by Colin Smith
Chapter Three
It was not until February 1939, seven months before the start of the war, that Gort, now well into his arrangements for the second British Expeditionary Force in twenty years, felt he could no longer conceal from the French what the British contribution was likely to be. Their reaction was predictable. Size mattered. ‘France does not intend England to fight their battles with French soldiers,’ snapped Général Henri Dentz, deputy to Commander-in-Chief Gamelin and, at that stage, probably no more Anglophobic than the rest of the French High Command.
French public opinion, the British ambassador in Paris explained to his government, demanded a big British Army on French soil as proof of its commitment to their joint stand against Hitler. ‘It’s no use pointing out the size of our air force or navy,’ he said. US ambassador William Bullitt agreed. ‘The only great army on the side of decency is the French army,’ he informed President Roosevelt. ‘The British have even less of an army than we have.’
As it happened, while Bullitt and the French generals sniffed at Gort’s Lilliputian offerings, the sailors were getting on rather well. True, Amiral François Darlan, whose wife Berthe Morgan had some English ancestry, enjoyed reminding the British that his great-grandfather Antoine Darlan had been killed at Trafalgar aboard the Redoutable from whose topsails a sniper shot Nelson on his quarterdeck. But the commander of the French Navy was respected in London as the ambitious little man who was creating the most efficient Marine Française republican France had ever known.
At the beginning of 1937 Darlan had been the surprise appointment to the post, overtaking the favourite because he came from an unusually left-wing background for a senior serving officer and was therefore more acceptable to the ruling Popular Front. The Darlans were a long-established family of seafarers from the village of Podensac in south-west France, some 20 miles up the Garonne river from Bordeaux in the claret country from where the English have long imported their favourite wine.*
For several generations, when they were not serving their country, they made their living working river boats. But Darlan’s paternal grandfather, Sabin, had more ambition. When he retired from the navy he acquired some of the seagoing vessels involved in the wine trade and made the fortune that pushed them up the social ladder. Darlan’s father, Jean-Baptiste, became a lawyer, his uncle Xavier a doctor. Somewhat unusually even for the tight-knit ways of provincial France, the Darlan brothers married the Espagnac sisters, the daughters of a physician from the village of Nérac, about 60 miles up-stream from Podensac. Distancing themselves even further from the sea, both brothers settled there and this is where François Darlan, the future amiral, was born on 7 August 1881 into a meritocratic family with a strong belief in the egalitarianism that had permitted its own success.
Jean-Baptiste, who became mayor of Nérac and a deputy in the National Assembly, was everything Pétain and the majority of the officer corps detested: a member of the old Dreyfusard Radical Socialist Party, an enthusiastic Freemason and, above all, an anticlericalist who believed in the sanctity of the Third Republic and a Church divorced from politics. How much of this upbringing survived in his son as he approached his sixtieth year is hard to say, though the amiral was not loath to display a certain distance from the cloth. ‘I don’t have any special respect for the Lord’s Day,’ he told an old friend when he chose to leave port on a Sunday for a training exercise. But if he could not help his father’s politics they could certainly help him when it came to working with the Popular Front.
It paid for senior French officers to be more politically adroit than their British counterparts, especially in the navy where they were unlikely to have acquired the popular recognition of a Pétain or a Foch. Darlan had graduated from the École Navale in 1902 and his peacetime duties took him all over the French Empire, particularly to Indochina waters. Even so, he had little personal experience of sea warfare. In 1914–18 the British had maintained Allied naval supremacy in the Channel and the North Sea. As a result, Darlan was among those French naval officers whose war had mostly been spent on land providing additional artillery support for the army from adapted heavy naval guns. This included a spell in the British Ypres-Passchendaele sector during which he was praised by his allies for spoiling a German counter-attack with a prompt barrage.
Darlan’s post-war relations with the British did not start on such a harmonious note. In 1930 he had been technical adviser at the London Naval Conference. For three months America, Britain, France, Italy and Japan wrangled over how much naval tonnage each should be allowed to build depending on their coastlines and colonial commitments. From the start things had not augured well for the French delegation as the conference’s opening ceremony was in the House of Lords’ Royal Gallery which is dominated by Daniel Maclise’s huge paintings of the dying Nelson and Wellington’s victorious meeting with Blücher. ‘On one of the walls, the Battle of Trafalgar; on the other, Waterloo: charming!’ Darlan wrote home to Berthe, who was herself descended from Admiral Sir George Rodney, another scourge of the French and the name of a contemporary British battleship.
Quite apart from having to suffer their hosts’ appalling taste in triumphalist art the French also had to put up with their absurd insistence that they should be allowed no more tonnage than the Italians. Darlan produced statistics comparing territory controlled, coastlines and dispersal of colonial possessions that showed, without a shadow of doubt, that France’s naval needs were second only to the British Empire’s. Italy shared bottom place with Japan. In the end, France and Italy declined to sign the only thing that really mattered to them concerning the building of light ships and all agreed on a five-year moratorium on capital ship construction and restricting submarine warfare which, for the time being, suited everybody’s budgets. ‘A vast fabric of stupidities,’ said Darlan after the meeting broke up.
But by the time the Popular Front had put him in charge of the navy the British were no longer looking at the Italians with such a favourable eye. Mussolini, ignoring all agreements, had expanded his fleet. The Royal Navy could no longer be certain of secure passage across the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to the Suez canal. France was concerned about access to its North African possessions. Darlan saw shared interests that outweighed other considerations.
The Spanish Civil War was now into its second year. In the Mediterranean Il Duce, who had sent thousands of Italian ‘volunteers’ to fight on the side of General Franco’s mostly Fascist-inspired nationalists, was also using his fleet to help blockade the republican government’s ports. Italian submarines had sunk British and French merchant ships bound for them and the Admiralty, having cracked the Italian naval code, knew exactly who was responsible. But their political masters wished to avoid a confrontation and, true to the policy of appeasement, declared that the ships were being torpedoed by ‘unknown submarines’.
In Paris the rosbifs were much ridiculed. It became fashionable to refer to Mussolini as ‘The Unknown Statesman’ and the Boulevard des Italiens as the ‘Boulevard des Inconnus’. Most of Léon Blum’s original Popular Front had yearned to intervene in Spain, whose besieged leftist anticlerical republicans also called themselves the Popular Front, but they had not dared for fear of igniting a similar conflagration in France. But here was an opportunity to put overwhelming Anglo-French naval power on the side of the angels. Armed with suggestions from Darlan about how surveillance zones could be policed, the French Foreign Minister persuaded Britain to co-sponsor an international conference on piracy. It took place at Nyon in Switzerland in September 1937. Italy and Germany declined to attend. But among those who did was the Soviet Union, the Spanish republicans’ main supplier. The upshot was the Nyon Agreement that gave the Anglo-French fleets carte blanche to patrol the most sensitive areas and hunt down the culprits.
Even before the agreement was signed the Admiralty’s code-breakers were reporting that the Italians were withdrawing their submarines. Figaro hailed it as a triumph of French diplomacy, which it was, and �
��a prelude to a stiffening of Franco-British diplomacy’ which – a year before Munich – it was not. But it was the start of an operational Anglo-French naval partnership in the Mediterranean that far exceeded the more notional peacetime arrangements between their armies.
British and French ships could turn up at each other’s ports – Toulon or Gibraltar for instance – without giving prior diplomatic notice and expect to be victualled and refuelled. Five of Britain’s thirty-five destroyers in the Mediterranean – the French had twenty-eight – operated out of French North Africa. The Royal Navy, which also sent an aircraft carrier, two battleships and three cruisers, became a common sight in Marseilles and there was a good deal of socializing between the two navies: sporting fixtures and the exchanges of cap ribbons for the men; reciprocal wardroom cocktails and dinners for the officers.
The maiden voyage of France’s new battle cruiser the Dunkerque – faster and bigger gunned than Germany’s latest pocket battleships – took her to Britain for King George VI’s coronation and naval review at Spit-head. Dunkerque’s rakish lines were much admired by her hosts (who had nothing quite like it) while her crew, with their distinctive red pom-poms in their caps and attentive Gallic ways, discovered that the enduring French belief that all young Englishwomen had horsey teeth and big feet was exaggerated. The only bad note came at the coronation itself when Darlan, who was a vice-amiral, the highest rank in the French Navy, discovered that at Westminster Abbey protocol placed him behind the admiral in charge of China’s ramshackle fleet. A year later, in June 1939, after some determined lobbying by Darlan on the need for the French command structure to be clearly understood by even the most obdurate foreigners, France also had its first Admiral of the Fleet.
When the war started Dunkerque, together with her sister ship Strasbourg and eight destroyers, was based at Brest as part of Amiral Marcel-Bruno Gensoul’s Force de Raid, France’s Atlantic fleet. This was the pride of La Marine Française: integrated, powerful, fast and of innovative design. On the two battle cruisers the problem of how to acquire speed while retaining firepower and protective armour plate had been resolved by reducing the normal allocation of gun turrets by half and placing all eight heavy 13.4-inch guns forward in two four-barrel turrets. Some of the destroyers belonged to a new intermediary class of warship the French had developed which they called contre-torpilleurs. Their eight 5.5-inch guns made them almost as well armed as a light cruiser, but they were faster than most destroyers. The Volta, which had been delivered shortly before Hitler invaded Poland, had done well over 40 knots in trials.
It was true that Britain then had the world’s biggest navy, including fifteen battleships with more on the way because most of the existing ones were over twenty years old. (The first thing young sailors joining the Renown were shown was a dent the old Imperial German Navy had made in her armoured deck at Jutland.) There were also seven aircraft carriers, the latest the new Ark Royal which had just completed her sea trials. France’s only carrier, the Béarn, had been launched in 1927 and there was talk of turning her into a seaplane tender, which was a bit like putting an old racehorse between the shafts of a milk float. Nor did the French have the Royal Navy’s as yet primitive but rapidly improving shipborne radar. Nor the ASDIC sonar detectors for U-boats, which was strange, for the acronym stood for Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee and started out as an Anglo-French 1914–18 research project. After the war, the French dropped out but the offshore islanders, for whom the submarine threat was much more important, tinkered on and by 1938 were installing a working apparatus in their destroyers. Nonetheless, large parts of Darlan’s fleet, lacking though it may have been in the latest electronic implants, were every bit as good as they looked.
Gensoul’s squadron was ideally placed to protect convoys crossing the Atlantic. During the war’s first winter Dunkerque was detached and teamed up with HMS Hood to hunt the German surface raiders which, by November 1939, had started to sink Allied merchant shipping with impunity. Each warship carried a signals liaison team from the other, had the speed and endurance to cover what Churchill called ‘the trackless ocean’ and enough firepower to make almost anything they were likely to encounter sorry indeed. All they lacked was the luck to meet up with them.
The next month, bound for Canada with some of France’s gold reserves, Dunkerque listened to the British radio chatter from the River Plate estuary where Commodore Henry Harwood’s cruisers Exeter, Ajax and Achilles were about to bluff the Admiral Graf Spee into scuttling. It had been a near thing. Dunkerque and Strasbourg had been built with German pocket battleships in mind. An Anglo-French group operating out of Dakar included both the Strasbourg and the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes. Of several hunting parties the Allies had set up in the South Atlantic these British cruisers, two hardly bigger than France’s latest destroyers, were the weakest.
But Harwood had guessed he would meet his prey in the waters between Uruguay and Argentina and danced his cruisers in and out of range of the Spee’s 11-inch guns to deliver their wounds like picadors. In doing so he lost exactly twice as many men as the thirty-six German dead. Exeter, whose 8-inchers were the biggest at Harwood’s disposal, was reduced to a disarmed hulk with all her main guns silenced and a nasty list. The Spee appeared almost untouched but shell splinters had damaged her fuel cleaning system and neutral Uruguay was pro-British enough to make repairs impossible, even attempting to obstruct her departure until the Renown and her 15-inch guns arrived. Hitler wanted Captain Hans Langsdorff to go down with all guns blazing. Langsdorff, unaware that Harwood was still awaiting big gun reinforcements, chose to scuttle his ship and save his men. So the Royal Navy celebrated the first major naval victory of the war and six days before Christmas, Langsdorff, a chivalrous opponent who had always rescued the crews of the merchant ships he sank, shot himself in a hotel room in Buenos Aires. As far as La Marine Française was concerned, it was typical of the undeserved good fortune England so often enjoyed on naval occasions.
On their way back from Halifax, Dunkerque and the light cruiser Gloire had escorted seven British troopers and freighters taking part of a Canadian infantry division to England. Gensoul, who had the better ships, was in command of the escort. In order to ensure the best possible liaison the British had placed Captain Cedric Holland, who for the last two years had been Britain’s naval attaché in Paris, in command of the convoy with the acting rank of vice-admiral. Holland was flying his flag from the Jutland veteran Revenge which was 10 knots slower than the French battle cruiser and nothing like as well armoured.
The convoy was a tempting target for German raiders above and below the waves and it had been at sea for only twelve hours when the Admiralty sent Gensoul a warning that the Graf Spee’s sister ship Admiral Scheer was on the prowl. But Gensoul was not about to get his chance to show the English how to sink a pocket battleship without her captain’s assistance. The weather closed in and Christmas Day 1939 was celebrated off Iceland in a Force Nine storm. For some of the prairie boys from Ontario in the packed holds of the troopships it must have been unmitigated hell.
By the 28th the wind had abated. As they approached the Irish coast intercepted British wireless traffic revealed that a U-boat had torpedoed the battleship HMS Barham, on patrol to the north of them, killed four of her crew but only inflicted minor damage. The next day the convoy and its French escort parted company: one bound for Southampton and the other for Brest, their Aldis lamps blinking out the customary courtesies and fulsome expressions of mutual admiration.
Amiral Gensoul: HOPE THAT WE MAY HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY OF MEETING AGAIN. I CONGRATULATE YOU ON THE WAY YOU HANDLED THE CONVOY.
Admiral Holland: I LOOK FORWARD HAPPILY TO SERVING UNDER YOU AGAIN.
Only in this case it all appears to have been true. Holland – Hooky to his navy friends because of the shape of his nose – was 51 and married with children. During his time in Paris he had acquired a French mistress and a certain sympathy with the Gallic viewpoint. He had f
irst met Gensoul shortly before the war during an official visit to France’s Atlantic naval base at Brest. Gensoul, who happened to be a Protestant, which was rare for a senior French naval officer, was generally well disposed towards the English. ‘An infinitely courteous, loyal and able collaborator,’ he wrote of Holland in a confidential report to Darlan on the December 1939 Atlantic crossings. Gensoul was close to his boss, one of an inner circle jealous outsiders referred to as the ADD – Amis de Darlan.
Shortly afterwards Holland returned to his duties as naval attaché in Paris. Then, at the beginning of May, and on the eve of the Wehrmacht blitzkrieg through France and the Low Countries, he left France to command the aircraft carrier Ark Royal. Almost immediately Holland’s new ship was embroiled in the closing stages of the Norwegian campaign.
Two months before, the Fleet Air Arm had made naval history, though not the kind most sailors wanted to hear. At the edge of their range, some of its Orkney-based Skua fighter-bombers had become the first aircraft to sink a major warship when they dive-bombed the light cruiser Koenigsberg in Norway’s Bergen harbour. Holland was ordered to do the same thing to the Scharnhorst, licking her wounds in Trondheim after she had taken a torpedo from a dying British destroyer. But by now the Germans had plenty of fighters and anti-aircraft guns in place. Eight of fifteen Skuas Ark Royal sent to Trondheim did not come back and the only bomb that found its target failed to explode.
Nobody could dispute the courage of Ark Royal’s air crews who knew they were attacking a strongly defended target, but the Norwegian campaign had shaken French confidence in the Royal Navy to the core. On 9 April, pre-empting an Anglo-French plan to do it first, Germany had the audacity to invade neutral Norway despite the presence of the best part of the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet at Scapa Flow not 300 miles away from Bergen. Simultaneously Germany secured a direct line of communication by brushing aside a resistance that was as brave as it was foolish and moving into neighbouring Denmark, a handy stepping stone between the Reich and its ultimate Scandinavian ambitions. An immediate prize was the strategic value of Norway’s long coastline with all the additional naval and air bases it could provide for sorties against the British in both the North Sea and the Atlantic. But it also secured the ice-free northern port of Narvik, warmed by the Gulf Stream and a winter outlet for the Swedish iron ore Germany’s steel mills craved when the Baltic froze.