Unarmed Combat

Richard Usborne

  • The Anglo-French Clash in Lebanon and Syria, 1940-1945 by A.B. Gaunson
    Macmillan, 233 pp, £29.50, March 1987, ISBN 0 333 40221 9
  • Personal Patchwork 1939-1945 by Bryan Guinness
    Cygnet, 260 pp, £9.50, March 1987, ISBN 0 907435 06 8
  • Staff Officer: The Diaries of Lord Moyne 1914-1918 edited by Brian Bond
    Leo Cooper, 256 pp, £17.50, October 1987, ISBN 0 85052 053 3

When France fell in the summer of 1940, practically all Arabs of the Levant were sure that the Axis would win the war. This would probably free their countries, Syria and Lebanon, from the French mandates under which they had lived resentfully since 1920. But then an Italian Armistice Commission turned up in Beirut (one of its members brought his grand piano). That their future overlord would be Italy was not a pretty thought for the Levantines. Meanwhile, on Pétains orders, the French bureaucrats went on with their jobs, and the French Army of the Levant, their weaponry unused and intact, remained the ruling power.

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