The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  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

  Most, including Hitler, believed Churchill’s declaration to fight on alone applied only to the defense of England. But Churchill intended as well to take the fight to Hitler. He told Britons many times in coming months that Hitler must break the Home Island in order to win the war. Actually, Churchill knew there was another way—in another place—for Hitler to win, one that would negate the need for an all-or-nothing invasion of England. It was also the place that afforded Churchill the best chance to take the fight to Hitler’s ally and, if Hitler came to his ally’s assistance, to Hitler himself. Where all Britons that summer scanned the seas and the skies overhead, Churchill looked far further, to the place he believed the war would be decided: the Mediterranean Sea.

  The Mediterranean lay at the center of Churchill’s strategic vision, as it had for the ancient Romans, and as it now did for Mussolini. Churchill later called the Medit
erranean “the hinge of fate” upon which the outcome of the war turned. Many in the German navy and Luftwaffe high command understood this. Later in the summer the commander in chief of the German navy, Grossadmiral Erich Raeder, told Hitler in private that “the British have always considered the Mediterranean the pivot of their world empire.” Raeder believed clearing the British from the Mediterranean would sever England from its Empire and force London to come to terms, if the U-boat blockade did not bring Britain to its knees first. Churchill believed likewise. But Churchill not only saw danger in the Mediterranean, he saw opportunity, the only opportunity for Britain to go on the offensive, by sea, air, and on land. This, Churchill intended to do. His war strategy can be summed up thus: defend England; defend and attack in the Mediterranean.139

  Since the time of the Caesars, dominance of the Mediterranean—mare nostrum—had been vital to Italian security. The Mediterranean between Sicily and Tripoli, a distance of about 300 miles, was to Rome what the English Channel and the Northwest Approaches were to London. Malta, a British possession since 1814, and home to a Royal Navy fleet, sits directly astride the sea routes from Italy to its North Africa colonies. The main island of Malta, 95 square miles of Tertiary limestone, rises from the sea 100 miles south of Sicily and about 200 miles northeast of Tripoli. The nearest British naval base, in Alexandria, lay almost 1,000 miles to the east, Gibraltar 1,100 miles to the west. When France fell, the entire British air presence on Malta consisted of three obsolete Gloster Gladiator biplanes, dubbed Faith, Hope, and Charity by their pilots. A fourth Gladiator was stripped for spare parts. Gibraltar and the Suez Canal are the main portals into the Mediterranean, but Malta since the time of Nelson had been the geographical key to free run of the sea. The harbor at Valletta was the only British deepwater port between the anchorages at Gibraltar and Alexandria, and therefore critical to the Royal Navy, almost as vital as Scapa Flow, the Scottish anchorage and main base of the Home Fleet.

  But the British, expecting at least an Italian air attack, if not a full-scale naval assault on Malta, moved their warships (but for submarines) from the naval base at Valletta to Alexandria, to help cover the eastern Mediterranean. Mussolini launched his first air raid on Malta on June 11, and never let up; he understood that only when he controlled the sea could his armies secure the perimeter. His navy of six battleships, nineteen cruisers, one hundred smaller vessels, and more than one hundred submarines was larger than the German navy, and larger than the combined British fleets at Gibraltar and Alexandria. Malta was so central to Churchill’s war strategy that he told the War Cabinet later in 1940 that if allocations of concrete for use in building coastal defenses had to be adjusted downward, it must not be done at the expense of three “vital” positions: The Home Island, Gibraltar, and Malta. Mussolini and Churchill (and Grand Admiral Raeder) knew that if the British lost Malta, the Mediterranean would become an Italian lake, and Gibraltar and the Suez Canal would become trapdoors to oblivion for the British. Mussolini, in his navy, had the way; whether he and his naval commanders had the will remained to be seen.140

  Italy, like Britain, was an imperial sea power. Its most prized colonial possessions, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, were just two days’ sail from Sicily. The Italian merchant fleet, protected by the Italian navy, served as the lifeline to those colonies, which in turn fed Italy. On June 10, 1940, the day Mussolini plunged his dagger into France, the Italian merchant fleet, at 3.5 million tons, was the fifth-largest in the world, behind the U.K. (18 million tons), the U.S. (12 million), Japan (5.5 million), and Norway (4.8 million). More than three-quarters of the Norwegian fleet—1,000 ships that were at sea when the Germans struck in April—now sailed in alliance with Britain. Mussolini’s rush to climb aboard Hitler’s war wagon resulted in one of the least noted but most significant shipping defeats of the entire war. On June 11, the day after Mussolini invaded France, his merchant fleet was reduced by 35 percent when 220 Italian freighters and tankers were seized in neutral ports worldwide. Mussolini had failed to call his merchant fleet home before his betrayal of France. He would never make up the loss. Churchill saw opportunity here. He believed the Italians would strike from Libya toward Cairo, but he also believed that Mussolini, with the loss of so much of his merchant shipping, could no longer support his African adventures. Two days after Dunkirk and four days before Mussolini struck, Churchill sent a memo to the Air Ministry: “It is of the highest importance that we should strike at Italy the moment war breaks out.” In the early fall Churchill told the House, “Signor Mussolini has some experiences ahead of him which he had not foreseen at the time when he thought it safe and profitable to stab the stricken and prostrate French Republic in the back.”141

  The possibility of a Nazi onslaught against the Home Island had first been raised at a Defence Committee meeting on May 20, when enemy panzers passed Amiens on their way to Abbéville, cutting off the BEF. After a brief discussion, chiefly about the lack of riflemen and rifle ammunition, eight Bren Guns—light machine guns—were manned in Whitehall, including the entrance to No. 10, and two more were placed above Admiralty Arch. They would have been useful only if Germans swarmed out of Buckingham Palace or Trafalgar Square. Three days later graver news from the Channel ports led to more realistic planning; Churchill alerted the Dominion prime ministers to the possibility of an “early heavy attack” on England and told his Chiefs of Staff that “some means of dealing with the enemy’s tanks”—he suggested land mines—might be found. By then the issue was judged to be serious. Martin Gilbert writes, “Invasion was now the dominant concern of those at the center of war policy. By the end of June it excluded virtually every thought in Englishmen’s heads.” In his diary Ironside wrote: “It is the weakness of waiting for an attack that preys upon people’s minds.” By then the French had surrendered to Italy, too, and RAF scouts were reporting the assembling of barges, lighters, and ferries in the ports of Belgium and northern France, and Whitehall knew that across the Channel, Nazi troops were singing, “We’re sailing against England.”142

  In Parliament Churchill first addressed the question of defense against invasion on June 4, as the Dunkirk evacuation was winding down. Yet, even at that early date, with British fortunes approaching their nadir, offense, not defense, underlay his strategic vision:

  The whole question of home defence against invasion is, of course, powerfully affected by the fact that we have for the time being in this Island incomparably more powerful military forces than we have ever had at any moment in this war or the last. But this will not continue. We shall not be content with a defensive war…. We have to reconstitute and build up the British Expeditionary Force once again…. All this is in train; but in the interval we must put our defenses in this Island into such a high state of organization that the fewest possible numbers will be required to give effective security and that the largest possible potential of offensive effort may be realized. On this we are now engaged.143

  Three weeks later, in a letter to South African prime minister Jan Smuts, a staunch British ally, Churchill made his offense-minded thoughts perfectly clear: “Obviously we have to repulse any attack on Great Britain by invasion.” He predicted that Hitler might turn toward Russia and “he may do so without trying invasion.” Then: “Our large army now being created for home defence is being formed on the principle of attack and opportunity, for large scale amphibious operations may come in 1940 and 1941.”144

  But for the time being he could attack Hitler only with words. His most eloquent challenge to the Nazis was delivered the day after the French laid down their arms. He spoke for thirty-six minutes, reading from twenty-three pages of typewritten notes. He foresaw a climax:

  What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned
on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.

  But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science.

  Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”145

  Later, Edward R. Murrow would say of Churchill: “Now, the hour had come for him to mobilize the English language and send it into battle.”

  It was as though a great bell had tolled, summoning Englishmen to sacrifice everything save honor in defense of their homeland and western civilization. The world beyond, other than the Empire, was deaf to it. Although listeners then and since took from Churchill’s words the impression that he was speaking about the bravery of Englishmen to Englishmen, he was not. He had chosen his words with care. He had not said that a thousand years hence, people would say this was England’s finest hour, but that it was the British Empire’s finest hour. Hitler had declared that his Reich would last one thousand years; Churchill had now claimed the same for his Empire. Each believed only one empire could survive. Neither considered the possibility that both might perish. Britain fought on that summer, alone in Europe—the Dominions and colonies too distant to offer meaningful help, yet with the Empire comprising one-quarter of the earth’s population, sturdy in its support of the Home Island. But the Empire—including India and the outliers of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—could not respond fast enough or with enough force to thwart Hitler. Only one Canadian division, withdrawn from France, was in Britain.