England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  The English sergeant [Webb] rushes towards us with his fixed bayonet. I fire the whole of my magazine at him. Carried forward by his rush, he falls dead at our feet in front of the washbasin. Unfortunately, he had time to fire and Ingénieur mécanicien Daniel, hit in the right shoulder, cries out and collapses. I step over the body of the dead sergeant and go for the English sailor who followed him and seemed to be having trouble with his revolver. I manage to disarm him and with one blow of my fist send him reeling against the curtain which covers the door to Ingénieur mécanicien Catherine’s cabin. I move forward and with a second, better blow – which dislocates my thumb – I send him rolling at the foot of the companionway to the wardroom, where he lies still.

  Le Nistour did not realize it but Heath was not only reeling from his punches. All but one of the eight small-calibre bullets he had pumped at almost touching distance into Webb had passed straight through the leading seaman to hit Heath around his head and shoulders as he crouched behind him struggling to cock his defective Webley. Heath’s face was covered in blood from flesh wounds; the only explanation for the lack of serious injury is that the bullets were now so spent they had little force. Meanwhile, in another bizarre example of what can happen when small arms are used at close quarters in the confined space of even a Surcouf-sized submarine, it appears that Daniel was not killed by the bullet that hit him in the shoulder but by the dying Webb stabbing him with his bayonet as he fell towards him, still clutching his rifle.

  After Daniel and Webb had gone down, all firing ceased and it became apparent to some of the French officers that they had recaptured their wardroom by laying on the kind of carnage that Robert Surcouf himself might have considered pointless.

  ‘I believe you were very wrong to have done that,’ Crescent told the bleeding Bouillaut, brushing aside the gunnery officer’s protests that if he had not done so Crescent would not be alive to complain about it. But Le Nistour sided with Bouillaut. Only his marksmanship had saved Crescent’s life, he said, examining his hero’s arm and chest wounds and assuring him that he would live.

  The dead and the dying lay where they had fallen amid the blood and the spent cartridge cases. At the end of the wardroom, where they could not be seen from the Command Post, stood Pichevin, the doctor and the other three officers, guns in hand. The enemy would have to venture down if they wished to shoot at them but there was no need to do anything: hopelessly outgunned, the French would be shot to pieces if they tried to get back into the Command Post. Pichevin decided to surrender and shouted up to the English that it was finished. Lieutenant Talbot told them to put their weapons down and come up one at a time as he called them. Only Bouillaut wanted to fight on – ‘we can’t let them do this to us’ – but Pichevin gently prised his MAB police special out of his hand and put it on the wardroom table with the other four pistols. Then he led the way up saying, ‘Finis.’

  It was not quite over yet. In the Command Post the French officers once again refused to leave the Surcouf without receiving a direct order from Capitaine Martin. Since three of the four British casualties had been from the submarine Thames, one of them his commander, at this stage Talbot must have been sorely tempted to have these recalcitrants chased up the gangway to the Paris with the aid of pickaxe helves and rifle butts. In the end, the impasse was resolved by Crescent suggesting, with Pichevin’s consent, that he would go and speak with their captain providing Talbot ‘gave his word as an officer’ that he could return.

  Crescent discovered a resigned Martin on the Paris’s rear deck. Shortly afterwards only two French officers remained on the Surcouf: Dr Le Nistour was in the sick bay bandaging Bouillaut. ‘English sailors kept coming up and asking me to go and see their wounded officers,’ he recalled. ‘I told them to wait.’

  Dunbar-Nasmith and his staff had laid their plans for the seizure of the French ships well. They had even made sure ambulances were available to transport any French seamen discovered in ships’ infirmaries to hospital. But they had made one curious omission. Although, in theory at least, they had by no means ruled out resistance to the boarding parties, they had not attached any naval surgeons or medics to deal with casualties. ‘After first aid was given it must have been 25 minutes before the doctor reached Commander Sprague,’ reported Talbot, obviously incensed by the delay. ‘And a further ten minutes to a quarter of an hour before Lieutenant Griffiths was attended to.’

  Given the drugs and the surgical procedures of the day, whether more prompt treatment would have saved lives is a moot point. They both had multiple gunshot wounds and were seriously hurt. Dr Le Nistour, who was the last of the French officers to leave the wardroom, thought Griffiths looked dead but he gave Sprague a cursory examination and found him just capable of speech. ‘He could only tell me that he had been wounded in the right shoulder. He had also been shot in the abdomen. His lips were beginning to lose colour.’

  Talbot’s men managed to get Griffiths, who was still alive, up the ladder and into the Command Post where Le Nistour, having attended to Bouillaut, gave the lieutenant a morphine injection and urged his rapid removal to hospital though he knew there was not the slightest hope. He was about to return to the wardroom and see what he could do for Sprague when into the Command Post staggered another British casualty.

  Able Seaman Heath, blood streaming from his seven separate bullet wounds in the face, arms and neck, spotted his assailant treating one of the wounded British officers and revealed with a wagging finger and some strong language the doctor’s pivotal role in recent events. At first, according to Le Nistour’s account, Heath was ignored. Then it became apparent that these were not the ravings of a man in shock. Talbot brusquely ushered the doctor off the submarine and a few minutes later he was replaced by a medical officer from the Paris, Dr Adrian Carré.

  An English officer, bareheaded and very agitated, came to the rear deck of the Paris calling for a doctor. I went aboard Surcouf followed by Médecin auxiliaire Caillard. As soon as I reached the bridge I was threatened with a revolver in the very shaky hand of a very agitated midshipman and searched several times. Going below I saw a man I later knew to be Bouillaut, lying on a couch in the infirmary guarded by a sentry holding a revolver. Thinking I had been called for him, I went into the room but could hardly get to say two words before being pushed, revolver against my back, to the Command Post, where I saw on the floor a Lieutenant [Griffiths], clearly on the point of death. I leant over him and saw a bullet’s entry hole in the lower costal region. There was nothing I could do. Each time I moved two English officers, who seemed near to panic, threatened me with their guns. ‘What do you do? Where do you go?’ When I asked where the French doctor was, one of them replied: ‘He shot a man.’ An English doctor arrived and we were pushed towards the exit, always with a gun in our backs, and carefully searched again before we were able to leave the vessel and get back to Paris.

  But shortly afterwards Father Buffner, the chaplain on board the old battleship, was allowed onto the Surcouf where he gave conditional absolution to Engineer Daniel and Leading Seaman Webb whose bodies were still lying where they had fallen. Three RN doctors were now on board, a surgeon commander and two lieutenant surgeons and they supervised the evacuation of the wounded to Plymouth Naval Hospital. Sprague, who arrived there in the same ambulance as Bouillaut, died the next day. An attempt was made to extract the bullet from Griffiths’s liver and he lingered on for another twenty-four hours. Bouillaut would make a complete recovery.

  On his way back up the gangplank to the Paris, Father Buffner’s British escort, visibly moved, whispered to the priest, ‘How sad, how sad.’

  It was about to get even sadder, for there was no going back.

  Chapter Five

  Dawn and French Algeria’s high summer heat haze hid Oran’s headland from the crews of the warships in the sheltered waters of Mers-el-Kébir some 4 miles to the west of the main commercial port. Sleepy young men in white vests stowed their hammocks then, mess tins in hand, lined u
p for breakfast rolls and coffee. Arab fishing boats painted Spanish-style in gaudy fairground colours headed out to sea. Bugle calls. On a battle cruiser’s deck a marine platoon in white gaiters clattered to attention.

  Enseigne de vaisseau Jean-Paul Bezard on the new super-destroyer Volta, the fastest ship there, was thinking about the day’s sporting activities ahead: a water polo match with their sister ship the Mogador, then rowing races with teams of gunners, signallers, engine room artificers and stokers taking turns in the skiffs and whalers. Afterwards the more confident swimmers would take a dip and this evening liberty men would go ashore to carouse in the bars of Oran. The important thing was to keep the crew occupied. Some of the reservists were getting restless, especially those who came from the areas the Germans had occupied and had received no recent word from their families. Almost everybody envied the pieds-noirs in the crew who had all been discharged on indefinite leave. North Africa’s white colonials were already home, last seen stepping ashore with a wave and a cheeky ‘Bonnes Vacances’. At least their absence gave credence to the rumour that the Volta would soon be leaving for Toulon because the Germans were insisting that most of the French fleet was gathered there with skeleton crews. Meanwhile, they had their water sports.

  Then at about 9.30 a.m. the haze had thinned enough to reveal, anchored about a mile off the jetty, what dozens of binoculars and knowing eyes identified as a British destroyer. Shortly afterwards Dunkerque signalled the squadron to general quarters and the rowing teams were called in.

  The Royal Navy generally regarded Mers-el-Kébir as a contiguous part of Oran and in speech and despatches rarely bothered to recognize its separate identity. In Arabic it means ‘Grand Harbour’ and as far as the corsairs were concerned it provided ample room for their slave-oared galleys and galleons and the prizes they seized. In recent years the French had failed to dredge all of it to a depth capable of accommodating twentieth-century warships with easy room to manoeuvre, yet by the second week of the armistice large parts of France’s fugitive fleet had gathered there.

  Some provision for deeper anchorage had been made by building a high concrete jetty from a spit of land on the western side of the bay, which also served as a breakwater. Along it, at intervals of about 120 yards, Amiral Gensoul had moored by their sterns his five biggest ships, the product of two generations of stylish French naval architecture.

  Nearest the shore and the beginning of the jetty was his flagship Dunkerque. Next in line was the older battleship Provence, in 1918 the flagship of the French fleet, and then Dunkerque’s sister ship Strasbourg followed by the Bretagne, which was the same 1915 vintage as the Provence and like her had been extensively refitted. At the seaward end of the jetty was the large seaplane tender Commandant Teste,* an alternative to flat-deck aircraft carriers embraced by most major navies in the 1920s. Her float planes had played an important role in the Anglo-French patrols protecting neutral shipping during the Spanish Civil War. Six escort destroyers – Volta, Mogador, Terrible, Kersaint, Tigre and Lynx – were moored from the bows in the shallower waters of Saint Andre, the French name for the old harbour.

  Gensoul was not at all happy about the way his ships were deployed but he had no choice. ‘The arrangements and the bottom of the Mers-el-Kébir did not lend itself to the mooring of these ships at the front of the jetty, that is to say pointing out to sea,’ he would explain in his report to Darlan. This meant that the sixteen 13.5-inch guns of the Dunkerque and Strasbourg, concentrated in their two forward turrets, were useless because they could not be brought to bear on any threat coming from the open sea. All he could do was order both the Bretagne and Provence to ensure that one of their two aft turrets was at action stations. That would give him at least four heavy guns pointing in the right direction. In addition there were also coastal batteries at both the western and eastern sides of the bay though, in accordance with the armistice, these were already in the process of removing their breech blocks.

  Nonetheless, Gensoul was reluctant to give up all the habits of war acquired over the last ten months of hostilities between France and Germany. Perhaps there were some fears of Italian post-armistice treachery. Rome, despite its tardy and ineffectual appearance on the battlefield, had made no secret of its desire to be tougher on their defeated Mediterranean rival whose virtually intact fleet was a reminder that, even in its shrunken state, France could be dangerous. Mussolini might yet find a reason to trample over the terms of the armistice, order his navy to take some unilateral action and argue with the Germans about it later. Then there was this other possibility, though so distant, such a small cloud on the horizon that even an experienced sailor might be forgiven for not at first spotting it as the beginning of a storm brewing up from an unseasonal direction.

  First came the plight of Vice-amiral René Godfroy’s Force X which had been attached to the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet under Sir Andrew Cunningham operating out of the British base at Alexandria in Egypt. On the eve of the armistice they were about to participate in an Anglo-French raid on Italian shipping in the Straits of Messina and bombard the Sicilian port of Augusta. Now Godfroy’s squadron was stuck in Alexandria. This included the battleship Lorraine, his flagship whose 15-inch guns had recently shelled Italian Army positions on the Libyan-Egyptian frontier, three heavy and one light cruiser, three destroyers and a submarine.

  Darlan had ordered them to report as soon as possible to Bizerte in French Tunisia but Cunningham, who had a good personal relationship with the widower Godfroy, whose late wife had been a Scot, had sent him an apologetic note explaining that he had been ordered to prevent him sailing. To get out of this impasse they reached a gentleman’s agreement: Godfroy promised not to attempt to sail without notifying Cunningham who in turn agreed not to try to seize his ships.

  This was not what either of their superiors wanted. On the British side it meant that Cunningham must keep ships either in or just outside Alexandria in order to keep the French bottled up. Darlan was particularly incensed because he feared the Germans would suspect him of trying to finesse conditions and endanger negotiations on the number of ships he might retain in French North African ports. He advised Godfroy that, as a last resort, he should consider fighting his way out, which would have been suicidal, though, apart from more humane considerations, the British might have baulked at the prospect of clogging an important harbour with sunken ships.

  There was, or course, no comparison between Gensoul’s and Godfroy’s position. Gensoul’s ships were in Mers-el-Kébir, not a British-controlled port. A recent visit from Admiral Sir Dudley North, who was based in Gibraltar from where he commanded the Royal Navy’s North Atlantic Station, had only seemed to emphasize the point. On 24 June, two days after the signing of the armistice with the Germans and the day the whole wretched business had to be gone through again for the benefit of the smirking Italians, North had turned up unannounced at Mers-el-Kébir in the destroyer Douglas. Even for Gensoul with his Anglophile sympathies, this was a bit difficult. France was now neutral. It was not supposed to receive the warships of its recent allies in its ports. Nonetheless, Gensoul invited North aboard the Dunkerque and gave him twenty minutes.

  North had made a blunt request that he should bring his ships to Britain where a warm welcome awaited them and where there was no danger of them being seized by Axis forces. Gensoul gave the same reply that Darlan had already given several times over to Churchill and First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound: that French ships would be scuttled rather than allow them to fall into German or Italian hands and that preparations had already been made to blow their bottoms out. Otherwise he must abide by the armistice and there could be no question of his squadron eloping with the Royal Navy.

  His amiable visitor had departed, apparently satisfied, and for four days they were left alone. Then twice in the same week a British seaplane flew slow, insolent circles above Gensoul’s ships. Once this obvious photo-reconnaissance was done it disappeared towards Gibraltar, Britain’s only toeho
ld in a continental Europe that was otherwise hostile, Nazi-occupied or neutral. The French might have chased the trespasser off with a couple of fighters but for the moment the armistice had grounded its aircraft. In any case, La Marine Française was not yet ready to treat British aircraft as hostile intruders.

  Then, some forty-eight hours after this seaplane’s last appearance, the destroyer HMS Foxhound appeared and anchored off the jetty. On board was the Francophile Hooky Holland, Gensoul’s ‘infinitely courteous, loyal and able collaborator’ from their days in the North Atlantic together and, for the last two months, captain of the Ark Royal. Holland’s aircraft carrier would shortly be coming up behind him on the horizon along with the battleships Hood, Valiant and Resolution, the cruisers Arethusa and Enterprise and ten destroyers. These ships were all part of Force H, a new formation sent to Gibraltar to plug the yawning gap the French departure had left in the Mediterranean where previously the Royal Navy, with squadrons operating out of Malta and Egypt’s Alexandria, had concentrated on its eastern basin.

  Force H was under Admiral Sir James Fownes Somerville, whose flagship was named after his ancestor Lord Hood who once burnt down the Toulon dockyard. Somerville’s own relations with the French had always been more amicable, most recently at Dunkirk where Admiral Bertram Ramsay and he had worked alongside Amiral Jean Abrial. On the whole, cooperation between the British and French navies, already tried and tested, had been much better than between the two armies where scuffles over alleged queue-jumping were frequent and sometimes reached the point where triggers had already yielded first pressure. When it was all over and 338,226 troops had been landed in England’s south coast ports, Darlan praised Ramsay for a ‘masterly operation’ and the King had received Abrial at Buckingham Palace to offer congratulations and condolences. Three of the nine destroyers sunk by bombing, mines, a U-boat and a Schnelboot had been French. The number of British vessels and small craft sunk and damaged was much greater but they were from a much bigger fleet and it was mostly their army they were rescuing.