Britain's secret invasion. Was it worth it?

Fire Tree ends with Operation Ironclad, so it seems right that the second blog should look at that event, a forgotten episode in British (and French) history.

Most readers who pick up Fire Tree will not have heard of Operation Ironclad. That is rather the point of the name. On the morning of 5 May 1942, a British invasion fleet appeared off the northern coast of Vichy-controlled Madagascar and put troops ashore at Courrier Bay, guided through a minefield by men who knew the coast. It was Britain's first large combined operation of the war, army, navy and air force working together against a defended coastline. And it happened more than two years before D-Day. Almost nobody in Britain knew it was happening. Even de Gaulle's Free French, who would clearly have taken an interest in the fate of a French colony, were kept out of the planning until the ships of Force 121 were already at sea.

On paper, the reasoning behind the operation was straightforward. By early 1942 Japan had swept through South-East Asia in a matter of weeks, and London feared that Japanese submarines, some with a range of ten thousand miles, would find a home in Diego-Suarez's deep natural harbour and use it to cut the shipping lanes that supplied India, the Middle East and Australia. Vichy Madagascar was formally neutral. In practice, after what had already happened at Mers-el-Kébir and Dakar, nobody in London was prepared to trust that neutrality would hold if the Japanese came asking. In fact, Vichy France had already shown itself keen to collaborate with the Nazis by form part of the new European order. Churchill, who had initially doubted Britain could spare the resources, came round to calling Diego-Suarez "the strategic key to Japanese influence in the Indian Ocean."

So Britain invaded a colony belonging to a country it was not at war with, to keep out a country that had not yet made any move towards attacking.

Going to plan

The landing itself went almost to plan. Diego-Suarez fell within forty-eight hours, but the wider island did not. The stubborn resistance put up by the Vichy troops, many of whom were Malagasy and Senegalese conscripts serving under French officers, surprised everyone. One British officer noted, not as a compliment, that the French resisted the Allies in Madagascar longer than they had resisted the Germans in France two years earlier.

It took three more landings in different parts of the Big Island, and six months of fighting through the island's interior before Governor-General Annet finally surrendered, four months after the initial landing. When hostilities stopped, British and Allied forces had lost over five hundred dead, although more of them were lost to disease than to Vichy bullets. The Vichy French forces suffered over a thousand casualties and prisoners.

Three weeks after the first landing, the fear that had justified the whole operation nearly proved itself right. On the night of 29 May, Japanese midget submarines, launched from larger submarines positioned offshore, slipped into Diego-Suarez harbour and torpedoed the battleship HMS Ramillies. They also sank the tanker British Loyalty. It was the only Japanese attack of its kind in the western Indian Ocean during the entire war, and it happened at the harbour Britain had just spent hundreds of lives to secure. For a moment, Ironclad looked entirely vindicated.

But after that attack, Japanese forces never came back. There was never any threat of them building the base London had dreaded, and Madagascar was never subject to any other enemy attack. The submarine base that justified the invasion was, in the end, a base that was never built.

This leaves the honest version of the question harder to answer than either side of it wants it to be. Was Ironclad a necessary pre-emption of a real and demonstrated threat, or an expensive insurance policy against a danger that, absent the invasion itself, might never have materialised?

The aftermath

The aftermath answers a version of the question London was not asking. Having excluded the Free French from the planning and fought the campaign entirely as a British and Commonwealth affair, once the fighting was over, Britain handed the administration of Madagascar over to the Free French. It gained nothing politically for six months of losses and gave de Gaulle exactly the colonial legitimacy Churchill's government had been so careful, for many weeks, to deny him. Andwhatever it secured against Japan, the occupation did something to Madagascar that no invasion plan had budgeted for. It provided fuel to the fiction that French rule was stable and permanent. Five years later, in 1947, the fuel ignited,  becoming a bloody rebellion that killed many thousands of people. Madagascar's road to the independence it reached much later in 1960 runs, in part, back through the harbour Britain fought so hard to take.

None of this made the news at the time, and most of it is still unknown about, which is exactly why it felt like the natural place to start unpacking the history behind Fire Tree. Because the repercussions of that event had other consequences that resulted in a legacy played out in the lives of the descendants of those who took part.

Martine's Madagascar is fiction built on the scaffolding of real events: the feint at Rigny Bay while the real landing went in at Courrier Bay, the speed of Diego-Suarez's fall, the six months of occupation that followed before anyone in Madagascar, French or Malagasy, could be sure who was actually in charge of the island they lived on.

Whether Ironclad was worth it depends rather a lot on who is doing the counting, the strategist weighing a harbour against a fleet that stayed away, the conscript sent to hold a line for an empire that was never his to defend, or the descendant, whose very existence is a direct consequence of what happened.

Download the short story - Death Watch - a fictionalised account of the Japanese miniature submarine incursion into the Diego Suarez after the British invasion of the island.