Assault on Rutbah Fort | |||||||
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Part of the Anglo-Iraqi War | |||||||
![]() An aerial photograph of the assault on Rutbah Fort | |||||||
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Belligerents | |||||||
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Commanders and leaders | |||||||
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Units involved | |||||||
Arab Legion No. 2 Armoured Car Company RAF | al-Qawuqji's men Iraqi Desert Police | ||||||
Strength | |||||||
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Location within Iraq |
The Assault on Rutbah Fort was fought during the Anglo-Iraqi War between British and Transjordanian forces and Iraqi forces loyal to Rashid Ali.
On 1 May 1941, forces loyal to Rashid Ali occupied the fort at Rutbah. An advanced party from Habforce was dispatched to combat them.
On 8 May 1941, a column of the Arab Legion, under Glubb Pasha, reached the fort at Rutbah. They picketed the ground surrounding the fort, to wait for the impending Royal Air Force bombardment. The fort was defended by approximately 100 policemen, the majority of which were Iraqi Desert Police. [1] The H4-based Blenheims of No. 203 Squadron RAF arrived and bombed the fort, and thinking that the fort had surrendered, left. The fort did not surrender and the RAF returned twice that day to bomb the fort without success.
The next day, the RAF continued to bomb the fort at intermittent intervals. One plane sustained such heavy small-arms fire that it crashed on the way back to the airfield, killing the pilot. That evening, 40 trucks armed with machine guns arrived at the fort to reinforce the garrison. Half of the trucks were irregulars under the command of Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the other half were Iraqi Desert Police. Glubb decided to withdraw his soldiers back to H3 to await the reinforcement of the main column.
The Arab Legion arrived back at H3 on the morning of 10 May, and found No. 2 Armoured Car Company RAF under Squadron Leader Michael Casano waiting there. The squadron had been sent up ahead of the main column to assist the Arab Legion in taking Rutbah. Casano took his armoured cars to Rutbah whilst the Arab Legion replenished their supplies at H3. Casano's armoured cars fought an action against al-Qawuqji's trucks for most of the rest of the day, and although the result was not decisive the trucks retired to the east under the cover of dark to leave the garrison to its fate. That night the RAF succeeded in a night bombing, with several bombs landing inside the fort.
Following the withdrawal of al-Qawuqji's trucks and the successful bombing by the RAF, the garrison withdrew from the fort under the cover of dark. In the morning on the day of the 11 May, the Arab Legion column arrived and garrisoned the fort whilst Casson's armoured cars continued to fight remnants of the Iraqi Desert Police's forces. [2] During the day, James Joseph Kingstone, the commander of Kingcol, along with some of his staff and a protective troop of the Blues and Royals and Life Guards, departed H3 for the fort at Rutbah. Leaving his protective troop at the edge of the town, Kingstone and Somerset de Chair, his assistant, proceeded on to the fort and met with Glubb Pasha. [3]
A film of the conflict was produced by British Pathé and published on 9 June 1941 as 'The War In Iraq'. [4]
The 1948 Arab–Israeli War, also known as the First Arab–Israeli War, followed the civil war in Mandatory Palestine as the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. The civil war became a war of separate states with the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948, the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight, and the entry of a military coalition of Arab states into the territory of Mandatory Palestine the following morning. The war formally ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements which established the Green Line.
The 1941 Iraqi coup d'état, also called the Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani coup or the Golden Square coup, was a nationalist coup d'état in Iraq on 1 April 1941 that overthrew the pro-British regime of Regent 'Abd al-Ilah and his Prime Minister Nuri al-Said and installed Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as Prime Minister.
Lieutenant-General Sir John Bagot Glubb, KCB, CMG, DSO, OBE, MC, KStJ, KPM, known as Glubb Pasha, was a British military officer who led and trained Transjordan's Arab Legion between 1939 and 1956 as its commanding general. During the First World War, he served in France. Glubb has been described as an "integral tool in the maintenance of British control."
The Arab Legion was the police force, then regular army, of the Emirate of Transjordan, a British protectorate, in the early part of the 20th century, and then of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, an independent state, with a final Arabization of its command taking place in 1956, when British senior officers were replaced by Jordanian ones.
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The Anglo-Iraqi War was a British-led Allied military campaign during the Second World War against the Kingdom of Iraq, then ruled by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani who had seized power in the 1941 Iraqi coup d'état with assistance from Germany and Italy. The campaign resulted in the downfall of Gaylani's government, the re-occupation of Iraq by the British, and the return to power of the Regent of Iraq, Prince 'Abd al-Ilah, a British ally.
Fawzi al-Qawuqji was a Lebanese-born Arab nationalist military figure in the interwar period. He served briefly in Palestine in 1936 fighting the British Mandatory suppression of the Palestinian Revolt. A political decision by the British enabled him to flee the country in 1937. He was a colonel in the Nazi Wehrmacht during World War II, and served as the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) field commander during the 1948 Palestine War.
The Royal Jordanian Army is the ground force branch of the Jordanian Armed Forces (JAF). It draws its origins from units such as the Arab Legion, formed in the British Mandate of Transjordan in the 1920s. It has seen combat against Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. The Army also fought the Syrians and the PLO during Black September in 1970.
The II Squadron RAF Regiment is a squadron of the RAF Regiment based at RAF Brize Norton. The squadron is parachute trained.
Iraqforce was a British and Commonwealth formation that came together in the Kingdom of Iraq. The formation fought in the Middle East during World War II.
The Battle of Palmyra was part of the Allied invasion of Syria during the Syria-Lebanon campaign in World War II that took place from 21 June to 2 July 1941. British mechanised cavalry and an Arab Legion desert patrol broke up a Vichy French mobile column north-east of the city of Palmyra. This provoked the surrender of the Vichy garrison at Palmyra.
The Household Cavalry Composite Regiment was a temporary, wartime-only, cavalry regiment of the British Army consisting of personnel drawn from the 1st Life Guards, 2nd Life Guards and Royal Horse Guards. It was active in 1882 for service in the Anglo-Egyptian War, in 1889–1900 during the Second Boer War, from August to November, 1914 during the opening months of World War I and in World War II.
The Desert Force, also known as the Desert Patrol, was a paramilitary force of Transjordan. Its main task was to guard Jordanian borders with neighboring Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria as well as to provide protection for oil pipelines of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). It also participated in campaigns of Syria and Iraq during World War II.
Michael Peter Casano, MC, was a Squadron Leader in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.
The Number 2 Armoured Car Company RAF was a military unit of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) which was based at Amman in what was then called the Transjordan. It was the counterpart of No.1 Armoured Car Company RAF, which performed a similar role in Iraq.
Royal Air Force Hinaidi or more commonly known as RAF Hinaidi, is a former Royal Air Force station near Baghdad in the Kingdom of Iraq. It was operational from 1922 until 1937, when operations were transferred to RAF Habbaniya.
Gocol was a flying column created by the British Army shortly after the Anglo–Iraqi War had ended.
Habforce was a British Army military unit created in 1941 during the Anglo-Iraqi War and still active during the Syria-Lebanon campaign during the fighting in the Middle East in the Second World War.
H-3 Air Base is part of a cluster of former Iraqi Air Force bases in the Al-Anbar Governorate of Iraq. H3 is located in a remote stretch of Iraq's western desert, about 435 kilometers from Baghdad in western Iraq. It is close to the Syrian–Iraqi border, and near the highway that connects Jordan with Baghdad.
This is the order of battle for the Battle of Megiddo (1918), the concluding engagement of the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of the First World War. The Entente's Egyptian Expeditionary Force, commanded by General Edmund Allenby and composed mainly of British, Indian, Australian and New Zealand troops, with a small French and Armenian contingent, cooperated with the Arab Northern Army, which was part of the Arab Revolt and was under the overall command of the Emir Feisal, in an all-out offensive against the Yıldırım Army Group, part of the army of the Ottoman Empire.