Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · British Mandate Emirate

Transjordan - September 1, 1939

Transjordan in 1939 is the smallest and quietest piece of the British Middle East, and one of the most useful. The Emirate is barely three hundred thousand people spread over a plateau and a great deal of desert, governed from Amman by Abdullah bin al-Hussein, the Hashemite prince who arrived in 1921 on his way to reclaim Damascus and was persuaded by Britain to stop where he was and be given a country instead. It is a mandate territory: London holds the mandate, pays the subsidy that keeps the administration alive, and speaks through a British Resident whose advice is not optional. What Abdullah has built with that arrangement is a functioning tribal monarchy, a working relationship with the bedouin confederations that had ignored every previous government, and the Arab Legion - a small, disciplined, largely bedouin force that will finish the war with a reputation better than that of any other Arab army. The strategic identity is the corridor: a country whose importance is entirely a matter of what crosses it.

Starting position

The starting board is position, loyalty and dependence. Transjordan sits between the Palestine mandate to the west, French Syria to the north, Iraq to the east and the new Saudi kingdom to the south, and every route between them runs through it: the Hejaz railway from Damascus toward Medina, the desert road and air route from Palestine to Baghdad, and - the piece that makes a small emirate matter to a naval power - the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline carrying Kirkuk crude across the plateau to the refineries and tanker berths at Haifa. The army is the Arab Legion under John Bagot Glubb, who takes command in 1939 and who has spent a decade converting the raiding tribes of the desert into the Desert Patrol; it is a few thousand men, but they are the only force in the region recruited from the people they police and trusted by them. Revenue is British money and very little else - no oil, no port, no industry, thin agriculture on the Ajlun and Balqa uplands and a phosphate deposit nobody is yet working seriously. West of the Jordan the Palestine revolt has been burning since 1936, and Abdullah's position on it is careful to the point of ambiguity. The pieces are a corridor, a pipeline, a good small army and a patron who pays.

What turns the campaign

The war does not come to Transjordan; Transjordan is what the war has to cross. The immediate value is negative security - keeping the pipeline intact, the Baghdad road open and the desert frontier quiet while Britain fights elsewhere - and the emirate delivers it. The moment of decision arrives in the spring of 1941, and it is the making of the position. Rashid Ali's coup in Baghdad puts a hostile government astride the pipeline's other end with German aircraft flying in through Vichy Syria; Britain's response is improvised, and Habforce, the column that drives east to relieve the airbase at Habbaniya and then take Baghdad, has the Arab Legion's mechanised companies in front of it. Weeks later the same troops go north into the Syria and Lebanon campaign against Vichy. Abdullah is the only Arab ruler who commits without hedging, and he does it at a moment when it is not at all clear Britain is winning. The campaign turns on that calculation - whether a client state with no independent means should spend its one asset early and be paid in standing, or hoard it and be treated as furniture. Underneath sits Abdullah's real ambition, which is not Transjordan at all: the Greater Syria project, the throne in Damascus, and after 1939 an increasingly explicit interest in whatever is left of Palestine when the mandate ends.

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