The Second World War and After	199
fifty field-guns, while detachments seized the pumping-stations
on the oil-pipeline to Haifa. By all normal rules Habbaniya should
have fallen; but after four days' fighting the R.A.F. assisted by their
Assyrian and Kurdish Levies succeeded in driving back the Iraqis,
and were reinforced by a small motorized column, including the
Arab Legion of Transjordan, hastily got together in Palestine and
rushed across the desert. The Iraqis now appealed to Germany for
help; but Hitler had decided that major operations to expel Britain
from the Middle East must wait till after the launching of the in-
vasion of Russia, now in an advanced state of preparation. The
Germans were held up in Crete, whose conquest took them
eighteen days instead of the two on which they had counted; and
they could spare their Iraqi allies only some fifty aircraft. This was
insufficient, and the Golden Square had failed to win the support of
the apathetic Iraqi people. On 29 May, the British forces, still far
inferior in numbers to the Iraqis, had reached the outskirts of
Baghdad. Rashid Ah and his ministers, the Golden Square, the
Mufti and his shadow-cabinet all decamped in haste, some to
Persia, and some to Aleppo and eventually through Turkey to
Axis Europe. An armistice was concluded on 31 May, Britain,
pressed back on Egypt and Palestine by this premature pincer-
movement of the Axis and its sympathizers, had fought back and
won in the first great testing-time of the Middle East campaign.
Beyond ensuring the establishment of a friendly government, she
imposed no punitive terms on Iraq; but proceeded to attack the
Vichy French in Syria, who had in their impotence harboured for
many months the spies and propagandists of the Axis Armistice
Commission, and had recently allowed German aircraft to
refuel on Syrian airfields on their way to Northern Iraq, and
material supplies to travel to Iraq by the Syrian railways. The
Vichy French fought back grimly against the British and Free
French, but by mid-July they were forced to capitulate, and under
the Lyttleton-De Gaulle Agreement a Free French government
was installed in the Levant States, British forces being free to oper-
ate there for the duration of the war. Meanwhile Hitler had invaded
Russia. One of the only two routes by which contact between
Russia and Britain could be established was through Persia, where
the Germans had been steadily building up their staffs of tech-
nicians and spies during the past six months. A joint Anglo-
Russian demand that the Persian government should expel them