Damascus — the Syrian Campaign
General , High Commissioner and commander of the Vichy forces in the Levant, controls Syria and Lebanon under French mandate. In the spring of 1941, the application of the Paris Protocols turned these territories into a transit point for German air aid to the Iraqi revolt: Luftwaffe aircraft passed through the Syrian airfields, alarming the British.
For London and De Gaulle's Free France, this breach is unacceptable: to let the Axis establish itself in the Levant would threaten Egypt, the Suez Canal and the oil of the Middle East. On 8 June 1941, they launch Operation Exporter: British, Australian, Indian and Free French troops enter Syria from Palestine and Iraq.
Dentz commands about 35,000 men — colonial troops and units that have remained loyal to Vichy. He faces an agonising dilemma: to put up a serious resistance against former allies and against fellow Frenchmen, in the name of Vichy's legality and military honour; to wage only a token fight to save appearances; or to yield to spare a fratricidal clash. The first skirmishes quickly turn into a French-against-French war.
Should Dentz seriously defend the Levant against the Allies and the Free French?
Dentz chooses A: his troops resist fiercely for more than five weeks, inflicting heavy and unexpected losses on the attackers. Damascus falls on 21 June, but the fighting continues until mid-July, and the confrontation between Vichy Frenchmen and Free Frenchmen leaves deep wounds. The Armistice of Saint-Jean-d'Acre, on 14 July, ends the campaign. The reckoning is bitter: about a thousand dead on each French side, and the great majority of Dentz's soldiers will choose to return to metropolitan France rather than rally to de Gaulle — a cruel disappointment for Free France. The Syrian campaign nonetheless secures the Allied flank of the Middle East and deprives the Axis of a base in the Levant.
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