Blood, Oil and the Axis: The Allied Resistance Against a Fascist State in Iraq and the Levant, 1941 By John Broich

Blood, Oil and the Axis: The Allied Resistance Against a Fascist State in Iraq and the Levant, 1941

By John Broich

    Dr. Broich is a British Empire historian. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2005 and from there taught at Amherst College until 2007. In 2007, he joined Case Western Reserve University where he currently teaches World War II history, British Imperial history, World environmental history, and other topics. He is also a noted writer, with articles appearing in The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Slate, and BBC History Magazine among others. His current book is his third. His first book entitled London: Water and the Making of the Modern City was published in 2013. His second book Squadron: Ending the African Slave Trade was published in 2017. The book we are reviewing today Blood, Oil and the Axis was published in May 2019 by Harry N Abrams, Inc. Harry N Abrams was founded in 1949 and is currently the leading American publisher of high-quality art and illustrated books, it is currently owned by La Martiniere Groupe of France.

    It is spring 1941 and the year is dark across the Old World. In Asia, the Imperial Japanese Army rampages across the Republic of China In Europe, the avowedly anti-communist fascists powers have finished waging war on Poland with the aid of the Soviet Union, conquered their way to the Pyrenees Mountains and are marching through the Balkans in a seemingly unstoppable tide of oppression and hate (Death to all fascists!). Berlin has become the center of an Empire that stretches from the equator to the Arctic circle and is growing. All that is left is the Republic of China, a dozen exiled governments with the rags and tags of their armed forces and the British Empire leading the Commonwealth of Nations. The resources of the Allies grow thin and every battle is fought on an increasingly thin margin. The Republic of China's armies fractures more by the day. France has been occupied for almost a year (The collapse of France is a case study in getting inside your enemy’s OODA-Loop.  Jesus.). The British retreat on almost every front. To many across the world, it seems like the days of the British Empire are numbered and perhaps even the ideal of liberal democracy is doomed. The United States and the Soviet Union still slumber in their neutrality. The Soviets, secure in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, were happy with the gains it brought them. The US was secure behind two oceans and the American First movement grandly declared that the world was none of our concern. This is the stage that leads a group of Iraqi Colonels, discontent with the British domination of their nation to dare to dream of a new status quo and all they have to do is make a deal with the Devil in Berlin.

    The Anglo-Iraq War is an often overlooked part of World War II. Fought on a shoestring and with improvised logistics, it is still a war that was waged by enlisted men and officers from four continents and if it didn't decide the fate of the Middle East, it certainly weighed the dice. This book gives us a broad look at the coup that overthrew the two-year-old King of Iraq and his regent in favor of a pro-fascist government led by a Prime Minister as a frontman for four Iraqi Colonels. Now Dr. Broich does give some early context here, the leaders of Iraq were frustrated with the British domination of their government which they saw as the betrayal of earlier promises (Because it was.  The British betrayed pretty much everyone who wasn’t white and gentile at the end of WW1). See Iraq was formed after World War I from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and the British had widely promised a large number of Middle Eastern ethnic groups independence and freedom in exchange for fighting the Turkish Ottoman Empire. It's a bit complex to get into but to put it simply, the promises they made were wide-ranging and contradictory so the British solved this problem by pretty much breaking all of them (Lawrence of Arabia was most displeased.  Also, fuck the British Empire.). This did not make them a lot of friends in the Middle East and was one of the many, many seeds for the issues affecting the Middle East today. Now, the British did withdraw most of their direct rule from Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s, the Kingdom of Iraq was formally independent but in many ways was a puppet state for the British Empire. As might shock you gentle readers, a lot of Iraqis hated that. With the British Empire on the ropes, the Colonels of the Golden Square thought they could get a better deal from Nazi Germany. They even dared to dream of a Pan-Arabic state by unifying Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq under a single government (I'll be honest, there are days I think we should have let them do it. It would have fallen apart like a melon cart hit by a train but at least it wouldn't be our fault) an idea that had luke-warm support in Berlin at best (This has been an idea that’s cropped up again and again in Iraq, famously it was a central tenet of the Ba’ath party.{The idea of a Pan-Arabic state has also popped up in Egypt and Syria a couple of times}). Another obstacle to this would be the fact that Syria was currently under the rule of the Vichy French, the French vassal state of the Nazi Empire (Oh man, those fucking collaborationist pieces of shit.  Don’t even get me started on them!). While humiliating the French warmed the average Nazi's heart, no one wanted to push it too far and push more Vichy French army units into General De Gaulle's arms. However, what did drum up quite a bit of support was the idea of Iraqi oil flowing into German-occupied Europe to fuel the ever more thirsting Axis War Machine (It was very very thirsty, you see. The Reich didn’t have much in the way of oil reserves, and was one the reasons why they literally had to attack the USSR at some point, and win fast, because otherwise, they would drain their strategic reserves dry.). Plus a fascist Iraq would bring 50,000 armed soldiers onto the Axis side and allow them to open a new front against the British in Egypt and Palestine, giving the Axis chance of seizing the Suez Canal a massive boost. It would also potentially force Turkey out of neutrality into the Axis and open a road for an Axis aligned Iran.

    To oppose this, the British Empire didn't have much that it could commit to a whole new front, as they were fighting in North Africa already against the Afrika Corps and the Italian Army (Though, the Italians…I almost pity their soldiers.). Additionally, they knew it was only a matter of time before the Imperial Japanese armed forces were going to come knocking at their door. Additionally, the Arab troops in Jordan and Palestine were... Unenthusiastic about a campaign centered around suppressing an Arabic independence movement, at best (You don’t say!). Dr. Broich shows us this by taking us to the ground level letting us see things by following the stories of individual officers in the Indian Army, or the Australian forces attached to the British command and even members of the Free French forces. Dr. Broich is careful to give us a full view of these people's lives so we can remember these are real men and women not just characters in a book. Although some of them had lives that would easily slot into a Hollywood blockbuster, like the American Jack Hasey who ends in the French Foreign Legion or John Masters, the son of a British family that had lived in India for generations (Oh yeah, some of these people were absolute characters.  You read the biographies of some of the people who fought in WWII and you find yourself questioning reality.). We also meet men like Jack Bartlett and Harry Chalk who are normal men very much like you or people you know who would go on to do amazing things. We also get to see the struggle for public opinion through the eyes of British agents like Freya Stark and Nazis like Fritz Grobba, both of whom could easily be movie or novel characters given the very real events of their lives. Through this Dr. Broich paints a complex but very real picture of the people who took part in these events. Some of these events, especially in Iraq make me feel an intense feeling of deja vu, especially given the ineffectiveness of Iraqi officers and their inability to effectively use the forces at their command to achieve their objectives once they are fighting a force not made up of other Iraqis (History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme). I am left questioning what is it about Iraq that they cannot seem to develop an effective officer or NCO corps to lead their armies? It's not inherent in the people, Arab Americans and Iraqi American soldiers and marines have performed with distinction in the US armed forces. For that matter, Iraqi troops during the colonial and WWII period fought very well under British officers. It's not inherent in the government, as the Iraqi military has fallen apart under kings, dictators, oligarchs, and democratically elected leaders. And yet when I read the performance of the Iraqi military I am forcibly reminded that history may not repeat but it often rhythms (Oh look!) as their performance reminds me of how the Iraqi Army performed in the invasion and how they performed versus Daesh.

    To continue the echoing, Dr. Broich takes us into the follow-up, a more savage and vicious war in Vichy controlled Syria. As Free French units and Arab units were used in greater numbers there, often people who knew each other or were even brothers found themselves battling it out on opposite sides. The war in Syria took on the tones of a civil war extremely quickly with Vichy French officers calling Free French units mutineers and Free French units having a wide range of insults for the people defending fascist interests (Traitors, for instance.). There were also elements of strangeness as ethnic groups with long bloody feuds would decide they didn't want to butcher each other for the interests of Europeans (No one should want to butcher each other for the interests of Europeans.). The Syrian campaign would also display in greater measure the sheer horror of industrialized war, as tanks were used on infantry who had no armor support. British columns would be exposed to French bombing with next to no air support causing a number of psychological casualties. These were things that were not yet a common experience on the western front, the Blitzkrieg into France having struck too quickly and the war in North Africa not yet at its height but soon... All too soon an entire generation would come to grips with it, as warfare would return to Western Europe and the Nazi War Machine geared up to march east.

    Blood, Oil and the Axis gives us a view of a front in the war that is widely neglected by most people today. Even in the middle east, as far as I know, it's not studied in any depth and it is easy to miss given that it was a minor struggle in the greatest war that humanity has ever fought. However, the book also shows how the consequences of defeat or victory in even a minor campaign in such a vast war can have long-ranging effects. Consider that if Iraq had gone fascist, it may have allowed Rommel to seize Egypt and the Suez Canal. This means supplies and men heading to the British isles from Asia or from the isles to Asia would have to go around Africa. Turkey and possibly Iran would seriously consider joining the Axis, possibly threatening India from another direction even as the Japanese would soon march into Burma. Hundreds of thousands of Jews across the Middle East would be exposed to the genocidal madness of the Nazis and there can be no good consequences for the Eastern Front. Success gave the Free French a stronghold to rebuild from, a safe place for Jews fleeing continental Europe (Which they needed, because no one else was giving them one.), and allowed the British and their allies to gather the strength to resist the Afrika Corps and the Italians until the resources and manpower of the United States began to arrive en masse in the west and the strength of the Russian people could be deployed against their Nazi invaders. This holds true even today, despite the vast events that are sweeping over the US and the World, remember even the small decisions and acts that you do, whether it be join a protest, record the actions of the police, clean up after a protest or even just donate money to a cause you believe in can have ever greater knock-on effects (Can confirm.  The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, as of this writing, remains free!). Every great event is really just a group of smaller events building up together after all and this book shows that really well. Blood, Oil, and the Axis: The Allied Resistance Against a Fascist State in Iraq and the Levant, 1941 by Dr. John Broich gets an A for being a great historical source.

As I write this, events continue to move at an increasing pace inside the United States and the rest of the world.  I'm going to remind folks that our last review has a list of places and causes to donate to if they are so inclined.  Next week we review The Tango War: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin American During World War II by Mary Jo McConahay and I'll be leaving my editor in charge.  May God be with y'all.  Until I see you again folks, stay safe and keep reading.

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