The men firing them wore French uniforms and answered to a government in Vichy that now took its orders from Berlin. Australia had gone to war with France and almost nobody at home would ever be told. This was the part of the war that didn’t fit any story people wanted to hear.

 France had surrendered to Hitler the year before and the southern half of the country, run from the spa town of Vichy, kept its colonies and its armies under German license. Syria and Lebanon were Vichy ground, held by more than 30,000 troops with  tanks and modern fighters backed by regiments of the Foreign Legion. In the spring,  German aircraft had begun staging through Syrian airfields on their way to stir up a revolt against the British in Iraq.

A German backdoor was swinging open behind the Suez Canal  and London decided it had to be shut. The Vichy had spent the year turning Syria and Lebanon into a fortress manned by battalions raised across the French Empire, Senegalese and North African troops stiffened by the Foreign Legion with squadrons of aircraft overhead and a screen of light tanks below.

 Their artillery was already zeroed on the few good roads and the rivers that crossed them. Whatever London hoped, these men meant to fight and they were holding ground that suited a defender down to the last ridge. The Australians were walking into a real army that intended to hold every meter  of it.

 The job went to the 7th Division, Australians who’d already held the line through the siege of Tobruk and  reckoned they’d seen the worst the war had to offer. They were told Syria would be light work. What they found was a country built for defense, all limestone ridges and deep river gorges with stone villages that turned every bend in the road into  a killing ground.

The Vichy gunners knew the range of every culvert and bridge before the first Australian boot crossed the start line. The handful of easy days the briefings had promised became five weeks of the hardest fighting many of these men would ever see. On the coast road the leading battalions ran straight into it within hours.

 The bridges over the Litani River had already been dropped into  the water and the far bank was lined with machine guns sighted to sweep the open crossings. Men went into the river under fire  and came out the other side to clear the trenches by hand. Behind them the Vichy artillery walked its shells up and down the road with the  calm of gunners who’d ranged every meter of it weeks before.

This was supposed to be the easy stretch. What the Australians didn’t yet know was that the worst barrier on the whole coast still lay ahead of them. 30 km short of Beirut where the Damour River cut a gorge down to the sea, the Vichy command had built the strongest position of the campaign and settled in to wait.

 Every spare gun and reserve they could pull together was dug in on the high ground above that river, the legionnaires among them. To reach the Lebanese capital the 7th division would have to cross the gorge in the dark and climb straight into the fire on the far side. The order to do exactly that was already being written. To understand how Australians ended up trading fire with Frenchmen, you have to go back to the summer of 1940.

France’s collapse had left its empire suspended between two masters. The officials and officers running Syria and Lebanon chose loyalty to Vichy and through Vichy obedience to Germany. When German planes started using Syrian runways in May 1941, the British High Command in the Middle East stopped arguing about the politics  of it.

 The operation was given a flat military name, Exporter, and the troops nearest the border were told to get ready to move.  From the very start, it was a campaign that head office wanted kept quiet. Sending Australian boys against German  Panzers was a thing you could put on a recruiting poster. Sending them to shoot Frenchmen a year after France had been the gallant ally bled white at the side of the British was an awkward sell to families back in Australia.

 The government said little. The newspapers were given less. The men crossing the wire that morning had no real idea that the silence around them had been arranged before they’d fired a shot. The plan pushed three thrusts north out of Palestine at once. On the right, British and Indian columns drove inland toward Damascus.

 In the center, other forces climbed into the mountains. The main effort and the worst road fell to the Australians on the left, hugging the Mediterranean shore for the direct run at Beirut. They crossed before dawn on the 8th of June with very little artillery behind them because the planners still half believed the garrison would lay down its arms rather than fight its old friends.

 The garrison had no such intention. The fighting on the coast told them that inside a day at the Litani, the Australians and a party of British commandos forced the river against dug-in machine guns and counterfire, taking the far bank a trench at a time. The Vichy had blown the bridges and zeroed their guns, and they made the crossing cost.

 Where the maps showed a clean run up a good road by the sea, the ground gave the defender every advantage, and the defender used it. The men learned fast  that the only thing the briefings had got right was the direction of march. The enemy held the sky as well, at least at the start. Vichy bombers came out over  the advancing columns and worked the road, and there was little overhead to stop them.

Out at sea, British and Australian warships ran in close to shell the coast road and the Vichy positions above it, and Vichy aircraft came after the ships, putting bombs down among them. Vichy destroyers even slipped out of Beirut to challenge the bombardment,  and the water off the coast turned into its own running fight.

 The Australians on the ground looked up at all of it and kept walking north. From the Litani, the coast road ran on through the old ports of the Lebanese shore, past Tyre and the smaller harbor towns, each one a knot of stone houses and seawalls that had to be worked through under fire. The Vichy gave ground slowly and made the Australians buy every bend of it.

Blown culverts slowed the trucks, and rear guards held the bridges to the last useful minute, while the heat sat on everything like a weight. It was the kind of advance that never looks like much on a map, a few kilometers a day up a single road by the sea, with the casualty list growing quietly at every turn.

 Inland, the campaign turned uglier still. In the mountain town of Merdjayoun, the Vichy went over to the attack, throwing tanks and infantry into a counterattack  that drove the Australians back out of ground they’d already taken. The town had to be prized loose a second time in a grinding fight through the streets and the orchards on the slopes around  it.

Any furphy about a walkover died there in the stone laneways. The men came away with a hard respect for the soldiers across the valley,  even as they cursed the flies and the staff officers who’d told them this would be over by now.  There was a bitterness in this war that the others didn’t have.

 On the Free French side, Frenchmen who’d refused the surrender fought their way forward against Frenchmen who’d accepted it, Legionnaire against legionnaire in some of the same uniforms.  Prisoners on both sides were given the choice of which France to serve. For the Australians caught in the middle of it, there was nothing to do but treat the men in front of them as the enemy they plainly were and try not to think too hard about the rest.

 It was, by any measure, a rotten business  and everyone in it knew so. Away on the right, the interior began to give way. Damascus fell to the British, Indian and Free French columns in the third week of June and the inland flank of the Vichy defense started to crumble.  None of that eased the load on the coast where the 7th Division was still grinding north through the hardest country of the lot.

The Australians on the shore road heard about Damascus and got on with their own war, which was nowhere near finished. Ahead of them lay the mountains around Jezzine and beyond those, the gorge at Damour. Higher up in the hills around Jezzine, the fighting turned into something out of an older century. Sections worked forward across bare rock under machine gun fire, taking one stone breastwork at  a time with grenades and the bayonet doing the close work.

It was here, on the 10th of  July, that a private from Western Australia named Jim Gordon did the thing that put his name in the record. His company had been pinned for hours by a Vichy machine gun post that nobody  could get near. So, Gordon went after it on his own. He crawled out alone across open ground, got in close under the muzzle and rushed the post with the bayonet before the crew could swing the gun onto him.

The four men at the gun didn’t survive the rush and the gun  fell silent. With that one position gone, the whole line that had been stuck for half a day got up and moved. Gordon was given the Victoria Cross for those few minutes of work, the first of two the campaign would produce. He was the kind of soldier the Australians valued most, a quiet man who said almost nothing about it afterward and went back to the war.

 For the men in the hills and the orchards, it was a wearing, dirty grind under a hammering sun. The heat came off the rock in waves and the water ran short. Dysentery moved through the ranks the way it always did, and the men slept in stone scrapes and grumbled their way up every ridge in the flat, unimpressed manner the 7th Division had carried out of the desert.

In barracks, they’d never been much for saluting or button tunics. Under fire on a Lebanese hillside, they were as steady as any troops in the British Empire, and the Vichy across the valley were starting to find that out. The air war over the columns slowly turned as well.  Allied squadrons came up to contest the sky the Vichy had owned in the opening days, and the bombing  of the coast road eased as the weeks wore on.

It never became easy, but the men on the ground stopped looking over their shoulders quite so often. Control of the air, like everything else in this campaign, had to be  taken rather than handed over, ridge by ridge and week by week. By the time the 7th Division closed up on Damour, the worst of the threat from above had been pushed back.

 On the coast, the advance ground forward through the seaside towns, taking  Sidon and pushing on toward the river line that mattered most. Every kilometer of the shore road had to be paid for. By the first days of July, the 7th Division had closed up on the gorge at Damour, the last real barrier between them and Beirut.

What waited there was going to make the Litani and Merdjayoun look like a warm-up. The Australians could see the high ground on the far side and knew more or less what climbing into it was going to cost. Damour sat 30 km south of Beirut, a town of red-tiled houses and banana plantations on high ground above the river gorge.

 The Damour River ran fast and cold at the bottom of a deep cut, and every approach to it was covered by guns the Vichy had spent weeks bedding in. Hold Damour and you held Beirut, and the Vichy command knew it. They packed the position with their best, the Legion among them, men who had no thought of surrender, and every intention of making the Australians pay for each meter of slope.

The 7th Division was ordered to take it by frontal assault across the gorge. The attack went in before first light on the 6th of July. Australian infantry climbed down into the gorge in the dark and waded the cold river, then started up the far cliffs with the enemy directly above them. Engineers strung signal lines across behind them so  the guns could be brought to bear.

Artillery from the rear ranges hammered the high ground while the infantry climbed up into their own falling shells,  trusting the gunners not to drop a round short. By dawn, small parties of Australians were over the river and clinging to the slopes below the  town, and the Vichy guns opened up to throw them back into the gorge.

 Keeping those guns talking to the infantry meant keeping the telephone lines alive, and the lines kept getting cut by shellfire as fast as they were laid. A young gunner lieutenant named Roden Cutler spent the battle out in the open mending them, crawling along the wire under fire to splice the breaks so the artillery wouldn’t go blind at the worst moment.

 He’d already built a reputation across the campaign in doing exactly this kind of work in the fighting at Merdjayoun. At Damour, his luck ran out. A shell caught him and tore his leg apart, and he lay out on the bare slope where no stretcher could reach him. It took 26 hours before anyone could get him off that hillside. By the time they did, the wound had turned septic, and the surgeons had no choice but to take the leg.

 Cutler lived and was given the Victoria Cross, the second of the campaign. Years later, he’d serve as the governor of New South Wales, a one-legged old gunner shaking hands at official functions, almost none of whose guests had any notion of what he’d done on a slope in Lebanon, or that the country had fought a war there at all.

For now, though, the battle for Damour was still going on above where he lay.  Getting the wounded out of that gorge was its own battle. The stretcher party spent the days of the fighting carrying men back down the cliffs the infantry had just climbed, working in the open while the Vichy guns searched the slopes.

Nobody was left where he fell if there was any way at all to reach him. Men who’d been hit lay out for hours waiting their turn, and the bearers went back up for them again and again under the same fire that had put them there. It was the quiet, unglamorous work that held the 7th Division together, and there were no medals waiting at the bottom of the gorge for the men who did it.

 The Australians wouldn’t be thrown back. Over the next 3 days, they fought their way up out of the gorge  and into the plantations and the streets beyond, clearing the houses one at a time and beating off the Vichy counterattacks that kept coming in against them. On the 9th of July, the town fell. The strongest position the Vichy had on the whole coast wasn’t there anymore, and the shore road north to Beirut lay open.

With Damour gone, the defense of Lebanon began to come apart at the seams,  and the men who’d been told to hold to the last started looking for a way out. 10 km up that road sat Beirut, and the Vichy commander in the Levant, General Henri Dentz, could read the board in front of him. His coast was broken, the interior towns were falling  to the British and Indians, and there was no help coming from a France that answered to Germany.

On the 10th of July, the day after Damour, Dentz asked for terms. The shooting didn’t stop all at once, but the campaign had been decided on the slopes  above the river. The 5 weeks of fighting that nobody at home knew about were nearly done. A ceasefire came into force a minute after midnight on the 12th  of July, and the formal armistice was signed at Acre on the Palestine coast 2 days after that.

The bill for the 7th division and the Australians beside it was a heavy one. 416 Australians lost their lives in 5 weeks against an enemy the public had never properly been told they were fighting. Another 1,136 were wounded. Men like Cutler who’d carry the campaign in their bodies for the rest of their days.

Against that cost, the German back door into the Middle East had been slammed shut, and it stayed shut for the rest of the war. When it was over, the scale of what they’d beaten came clear. Tens of thousands of Vichy troops laid down their arms across Syria and Lebanon. Given the choice between joining the Free French and sailing home to occupied France, the large majority chose to go home, boarding ships for a country still under the German boot rather than turn their coats.

It said something about how strange this war  inside a war had been. The Australians watched their late enemy sail away and turned to the business of holding a country they’d just taken. For the 7th division, Damour was nearly the end of one war and the start of another. Within half a year, Japan was in the fight, and the same battalions that had forced the Litani and climbed the Damour gorge were shipped  home to meet the new enemy.

Within a year of Damour, they were bleeding on the Kokoda Track in New Guinea.  Syria became the campaign they’d fought on the way to the one everyone would remember. The men who’d done it went straight into a harder war and rarely spoke of the French one again. That was the strange thing about it.

 For all the silence, the campaign had done its job and done it completely. With Syria and Lebanon in Allied hands, the approaches to Suez and the oil fields were safe behind a friendly border, and the Germans never got the airbases near Palestine they’d been reaching for. It was one of the few clean-finished victories the British Empire could point to in that bleak stretch of the war.

 And it vanished from view almost the moment it was won. The first reason was simple bad timing. Three weeks into the campaign on the 22nd of June, Hitler had turned east and invaded the Soviet Union. Overnight the war had a vast new front and a body count to match, and the headlines went to Russia and stayed there.

 A short, hard fight in Lebanon couldn’t compete with millions of men locked together across a thousand kilometers of step. The Australians who’d just taken Damour found their war had already been pushed off the front page while they were still bleeding for it. The second reason ran deeper, and it was the one that stung. London found the whole affair embarrassing and chose to bury it.

Beating the Germans was a story you could tell. A public song and dance about Australians and Britons gunning down Frenchmen sat very badly while the same governments were trying to build up the Free French as partners for the long  war still ahead. So, the campaign was played down on purpose.

 The newsreels and the front pages went to easier subjects, and the soldiers who’d fought it came to be known among themselves  as the silent men. They’d won, and they’d been asked to keep quiet about winning. The diggers who’d fought in Syria found that almost nobody back home had heard of it. There was no parade for the climb out of the Damour Gorge, and no newsreel of the river crossing at the Litani.

Other campaigns got the memorials and the legends. Cutler went on to a long public life with one leg and a Victoria Cross most people couldn’t quite place. Jim Gordon went quiet about the machine gun at Jezzine, the way he’d been quiet about it from the start. The men who’d fought France in 1941 mostly just let it lie, and the war moved on without them.