The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (319 page)

Why did he stay? He appears to have had several motives. His hatred of the British lay deep; he believed that for Frenchmen, there was no difference between England (as the French always called Britain) and Germany; Pétain was offering him power; and he was convinced that the Nazis would win the war. He told Ambassador Bullitt that he was “certain that Great Britain would be conquered by Germany within five weeks unless Great Britain should surrender sooner.” When Bullitt remarked that Darlan seemed pleased by that prospect, he smiled and nodded in agreement. As for his promises, he preserved honor, at least in his own eyes, by resigning his commission and taking office as Pétain’s minister of marine. It was now his duty to enforce the policies of the new government whether he approved of them or not.
¹²⁷

As late as June 22, first sea lord Admiral Dudley Pound told the War Cabinet that Darlan was taking “all possible steps” to prevent his ships from falling into Nazi hands. Churchill believed that they could not rely on one man’s word, because the issue was “so vital to the safety of the whole British Empire.” Within hours he was vindicated. At 6:50
P.M.
they learned the terms of the armistice on June 22. The French had signed it without consulting their ally. Article VIII stipulated that the “French war fleet… will be assembled in ports to be specified and then demobilized and disarmed under German or Italian control.”

The British had been betrayed. The ships would be delivered into enemy hands while still fully armed. Hitler declared that Germany did not intend to use them during the war, but as the prime minister rhetorically asked Parliament: “What is the value of that? Ask half a dozen countries, what is the value of such a solemn assurance? Furthermore, the armistice could be voided at any time on any pretext of ‘non-observance.’ ”
¹²⁸

The French fleet formed but one part of a much larger story. With the French surrender, the British naval blockade of the Baltic—the closing of the Skagerrak and Kattegat Straits to German ships—was broken. The Germans now held European ports from Norway through Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and France to the Bay of Biscay. The German capture of the Channel ports—Dieppe, Cherbourg, Brest, St-Nazaire, La Rochelle,
Le Havre, and Lorient—had changed the entire dynamic of the war. Operating from these ports the Reich’s submariners had to sail for only a day or two in order to reach British shipping lanes. Immediately the British ceased merchant sailings into or out of the Southwest Approaches, the sea-lanes that ran south of Ireland and into the Irish Sea, to Bristol and Liverpool. That left the Northwest Approaches—the sea-lanes between Northern Ireland and Scotland—as the only route into Britain.

Peril also loomed in the Mediterranean, where the French navy had been charged with securing the western part of that sea. The French navy was no longer a factor, unless it fell into the hands of the Germans and Italians, and that, Churchill later wrote, would confront “Great Britain with mortal danger.” To fill the void left by the French in the western Mediterranean, the British drew heavily from the Home Fleet—itself preparing against possible invasion—to create Force H at Gibraltar, a powerful fleet of battleships, an aircraft carrier, and numerous cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. The commander of Force H, Vice Admiral James Somerville, was given three objectives: keep the Germans out of the Mediterranean, keep the Italians in, and impose a naval blockade on Vichy France and its northwest African dominions. But how to remove the French fleet from the equation?
¹²⁹

Churchill found himself confronted, he later wrote, with “a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned.” There was no easy solution, although some thought so; on June 25, George Bernard Shaw wrote to him: “Why not declare war on France and capture her fleet (which would gladly strike its colors to us) before A.H. recovers his breath? Surely that is the logic of the situation?” Churchill knew the French fleet would gladly do no such thing, and any use of force to cripple it would enrage Vichy. Yet as the British blockade of Vichy tightened, French hostility would become inevitable anyway. Therefore the War Cabinet, with Churchill the apostle of force majeure, approved an operation that, in his words, would comprise “the simultaneous seizure, control, or effective disablement of all the accessible French fleet.” Accessible were ships now in English waters and those anchored at Alexandria, the Algerian city of Oran, and Dakar, in West Africa.
¹³⁰

The first phase of the British action was code-named Operation Grasp. In the early hours of July 3, armed boarding parties took over all French vessels in the ports of Portsmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, Southampton, and Sheerness. There was virtually no resistance; one French and one English sailor were killed when the crew of the French submarine
Surcouf
disputed the issue. Surprise was complete, and the ease with which the French ships were taken demonstrated, as the prime minister pointed out, “how easily the Germans could have taken possession of any French ships lying in ports which they controlled.”
¹³¹

The second phase, Operation Catapult, was more difficult. The P.M. called it “the deadly stroke… in the western Mediterranean.” In the eastern Mediterranean, at Alexandria, they were lucky. Darlan ordered Vice Admiral René Godfroy to sail his ships to the French-held North African Bizerte; simultaneously, Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham (“ABC” to his friends), commander in chief of Royal Navy Mediterranean operations, was ordered to stop him. The two admirals, good friends, settled the issue by a gentleman’s agreement: Godfroy discharged his fuel oil and placed the breechblocks of his guns and the warheads of his torpedoes in custody of the French consul ashore, with the British consul as co-trustee. All parties signed a formal agreement, thus achieving Cunningham’s objective without violating Godfroy’s honor.
¹³²

It was very different at Mers-el-Kébir, the naval base three miles west of Oran. Much of the French Atlantic squadron was anchored here, including two battleships and two modern battle cruisers, the
Dunkerque
and the
Strasbourg,
built by the French to counter the German battle cruisers
Gneisenau
and
Scharnhorst,
which had proven their deadliness when they mauled the British off Norway.
Dunkerque
and
Strasbourg
could not be allowed to fall into German hands. The French commander, Vice Admiral Marcel Gensoul, had been alerted and told to be wary of the British. Admiral Pound said the only way to destroy them would be “in a surprise attack carried out at dawn and without any form of prior notification.” But that was impossible. Catapult was asking a lot of Royal Navy officers as it was; just a week earlier the French had been their comrades. They could not be expected to open fire on them without warning. Thus the task given Vice Admiral Somerville was both difficult and delicate.

He arrived off Mers-el-Kébir shortly after 9:00
A.M.
on July 3 with the battleships
Valiant
and
Resolution,
the venerable and feared battle cruiser
Hood,
two cruisers, eleven destroyers, and the aircraft carrier
Ark Royal.
Somerville gave Gensoul four choices. He could sail with the Royal Navy against Nazi Germany and Italy; he could sail to a British port; he could sail to a French colonial port or the United States, where the ships would be disarmed for the duration; or he could sink his vessels within the next six hours. Failing these, Somerville’s message ended, “I have orders from His Majesty’s Government to use whatever force may be necessary to prevent your ships from falling into German or Italian hands.”
¹³³

Eight hours of palaver followed. Gensoul said that under no circumstances would he permit his crafts to be taken intact by the Nazis, who, until now, had been their common enemies. Faced with an ultimatum, however, he would defend himself by force. Somerville radioed London that the French showed no signs of leaving their harbor. Churchill, speaking through the Admiralty, told him to get on with it, to do his duty, distasteful
though it was. Somerville gave Gensoul a series of deadlines, telling the Admiralty that the French were awaiting instructions from their government and that he was having problems with French mines. However, as the afternoon waned, he realized that the French admiral was stalling while he gathered steam, putting his vessels in an advanced state of readiness for sea. Then British intelligence intercepted messages to Mers-el-Kébir from the new French government. Darlan was ordering Gensoul to “answer force with force.” He had informed the Germans of what was going on, and he told Gensoul that all French ships in the Mediterranean were on their way. The Admiralty radioed Somerville: “Settle the matter quickly or you may have French reinforcements to deal with.”
¹³⁴

At 5:55
P.M.
the British admiral issued the order to open fire. Within ten minutes one French battleship had blown up, and the other was beached. The
Dunkerque
had run aground—torpedo bombers from the
Ark Royal
finished her off—and 1,250 French sailors were dead. Only the
Strasbourg
had escaped, making smoke and fleeing into the gathering darkness.
¹³⁵

Mers-el-Kébir was the culmination of nearly eight weeks of increasing disappointment and distrust between the two former allies. Pétain’s government was apoplectic. Darlan vowed revenge. Pierre Laval, the new minister of foreign affairs in the Vichy government, whose tarnished star was rising in the Nazi sun over Vichy, called for a declaration of war on England. Baudouin disparaged Britain’s war effort and blamed the war on the English. Pétain broke off diplomatic relations with Britain, and the long, sad epic of his État Français’s collaboration with the Germans began. Some French warships, including the battleship
Richelieu,
took refuge at Dakar; the rest—three battleships, seven heavy cruisers, sixteen submarines, eighteen destroyers, and a dozen torpedo boats, almost one-third of the prewar French navy—sailed to the naval base at Toulon. There, for the next twenty-nine months, the fleet rode at anchor.

In England the action at Mers-el-Kébir was wildly cheered. Gallup found that confidence in the prime minister rose to 89 percent—at Chamberlain’s peak it had been 69 percent. Francophobia had not been so intense since the Napoleonic years. Even as the guns fell silent off Algeria, Britain learned that Vichy had quashed Reynaud’s assurance that the 400 Luftwaffe pilots who had become Allied prisoners would be sent to Britain, and were instead on their way back to Germany. In the House of Commons Churchill said: “I leave the judgment of our action, with confidence, to Parliament. I leave it to the nation, and I leave it to the United States. I leave it to the world and history.”
¹³⁶

Suddenly every MP was on his feet. Jock Colville noted in his diary: “He told the whole story of Oran and the House listened enthralled and amazed. Gasps of surprise were audible, but it was clear the House unanimously
approved.” Hugh Dalton wrote: “At the end we gave him a much louder and longer ovation than he, or Chamberlain or anyone else, had yet had during this war.” Harold Nicolson noted: “The House is at first saddened by this odious attack but is fortified by Winston’s speech. The grand finale ends in an ovation, with Winston sitting there with the tears pouring down his cheeks.”
¹³⁷

Curiously, the most bitter dissent was heard in the Admiralty. All the flag officers who had participated in Catapult agreed with Cunningham that the attack had been “an act of sheer treachery which was as injudicious as it was unnecessary” and was “almost inept in its unwisdom.” What they failed to grasp was that Mers-el-Kébir was not just a military action. Churchill’s objective, which he reached, was far greater. Later he tried to explain it to Cordell Hull, who thought it a “tragic blunder.” As Hull, an anti-imperialist who harbored a smoldering distrust of Churchill’s ultimate motives, set it down, Churchill told him that “since many people throughout the world believed that Britain was about to surrender, he had wanted by this action to show that she still meant to fight.”

That was the crux. In little more than two years, the Nazis had seized or conquered Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and France, and they had done it almost effortlessly. To millions, resistance seemed futile, even suicidal. On May 15, America’s ambassador, Joseph P. Kennedy, had informed President Roosevelt that Britain was finished, and that the end would come soon; he expected the Germans in London within a month. The British people didn’t think so. In May a Gallup poll found that 3 percent of them thought they might lose the war—by the end of July the percentage was so small it was immeasurable. Their King spoke for them when he wrote Queen Mary: “Personally, I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to and to pamper.” Though abroad his kingdom seemed doomed, at home Mers-el-Kébir ended talk of a British surrender. The prime minister was particularly anxious about the view in Washington. To his great relief Roosevelt approved, believing, he said, that if there was one chance in a hundred that France’s warships might fall into German hands, the attack was justified. Seven months later, Harry Hopkins, arriving in London as the President’s emissary, told Colville that “it was Oran which convinced President Roosevelt, in spite of opinions to the contrary, that the British would go on fighting, as Churchill had promised, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.”
¹³⁸