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and Nestorian Christian refugees from Turkey.
In neighboring Syria the republican-minded French backed the Hashemite Amir Faisal. His rule lasted only a few months, and the French were soon faced with resistance culminating in a revolt which they brutally repressed in 1925. A treaty promised independence in 1936, but the French reneged on the agreement.
The French drew the boundary between Syria and Lebanon, long a semi-autonomous province under the Ottomans. The border was moved to the crest of the mountains east of the Shia- and Druze-populated Baqaa (Bekka) Valley, a logical decision in European eyes but one which ignored long-established ethnic and tribal boundaries that had placed the valley firmly in the Damascus vilayet.
The British established a Hashemite dynasty in Iraq, but chose the Europeanized Amir Faisal of recent Syrian nationality, who lacked both nationalist credentials and local acceptance. The cobbled-together state faced threats foreign and domestic. Turkey was loath to give up the riches of northern Iraq. The Kurdish governor declared himself king of a Kurdish state in the north; the British immediately drove him into exile in Iran.
For thousands of years men had known that natural gas vented from the ground, and Plutarch had written that the locals set an oiled road afire to impress Alexander the Great. On 15 October 1927 a consortium of British, Dutch, French, and American companies discovered oil in vast quantities near Kirkuk in Kurdish Iraq, establishing the Middle East as a rival to Russia and the East Indies for oil production.
The fledgling Iraqi government council finally persuaded Britain to set a date for independence, October 1932. The new Prime Minister, Nuri al-Sa'id, was a progressive, a modernizer, and a pragmatic nationalist. But following independence Sunni landowners and army officers soon became the real powers.
The Iraqi Hashemite dynasty was long-lived, unlike its members; Faisal reigned until 1933, and was succeeded by his son Ghazi. Under Ghazi the army first began to flex its muscle in domestic politics, staging a coup in 1936 to install a cabinet more to its liking. Ghazi died in 1939, succeeded by his three year-old son Faisal. The uncle of three year-old Faisal, Abd al-Ilah, served ineffectively as regent, unable to control the army, who openly favored the rising dictators Hitler and Mussolini.
In 1938 Anglo-Persian and Gulf Oil companies discovered oil in Kuwait, followed within weeks by discoveries in Saudi Arabia. Soon British interests had to compete with a flood of representatives from oil-starved Italy, Japan, and Germany. The outbreak of war in Europe stifled further exploration, as American and British explorers returned home.
Following the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940 the Vichy government controlled Syria and Lebanon. In early 1941 Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Kailani tried to bar British use of treaty bases in Iraq. After a coup the regent went into exile in British Transjordan. Ali sought German aid; the Vichy government allowed a small force of German planes to transit Lebanon and Syria into Iraq. A British mechanized column ("Habforce") from Transjordan drove out the Germans and restored the pro-British faction. After the German incursion, the British and Free French seized Syria and Lebanon. Iraq's Kurds and Shia remained restive, and for the first time Communist agitators appeared, exploiting nationalist ambitions.
An obscure supporter of Rashid Ali was Khairallah Tulfah, a member of the fledgling Ba'ath ("Arab Socialist Resurrection") Party and maternal uncle and patron of a small boy rejected by his stepfather. The boy, Saddam Hussein, had been born between 1935 and 1938. When his uncle was imprisoned following the failed German incursion Saddam's stepfather drove the boy from home, and he made his living as a very young petty criminal.
In 1943 Lebanon declared independence, and the Free French briefly imprisoned the entire government. France eventually abandoned Syria and Lebanon in 1946. For Lebanon the French-mandated disruption of ethnic partitions resulted in a weird constitution in which the President was required to be from the Maronite Christian community, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Christians were in practice guaranteed a six-to-five dominant ratio in the Parliament, regardless of shifting demographics. It was a recipe for ongoing disaster.
The second seismic shift in regional affairs was the foundation of the state of Israel. In 1917 the secret Balfour Declaration expressed sympathy for formation of a Zionist state. Jewish settlers began to flow into Palestine, growing to a flood in the aftermath of World War II. In May1948 Israel proclaimed itself as an independent state at the expiration of the British Palestinian mandate. Almost immediately the remnant Arab Palestinian state, Syria, and Egypt were involved in war with the new state.
Iraq, with no common border, was not directly involved but sent troops to newly independent Jordan (formerly Transjordan), probably helping to forestall Israeli conquest of the West Bank. Jordan had an almost tacit agreement to limit fighting with Israel; Jordan simply annexed the West Bank region of Palestine. The short war drove a flood of Palestinian refugees into adjacent states.
Soviet influence continued to grow, particularly among junior military officers; in 1952 a coup overthrew the Egyptian monarchy, bringing Gamel Nasser to power. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Sa'id, in and out of power as the result of internal bickering, was of course wary of this growing Soviet regional influence. He was instrumental in forging the Baghdad Pact, a regional alliance with Turkey, later expanded to include Pakistan, Iran, and Britain.
Humiliated in its battles with Israel, in 1956 Syria invited the devil to the party and entered into a pact with the Soviet Union. In the same year Egypt nationalized the strategic Suez Canal, and gained considerable regional influence through successful confrontation with Britain and France. Soviet efforts to rule the region by proxy defined relations with the United States for decades.
In February 1958 Nasser's Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic (UAR), ostensibly forming a single country. It prompted a similarly temporary Arab Union of the Hashemite monarchies, Iraq and Jordan.
BEIRUT PRELUDE, 1958
The Maronite Christian President of Lebanon, Camille Chamoun, had sided with Britain and France in the Suez Crisis of 1956, and openly favored the Arab Union, offending Arab pan-nationalists including his own Prime Minister. Domestic unrest included destruction of the US Information Agency offices. The United States viewed the situation with increasing alarm, in the mistaken belief that the UAR was a Communist front.
Fearing Syrian invasion, and with the counterbalance of Iraq at least temporarily disabled, Chamoun requested help from the US. President Eisenhower invoked the self-proclaimed Eisenhower Doctrine, stating that the US had the right to intervene in nations under threat from international Communism. The agents of the intervention would be Army troops from Europe, and two reinforced battalion landing teams (1/8 and 2/2) of Marines.
Mounted on twelve hours notice, the Marine landings on 15 July were a bizarre spectacle. Beirut was a major tourist destination, and the landing force was under strict orders not to interfere with beachgoers. The Marines of 2/2 stormed ashore near the airport amid swarms of bikini-clad tourists (it was still that kind of country) and local villagers. Teenagers helped the Marines drag heavy gear through the surf, while other civilians cheered. The force first secured the airport for the arrival of Army airborne units from Germany.
Early the next day tanks come ashore across a floating causeway built by the Shore Party. The commander of the 2nd Provisional Marine Force, Brig. Gen. Sidney Wade, led a column of vehicles including the only two tanks available, into the city to secure the port, critical bridges, and the embassy complex.
There was reason to be nervous. General Wade had gone into the city to meet with the US ambassador and General Fuad Shihab. Shihab was concerned that his troops might fire on the Marines. Then word arrived that Lebanese Army tanks had established a blocking position along the highway. Wade drove toward the airport in an embassy car and encountered the Lebanese tanks; a short conversation revealed that they had no clear orders, but would probably resist any American advance.
At 1100 hours the Marines, still under their original orders, mounted up and moved toward the city.
PFC John E. Dreisbach was a radio operator.
"On the long column — containing tanks, amtracks, trucks and jeeps — that entered Beirut, I was sitting on a jeep fender," remembers Dreisbach. "There were thousands of people lining the streets, half of whom seemed to welcome us. The looks of the others made me get off the fender and jump into a truck, as they didn't look that friendly. I was also uneasy about the buildings, which seemed to be damaged by explosives."
About a mile north of the airport, the column encountered the Lebanese tanks, whose guns were trained on the Marines. The Marine rifle battalion commander had halted the advance when cars racing to and fro — Wade and naval officers headed into the city, the ambassador and General Shihab headed out — arrived at the roadblock.
In a hasty conference in a nearby schoolhouse Shihab and the Americans worked out a plan. Each Marine unit would be preceded by Lebanese Army representatives, and others would be "embedded" (a term not then in use). The Marines would be careful to bypass the Muslim quarter of the city. The truce was fortunate, since the Marine tanks had no main gun ammunition; the ship carrying it and the balance of the tank platoon had gone to Malta for repairs. By 1900hours the Marines had secured their objectives.
When 1/8, with fourteen more tanks as well as LVTs and Ontos, arrived the Marines were able to undertake mechanized patrols. These few vehicles (fifteen tanks, ten Ontos, and thirty-one LVTP-5s) represented the total US mechanized presence until the arrival of Army tanks on 27 July.
Ensuing confrontations were curiously polite by the standards of another time. Marines taken prisoner by anti-government Islamic forces were lectured at length and then released, and their weapons returned. Marines staged practice landings, to the amusement of beachgoers.
The last Americans withdrew on 25 October; the occupation resolved the crisis when Chamoun was persuaded to resign, replaced by the more pragmatic General Shihab. The cost to the US for this successful operation was unbelievably minimal: one soldier killed and one wounded.
* * *
Following a 1958 coup, power in Iraq was consolidated in the person of Abd al-Karem Kassem, an Army general of mixed Sunni and Kurdish Shi'a ancestry. Another reformer, he fell to grief when he allowed the Kurdish Democratic Party to operate openly, only to face revolt as the Kurds demanded autonomy. This was the beginning of the Kurdish problem.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Marine Corps Tank Battles in the Middle East by Oscar E. Gilbert. Copyright © 2015 Oscar E. Gilbert. Excerpted by permission of Casemate Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
