Churchill 1940-1945: Under Friendly Fire

by Walter Reid

  De Gaulle was to cause immense irritation, often by extraordinarily petty obstructiveness. When he arrived in London on 17 June, calling himself the leader of the ‘Free French’, he presented Churchill with an immediate difficulty. De Gaulle was persona non grata with Vichy and indeed he was shortly to be condemned to death in absentia for failing to carry out orders. The joke in London at the time was that if he returned to France, all de Gaulle would again be divided into three parts.

  Contact continued with the new regime at Vichy, which Britain still regarded as the best means of contesting German occupation. There was accordingly considerable hostility to de Gaulle within the British government and Foreign Office. It was very much Church-ill’s personal decision to take the initiative to recognise him formally and to give military support to the Free French. Spears was the catalyst in the process of inducing Churchill to take this initiative: the Cabinet in the Prime Minister’s absence had already agreed to follow the Foreign Office line: de Gaulle was not to be allowed to broadcast to France. In the event the famous broadcast of 18 June 1940, a call to arms made above the heads of the present leaders of France, and serving to underscore their ignominy, was one of the great propaganda moments of the war – not so much for its immediate effect, which was limited, but as a historic waypoint. It was also a decisive moment for de Gaulle: ‘At the age of forty-nine I was entering upon adventure, like a man thrown by fate outside all terms of reference’.3

  Outside the Foreign Office there was popular support in Britain for de Gaulle and the Free French. From the Royal Family to the scores of unknown widows who sent their wedding rings so that the gold might be used to fund his cause, there were manifestations of solidarity. Churchill was at the front of this. He made a highly supportive speech in the Commons on 20 August and in the course of the summer repeatedly pushed and prodded to ensure that the Frenchman received the supplies he needed and that his requests were not met with official obstruction. At this stage in their relationship, Churchill respected the one Frenchman whose resolution, as he saw it, matched his own. To the end of his life, even when de Gaulle was at his worst in terms of petty vindictiveness, he could be moved to tears by the idea that this man had supported him when he was alone in 1940. De Gaulle’s unalterable cast of mind would not have allowed him to do anything else.

  In the aftermath of Dunkirk Churchill had to consider the implications of the divorce from France. About 120,000 French troops had been rescued at the fall of France and brought back to Britain. It was hoped that they would join the fight for freedom in a Free French army; but given the choice of doing so or being repatriated in accordance with international law, almost all chose to return to their defeated homeland: only some 4,000 stayed to fight with de Gaulle, and a further 1,500 to remain in the Free French Navy. The loss of so many trained troops was a blow to Britain’s war effort, and gives the lie to the Gaullist myth so sedulously propagated after the war that France had saved herself by her own efforts.

  Only a small part of the French fleet was in British ports when France capitulated, two battleships and five destroyers within the UK and one battleship and four cruisers at Alexandria, plus, in both cases, a number of minor craft. The bulk of the French fleet was at Casablanca and at Mers-el-Kébir and Oran. There were also substantial numbers of cruisers in Algiers and Toulon. Pétain and Admiral Darlan had told Britain that no French warships would be allowed to fall into Axis hands, and indeed Darlan had ordered his captains to scuttle rather than surrender. But, Francophile though he was, Churchill could not rely on these promises. The terms of the French Armistice were only prised out of the French by Sir Ronald Campbell, the British ambassador, with difficulty. They were not reassuring. Article 8 provided that the fleet was to be demobilised and disarmed under German or Italian supervision, and little weight could be attached to a ‘solemn assurance’ that the vessels would not be used for Germany’s own purposes.

  The options that were offered to the French were generous: they could continue the war either as part of the Royal Navy or part of the Free French Navy, sail their ships to British or French West Indian ports with reduced crews or scuttle. The ultimatum was reported to Vichy by Gensoul, the French Admiral at Mers-el-Kébir, in crudely simplified terms: he had six hours to sink his ships or see them destroyed. Vichy declined to comply and Britain had no choice but to use force. Some 47 French officers and 1,250 sailors were killed, with 351 wounded.

  The damage the incident caused has lasted for generations in the French mind. Its immediate effect was that Vichy carried out an air raid on Gibraltar and broke off diplomatic relations with Britain (though Vichy France was still not at war with Britain). Even Churchill’s admirals were gratuitously unsupportive. Admiral Somerville, who had opened fire at 17.45 on 3 July described it as ‘a filthy job’, and Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, Flag Officer, North Atlantic, referred to it as a ‘ghastly error’. They and Admiral Sir Dudley North, the third admiral involved, never wavered in their belief that the use of force was unnecessary and mistaken.4

  The attitude of the admirals has to be contrasted with that of the most sensitive Frenchman in the world. De Gaulle was furious when he heard the news and he always resented what he considered to be British glorification of the event, but after only a few hours Spears found him very calm and objective, seeing things in perspective. What Britain had done was inevitable from Britain’s point of view.5 In a broadcast to France on 8 July, de Gaulle went even further: ‘There cannot be the slightest doubt that, on principle and of necessity, the enemy would have used [the French fleet] either against Britain or against our own Empire. I therefore have no hesitation in saying that they are better destroyed’.6 In December 1940, lunching at Chequers, he went further and said that if Britain made more of the fact that she was standing alone, ‘Oran would seem natural, because the world was at stake’.7

  The matter was not well handled. Gensoul could never later explain how it came about that he relayed the British ultimatum to his superiors in such a misleading form. On the British side, too, there were strange errors. Negotiations in this most delicate of matters were entrusted to Captain C.S. Holland, an officer who had been marked out earlier as having a ‘judgement about French officers [that] had become gravely impaired’,8 and a signal from Pound to Somerville authorising the acceptance of demilitarisation of the French ships was vetoed by the War Cabinet on the strange grounds that ‘this would look like weakening’: a decision that cost great numbers of lives and poisoned relations with the French. Gensoul had already said he too could accept demilitarisation.

  There were echoes of this distance between the War Cabinet and the naval chiefs in the way that the French navy holed up in Alexandria was handled. Here the British admiral on the spot was Andrew Cunningham. He dealt with his opposite number, Admiral Godfroy, with very great skill, understanding and sensitivity. He was a man of great confidence, and that allowed him, amongst other things, quite simply to ignore one of the unhelpful signals he received from London. He described a signal which ended with the crass words, ‘Do not (repeat) NOT fail’, as ‘a perfect example of the type of signal which should never be made’.9 He argued and delayed and used his judgement, and at the end of the day, and despite the interventions from London, he resolved the problem without bloodshed or ill feeling. To do them justice, Pound and Alexander, the First Lord, sent him a generous tribute: ‘Most sincere congratulations on complete success of your negotiations’. And the Prime Minister ‘also wishes his congratulations to be sent to you’. But Churchill said later that Cunningham had been ‘too pussy-foot’ in his dealings with Godfroy,10 in contrast to the more forthright approach in the case of Mers-el-Kébir.

  The Mers-el-Kébir decision, which Churchill had described as a terrible one ‘like taking the life of one’s child to save the State’, was of course a cruel necessity. The admirals on the spot who for the rest of their lives deprecated action which they regarded as unnecessary may have been too close to the spot to compreh
end the larger implications of events. If the French fleet had fallen into German hands, Britain would have lost the Battle of the Atlantic and almost certainly the war itself. The imperative was all the greater as while Gensoul was treating with the British, the French admiralty ordered all their battleships en clair to converge on Mers-el-Kébir to reinforce him.11 ‘Settle everything before dark’, said Churchill, ‘or you will have reinforcements to deal with’.

  The Mers-el-Kébir decision was very much Churchill’s own, made on his reading of the overall situation. It caused him great pain.12 A Chiefs of Staff opinion of 24 June had to be reversed at his demand, and he ignored the unanimous view of a conference of flag officers at Gibraltar, which followed a meeting between North and Gensoul at Mers-el-Kébir.

  Then and later the navy made much of the fact that Darlan had ordered that the fleet would be scuttled rather than handed over to the Germans. Churchill could not rely on a Vichy promise. Later Darlan was to allow Germany to take military supplies across Syria to assist opposition to Britain in Iraq. Churchill described him as ‘a bad man with a narrow outlook and a shifty eye. A naval crook is usually a bad sort of crook.’

  As had been hoped, Churchill’s resoluteness convinced Roosevelt that Britain really did intend to fight on and that material assistance given to Britain would not ultimately be delivered to Germany. The House of Commons was also impressed by his determination.

  It was indeed when Churchill reported the incident to the Commons that Margesson brought the Conservatives to their feet for the first time. When Churchill told the Commons that ‘we shall not fail in our duty, however painful,’ members rose to their feet in applause. But Margesson was responding as well as directing. There was a new mood amongst all Members of the House, who saw, perhaps for the first time, the resolve and determination at the heart of the direction of events. Their reaction was both unexpected and overwhelming. The speech was punctuated by gasps of surprise and endorsed with euphoric approval. Churchill left the House weeping, saying, ‘This is heartbreaking to me’.13 Eric Seal, one of the Prime Minister’s Private Secretaries, wrote home the next day: ‘It was a tremendous success. The scene at the end was quite awe-inspiring – the whole crowded House rose & cheered for a full two minutes … The PM was quite upset. He went quite pink and there were certainly tears in his eyes. What it was all about I still don’t really know. The speech was good, but not better than the others; & the occasion – the outbreak of hostilities with our old ally – hardly one for rejoicing.’14

  After Mers-el-Kébir French warships in British ports were seized by the Admiralty. The crews were given the chance of fighting alongside the British, but as usual the majority chose to go back to France: a disappointment always to de Gaulle.

  The dubious quality of the Free French allies was shortly underlined in Operation MENACE, the expedition to Dakar in September 1940. The operation had originally been conceived as a blockade of French warships at Casablanca. In the event, most of the fleet had been able to escape to Dakar. De Gaulle misread the situation and thought that the operation could simply be diverted to that port. When it transpired that there were Vichy cruisers in the region Churchill decided on cancellation, but again de Gaulle was unduly optimistic. Churchill gave way.

  The operation was a complete failure. First of all there was a woeful lack of security on the part of the Free French before they left England. The French officers notoriously enjoyed passing on news of their adventures and plans in the cocktail bars of West End hotels, and there were German agents even within their own numbers. It was reported that in a Liverpool restaurant toasts had been given to ‘Dakar’, and de Gaulle publicly went off to Simpson’s in Piccadilly to buy his tropical kit. Increasingly it proved necessary to withhold information from the French, and, to his exasperation, even from de Gaulle.

  Secondly, it emerged that at Dakar there simply was not the sympathy for de Gaulle which he had expected. He had not helped by broadcasting in advance and alerting the authorities to his arrival. There were no defections to him and the Vichy forces defended the port vigorously.

  Finally, the expedition was thoroughly badly organised, and contact was lost between the French and the British Admiral John Cunningham (not to be confused with Admiral Andrew B. Cunningham, ‘ABC’, who confuses matters further by being the brother of General Alan Cunningham).

  Dakar caused much criticism of the government in the country. The Prime Minister was so stung by coverage in the press, the Sunday Pictorial and the Daily Mirror in particular, that he proposed to the War Cabinet that the newspapers should be prosecuted.

  The immediate purpose of these articles seemed to be to affect the discipline of the Army, to attempt to shake the stability of the Government, and to make trouble between the Government and organised labour. In his considered judgement there was far more behind these articles than disgruntlement and frayed nerves. They stood for something most dangerous and sinister, namely, an attempt to bring about a situation in which the country would be ready for a surrender peace [sic]. It was not right that anyone bearing his heavy responsibilities should have to submit to attacks of this nature upon his Government.15

  Fortunately the War Cabinet vetoed prosecution.

  There were attacks in Parliament too, where Churchill generously defended de Gaulle and declared that the Free French deserved Britain’s continued support. At this time the Free French were not obviously and inevitably the image of France defiant and destined to revive. They were rather a maverick bunch of very dubious quality. De Gaulle himself was a very junior officer – his initial rank of brigadier-general equated to that of a British brigadier – and with little political experience as junior minister just before the fall of France.

  Churchill’s advocacy saved the Free French in Britain, but Dakar did them great damage in the United States, where Roosevelt was not alone in seeing de Gaulle as unreliable and unstable, and very much Churchill’s puppet. This view coloured American relations with de Gaulle throughout the war, and also her attitude to Vichy, which she regarded as the legitimate government of France and altogether a much more attractive option. Dakar proved the excuse for keeping the Free French out of the loop and at a distance.

  Despite Churchill’s commitment to de Gaulle and his Free French, contacts continued with Vichy – not least because contacts also continued between Vichy and Germany. In the summer of 1940 Laval and Darlan threatened to transfer what remained of the French fleet, together with French bases, to Germany: indeed, they wanted a declaration of war on Britain. Britain responded with delicate negotiations, some direct from Churchill to Pétain, some through the intermediary contact of Professor Louis Rougier, and some via Sir Samuel Hoare and the Madrid Embassy. All of this was profoundly unacceptable to de Gaulle, who believed that Darlan might well carry out his threat or even use the French fleet directly against Britain. ‘La France ne marchera pas, mais la flotte peut-être.’16 For him, ‘[t]he mere fact that the Vichy government exists under the present conditions represents in the eyes of the Free French an injury to the honour and the interests of France for which there is no possible justification’.

  10

  Sailors, Airmen and Soldiers

  At the Admiralty Churchill had not thought much of the senior officers he had dealt with, and they were equally unimpressed by him. Throughout the war the admirals proved to be a rather ungovernable collection, secure in their professional conservatism and always armed with what Churchill saw as technical obfuscations.

  One casualty of the Dakar disaster was Admiral Sir Dudley North. He allowed the French fleet to escape through the Straits of Gibraltar on 11 September, and his stock had fallen as a result of his protest about Mers-el-Kébir. He had taken the trouble to report ill feeling about the operation at Gibraltar and within the fleet. The immediate result was to anger the First Lord, A.V. Alexander, who told Churchill that he had proposed to Pound that North be dismissed. Alexander beefed up a signal from Pound to North, to read that, ‘
opinions of senior officers are always of value before an operation takes place … [But t]heir Lordships deprecate comments on a policy which has been decided on by the Admiralty in the light of factors which were unknown to officers on the spot.’ A very reasonable position. Churchill’s own view was that ‘It is evident that Admiral Dudley North has not got the root of the matter in him, and I should be very glad to see you replace him by a more resolute and clear-sighted officer’.1 For the moment Pound felt that there were not adequate grounds for dismissal, but North’s days were limited, and very soon he went.

  The circumstances surrounding his departure post-Dakar are a little strange: he handled MENACE badly, but not that badly. His dismissal, and the refusal to allow an official inquiry into it, was resented by many fellow officers, and the admirals generally felt that Pound was altogether too ready to comply with Churchill’s wishes. Suspicions persisted that he had been unfairly dismissed on Churchill’s instructions, although Churchill denied this in a letter to North of 7 June 1948, and North himself pressed after the war for an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his dismissal. Such an inquiry never took place, but Macmillan investigated the matter in 1957 and concluded that North had not been ‘the victim of Service or political prejudice’.

  It is probably the case that his dismissal was not directly engineered politically – at least not by Churchill. There was prejudice against him within the service, as well as specifically on the part of Pound, who was unimpressed by the fact that in MENACE North had simply waited for instructions without putting himself into a position in which he could carry them out. ‘How can I continue to place reliance on a Flag Officer who does not act because he is waiting for instructions?’ But mitigating factors were ignored. Pound’s tendency to look for scapegoats was well known.