by Colin Smith
Ever since Admiral Sir Martin Dunbar-Nasmith, the amiable Victoria Cross submariner who commanded Western Approaches, had turned up unannounced a couple of days before, Martin had suspected that the English wanted his boat. The Admiral’s entourage, eyes everywhere, had included Lieutenant Patrick Griffiths, his French-speaking liaison officer who was off the mine-laying submarine Rorqual, which was presently in the Mediterranean. Martin had little doubt that the admiral’s surprise visit was more by way of reconnaissance than social. But there was not much he could do about it except see that his hatches were sealed, his sentries doubled and alert enough to warn him of a boarding party in time to scuttle his ship at her moorings if necessary. Already the torpedoes had been disarmed, their fuses and firing pins removed.
When the officer-only message arrived Lieutenant de vaisseau Émile Crescent, the duty officer, was in the wardroom with its framed print of the doughty Robert Surcouf, cutlass in hand, leading his men onto a fat English merchantman. He hurried down to the radio cabin with the key to its safe and extracted the relevant code book. Long before he had finished Crescent realized that he was unwrapping the orders they had all been dreading as France’s armistice with Germany slipped into its second week and there was still no sign of Britain ending its futile war with Germany.
Surcouf was to be scuttled immediately. It appeared the British were not prepared to accept Darlan’s assurances that the fleet would not fall into the hands of the Germans and Italians. Already there were indications that the Royal Navy was poised to attack Amiral Gensoul’s squadron at Mers-el-Kébir where the clock was two hours ahead and dawn had long since broken. It was obvious that the 200 or so craft, including coastal patrol boats and converted trawlers, that had found shelter in Britain’s southern ports would not be ignored. On Surcouf Lieutenant Crescent, the message from Bordeaux decrypted in full, rushed off to tell Commandant Martin, shouting as he went, ‘The English are coming.’ But he was too late; the English were already there.
Zero hour for all boarding parties in the ports concerned had been set at 4.30 a.m. – almost first light. At Dartmouth they were made up of instructors from its naval college and some of the older officer cadets. In the main, they had enjoyed good relations with the crews of the six minesweepers they were about to seize. Nor did it help that the flotilla’s flagship was called Entente Cordiale.
At Devonport the Surcouf had been allotted sixty boarders. Half of them were sailors from the submarine Thames, recently refitted and about to go on patrol in the North Sea, and the rest Royal Marines. Among the sailors were engine room artificers carrying the various tools of their trade including wooden mallets to knock back obstinate control levers set to self-destruct. All of them were under Commander Denis ‘Lofty’ Sprague, the Thames’s lanky captain, whose deputy for the occasion was the liaison officer Griffiths from the Rorqual, another experienced submariner and anxious to rejoin his ship and get back into the war.
Almost everybody wore steel helmets and the officer and petty officers were armed with .455 Webley revolvers, as were some of the men who also carried wooden pickaxe helves. A few sailors and all the Royal Marines had rifles and bayonets, though the marines, like almost every other branch of Britain’s neglected armed forces, were stretched, and fully trained professionals were thin on the ground. ‘All men who had fired a rifle were included and care was taken to detail the maximum number of NCOs and old soldiers to each platoon,’ reported Colonel Edward Noyes.
It was hoped that an overwhelming show of forces would lead to bloodless boardings everywhere. Officers had been given a typewritten sheet of four French phrases thought likely to assist. They started with, ‘Nous sommes La Marine Britannique.’ Next came, ‘Nous sommes vos camarades,’ followed by ‘Montez’ – to indicate that the crew should go up on deck – and the last a distinctly uncomradely, ‘Levez vos mains’ (‘Raise your hands’).
The Paris was peacefully occupied by a party led by Dunbar-Nasmith in person. The admiral had armed himself with his own five-paragraph letter, a predictable mixture of flattery and threat, that was to be given to the captains of all the French vessels, big and small, being seized that night. ‘The French Nation has fought gallantly to a standstill,’ it began generously enough, before spelling out that Hitler could not be trusted and Britain was not going to risk French ships falling into German hands. ‘Any resistance can only cause unnecessary bloodshed which would be of advantage to our common enemy.’
While Amiral Cayol, roused from his slumbers by Paris’s duty officer and the sound of English voices, was trying to digest this the boarding party spread through the ship and discovered in the officers’ cabins ‘arms and ammunition readily available’. But nobody had attempted to use them. ‘Admiral Cayol was naturally very distressed,’ recalled Dunbar-Nasmith, who was by no means unsympathetic. ‘He told me that he had considered the question of scuttling his ships but decided not to do it as it would have obstructed the harbour and inconvenienced me.’
Commander Sprague’s capture of the neighbouring Surcouf did not start down the gangplank from the Paris. They arrived – as Capitaine Martin had thought they might – from across the water in three motor launches lying flat between the thwarts so that in the faint light of the new day, all that could be discerned were the silhouettes of the coxswains hunched over their tillers. First man onto the submarine was Lieutenant Francis Talbot of the Thames whose men got aboard without a shot being fired and captured one of the sentries. But the other was too fast for them. Talbot watched as he ‘ran along the casing for’ard, hammering on the hull by the conning tower and went down the fore hatch which was shut after him’. Sprague’s plan had assumed that all four hatches would be open and entered simultaneously. Now they were locked out. There is little on the planet as watertight as a submarine. Talbot climbed the deck ladder into the Surcouf’s tall conning tower but his torch revealed that the hatch there was closed too. Then the submariner spotted that its catches looked similar to the new ones on British conning tower hatches which allowed rescue divers to open them from the outside.
Below him Crescent, gripping his decoded message from Bordeaux, got to the Command Post – underwater, the place from where the periscope is operated and the equivalent of the bridge on a ship – when he saw the sentry who had got away lowering himself through the forward hatch, his Lebel still in its holster. He told Crescent that armed Englishmen had landed on the upper deck.
I ordered him to close the last hatch, which I saw him do, and to sound ‘Action Stations’. I rushed to warn the captain and the officers and ran forward to wake the Premier Maître Électricien and the Maître Torpilleur, telling them to start destroying the equipment we had singled out beforehand. When, about a minute after the alarm, I returned to the Command Post I collided with armed sailors under Commander Sprague, captain of the Thames. Our captain then came into the Command Post and spoke to Sprague who handed him a message from the British Admiralty. During this time English sailors spread all over the ship. Later I learned they had been able to open the conning tower hatch from outside.
Dunbar-Nasmith would give Talbot a mention in despatches for his ‘most praiseworthy’ action in getting into a vessel ‘battened down and known to be hostile’. But some of Surcouf’s officers were armed and it was far from over.
As more of Sprague’s men found their way below deck and the locked hatches were opened, the boarding party tried with varying success to herd the sleepy and reluctant matelots out of their bunks to the upper deck. Some, notably the engine room artificers, glowered at these trespassers and refused to budge. Sprague had more success when he asked all the French officers to muster in their wardroom which was on the deck immediately below the Command Post with the often shared officers’ cabins built off it. Once they had gathered there Sprague read them what purported to be a note from Amiral Cayol urging them to join the nascent Free French Navy under Amiral Émile Muselier, an extrovert Marseillais who at that point was the most senior French
naval defector to de Gaulle.
Capitaine Martin, who quite rightly did not believe a word of it, demanded to be allowed onto the Paris so that he could hear it from Cayol’s own lips. Sprague let him go, perhaps thinking that, for whatever reason, the sight of her captain voluntarily leaving his command would deprive the Surcouf of leadership and might encourage others to follow. In any case, there was a good chance that the French amiral was no longer aboard Paris, for he knew Dunbar-Nasmith wanted him off the old battleship quickly. Before he left Martin told Capitaine de corvette Pichevin, his second-in-command, to take over.
In the wardroom both sides were standing either side of its long dining table. ‘I’m sorry, I have my orders,’ said Sprague who, like some of the French officers, was wearing a uniform jacket and tie despite the heat and the hour. Médecin de premiere classe de la Marine Le Nistour, the man who two weeks before had wondered if the circling patrol boats meant they were already prisoners, noted he was ‘very pale and constantly wiping his forehead’. Although all the hatches were now open the submarine was still a sticky place, the scents of dark tobacco and coffee breaking through the familiar fug of diesel and body odour to remind the British that this was alien territory.
‘Good humour and friendliness are of more value than arms,’ Dunbar-Nasmith had advised his boarding parties. It appeared that at least some of the French were of the same mind. When a teenage midshipman somehow contrived to drop his Webley as he climbed out of the engine room one of them pulled him back by the seat of his pants and returned it to his holster. Meanwhile, Talbot managed to persuade the crew in the forward part of the submarine, including the stubborn artificers, to leave peacefully, and Sprague followed him aft to see if he could work the same magic on the other mess deck, which was the larger of the two.
Then Sprague’s long legs returned him to the Command Post just in time to catch a glimpse through the hatch into the wardroom below of Pichevin passing a note to a rating who turned out to be an electrician. The lieutenant had decided that the English had no intention of allowing Martin back and they must throw the main power switches and use the blackout to wreck as much as they could. Pleading his bladder, the electrician left the room to be followed by one of Talbot’s petty officers, who had a suspicious nature and a mallet. Switches and mallet appear to have connected at about the same time. ‘A short fight ensued, which my petty officer won, and the lights were made good again,’ reported Talbot.
Even so, there had been enough of a blackout for one man to vanish behind the flapping portière of one of the cabins adjoining the wardroom. Inside the cubicle he shared with Surgeon Commander Le Nistour, Ingénieur mécanicien Yves Daniel was tearing up his engine manuals in preparation for flushing them down a head. While he did this Dr Le Nistour stood guard outside. As far as Sprague was concerned the brief blackout and the man who had run off, evidently intending to do some damage while he could, was the last straw. He began to act like a petulant schoolmaster who feels suddenly let down, his attempts to be reasonable mistaken for weakness. As soon as the lights were back on he ordered all the French officers off the Surcouf immediately.
Capitaine de corvette Pichevin, the deputy commander, told Sprague that they would only take orders from their captain and strode off to his cabin where Crescent and the others, who were already armed, arranged themselves so that they shielded him as he picked up a revolver. Perhaps to distract Sprague, Crescent, the duty officer who had decoded the warning message from Bordeaux, announced that he had no intention of leaving and would remain where he was until Capitaine Martin had returned from the Paris.
‘I have my orders,’ repeated Sprague in French, only this time he drew his Webley. ‘If you don’t leave I’ll kill you.’ On his right Lieutenant Griffiths and an able seaman, whose name was William Heath, also had their revolvers out.
‘Fire if you want,’ said Crescent. ‘I’m not moving.’ At this point Sprague called for reinforcements from the Command Post above him, which contained about ten men under Lieutenant Talbot and Chief Petty Officer Herbert Mott. The petty officer despatched another old salt, the formidable-looking figure of Leading Seaman Albert Webb, the naval equivalent of a sergeant, who had fixed the Lee-Enfield’s standard 17-inch bayonet to his rifle and was carrying his ammunition in khaki webbing. Webb took up a position at the foot of the steps he had just descended from the Command Post.
If the French suspected Sprague was bluffing the next thing the Englishman did seemed to confirm it. Instead of shooting, Sprague half turned towards Webb and, pointing to Crescent with his revolver, said loudly in French, ‘Shoot this man.’ Since Royal Navy officers are not in the habit of giving British sailors orders in a foreign language it seems reasonable to assume that the words were intended for French consumption.
Standing either side of Crescent were Pichevin, who had walked back into the wardroom area from his cabin having finished loading his revolver, and Enseigne de vaisseau Massicot, the French equivalent of a midshipman. A little behind them and leaning against the door of his cabin was Lieutenant de vaisseau Bouillaut, the submarine’s gunnery officer in charge of her twin 8-inch guns.
The pipe-smoking Bouillaut, in his late twenties and recently married, was from an old naval family. In a pocket he had stuffed his personal weapon, a small flat .32-calibre nine-shot MAB automatic as carried by French detectives, a pistol naval officers sometimes bought for their personal protection during trips ashore in France’s more volatile colonies. Bouillaut decided that Sprague would not tolerate having his bluff called any more than they could ‘allow ourselves to be thrown off our ship and threatened with death without reacting’.
The British already had their weapons in their hands but they were there as a reminder of the overwhelming force at their disposal, intended to stop violence rather than start it. It is unlikely that the Surcouf boarding party had heard of the firearms discovered in the officers’ quarters on the Paris. It probably never occurred to them that anybody but the duty officer and his sentries would be armed, which would almost certainly have been the case on a British ship. Above all, it was a good example of the old rule that you should never point a gun at somebody unless you are prepared to use it. When Bouillaut, who seems to have had a duellist’s nerve, drew his MAB and started shooting he must have amazed them.
I took a pace forward and shot at Commander Sprague, Lieutenant Griffiths, the two English sailors and then again on their officers. As I was shooting I had moved to the companionway [the ladder leading up to the Command Post] – that was the moment I was wounded – and I fired at a sailor who, no doubt kneeling in the Command Post and showing only his steel helmet at the top of the companionway, was shooting at me.
This was Chief Petty Officer Mott, not kneeling but lying on his stomach, looking down into the wardroom and firing .455 bullets as big as musket balls with his 6-inch-barrel revolver which had first been issued to the British Army almost half a century before. These were the first shots exchanged between official representatives of the British and French military in the 125 years since Waterloo.
The sweet scent of cordite filled the Surcouf’s stale air and Sprague and Griffiths were both bleeding to death on the wardroom floor. Sprague – who had squeezed off one ineffectual shot as he fell – had collapsed against the door of the captain’s cabin after being shot through the neck, in the abdomen and below his right collarbone where a severed main artery was soaking his clothing and the surrounding floor space with blood. Griffiths’s fatal wound was in the liver and he had also been shot in a hip and one arm. He had somehow lapsed into unconsciousness almost upright, hanging onto the ladder to the Command Post.
Bouillaut, the man who had started it all, had been lucky. One of Mott’s large but low-velocity bullets – possibly made slower by being old ammunition – had travelled down the inside of his right arm, entered his chest and exited off his third rib above his right nipple. Bleeding profusely, he was still able to work both hands and remove his pistol’s empt
y magazine to insert a fresh one. When he looked round he saw, ‘there were no English capable of fighting left in the wardroom, and we now all had pistols in our hands.’
But it seems only one other French officer had fired, though, for the moment, he was not visible. In the midst of his own gunfight, Bouillaut had heard more shots, then cries of pain coming from one of the cabins of the Ingénieurs mécaniciens around the wardroom, followed by the clatter of a rifle falling on a steel deck.
Le Nistour had listened as the confrontation between Sprague and Crescent reached boiling point then went into his cabin and picked up his pistol. Daniel was sitting on the edge of his bunk still busy shredding blueprints and manuals. ‘Things are getting hot,’ said the doctor. The words were hardly out of his mouth when he heard Bouillaut fire the first shots. Perhaps Leading Seaman Webb saw Le Nistour dart back into his cabin and confused him with the man who was doing the shooting; Bouillaut was also standing further back from the other officers and, at the best of times, a submarine’s lighting is fairly dim. For whatever reason, Le Nistour had just armed himself when Webb, ‘baionette au canon’, charged across the wardroom and burst into his cabin, Able Seaman Heath hard at his heels.
It appears the doctor had a smaller calibre pistol than Bouillaut, possibly one of the popular .25 lady’s handbag pistols that Manufacture d’Armes Bayonne made in the inter-war years.