England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  This was not always the ambassador’s strongest point though it was difficult to keep a low profile when the military government was staying next door in the Prince of Wales suite at the Hôtel Crillon next door to the embassy building. When some German linesmen strayed onto the embassy roof while installing secure field telephone connections, Bullitt responded to this gross violation of US turf by threatening to shoot the trespassers himself. The Wehrmacht, who knew the whole world was watching what they did in Paris, beat a hasty retreat from this enraged neutral, probably the first territory they had conceded all summer.

  When, at the end of the month, Bullitt had moved his embassy to the unoccupied zone in a caravan of expensive cars the Thompson guns had gone with them. In addition, a French family had delighted the ambassador by entrusting him with the duelling pistols George Washington had presented to the Marquis de Lafayette for his help in the American War of Independence. Bullitt, proud of the Jewish and French Huguenot mix in his predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant genes, was always inclined to favour France over Britain.

  ‘The French at this moment do honor to the human race,’ he cabled Hull on the eve of a panic-stricken mass exodus of refugees from Paris. He had persuaded Roosevelt to take the French side in their argument with Churchill over the RAF’s failure to send more fighter squadrons to France; he had reported without comment their contention that it was a British collapse that allowed the Germans to punch a hole in the line they were trying to hold on the Somme, though the British had hardly any troops there. But he never shared the strident Anglophobia of Joseph Kennedy, his even richer Irish-American counterpart in London who distrusted Anglo-Saxon Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic. Kennedy’s Celtic rapture at the prospect of the old enemy’s imminent defeat had Robert Vansittart, an outspoken British diplomat whose indiscretions had annoyed Chamberlain, jotting on the American’s Foreign Office file, ‘a very foul specimen of double crosser and defeatist’.

  By the time he caught up with Darlan at Clermont-Ferrand, the amiral’s views were a perfect match for those held by the founder of what would become America’s most famous and tragic political dynasty and Bullitt had cabled his scoop to Roosevelt as fast as the journalist he once was. Harvard’s Coolidge Professor of History William L. Langer would describe it as, ‘one of the most remarkable and revealing documents in the entire annals of this great war’.

  Darlan went on to say that he felt absolutely certain that Great Britain would be completely conquered by Germany within 5 weeks unless Great Britain should surrender sooner … For his part he did not believe that the British government or people would have the courage to stand against serious German air bombardments and he expected a surrender after a few heavy attacks. I remarked that he seemed to regard this prospect with considerable pleasure and when he did not deny this but smiled I said that it seemed to me that the French would like to have England conquered in order that Germany might have as many conquered provinces to control as possible and that France might become the favored province. He smiled again and nodded … It was in his opinion certain that Hitler intended to bring the entire continent of Europe including England into a single customs union and that he desired to make France his leading vassal state.

  Darlan’s reaction to the news that the spineless English, instead of accepting their gallows fate with what dignity was left to them, had risen far enough off their knees to murder his loyal and defenceless sailors was predictable enough. But even some of the Amis de Darlan were unprepared for the new depths of his loathing for Perfidious Albion. Gone was the shrewd and level-headed commander they all admired. Instead, here was a man beside himself with rage, demanding a war of revenge against Britain and announcing that he had already ordered the Strasbourg to attack British ships, merchant as well as naval, at will.

  Eventually he was calmed down by Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin, the former head of Banque d’Indochine and one of Reynaud’s more surprising appointees because he had always been considered something of an appeaser, a man whose ‘soft silky manner’ had been noted by Churchill at his last meeting with Reynaud’s Cabinet at Bordeaux. ‘War with Britain will only weaken France’s already pitiful condition,’ Baudouin counselled. Instead, it was agreed with Pétain to sever diplomatic relations with London for the first time since 1815 when Napoleon escaped from Elba for his last 100 days as Emperor. ‘Little stands between French acts of war against the British except the good sense of Maréchal Pétain,’ cabled Bullitt in a despatch saved until he reached the secure wireless communcations available at the US Embassy in Madrid en route to Washington and a new job. Bullitt seems to have been in complete agreement with his political counsellor Robert Murphy, now US chargé d’affaires in Vichy, who thought the British attack was ‘unnecessary’. Distraught French naval officers informed Murphy that the English had always envied their ships and had seized their chance to sink the defenceless fleet. Murphy assured them that ‘while our interests and sympathies in the war were entirely on the side of Britain … the American government had no prior knowledge of the naval attack and deplored it’.

  This was false. True, Secretary of State Hull thought it was ‘a tragic blunder’ but Roosevelt did not deplore it at all and did not hesitate to say so. ‘Even if there was only the remote possibility of seeing your Fleet pass into German hands, the British government had reason to act as it did. I would not have acted otherwise,’ he told Count René Doynel de St Quentin when on 1940’s Fourth of July, the day after Mers-el-Kébir, France’s ambassador in Washington delivered with his Independence Day congratulations a note from Pétain on this ‘hateful aggression’. The President must have enjoyed this exchange, for he disliked St Quentin and had been urging Bullitt to persuade the French to replace him.

  What Roosevelt was unable to say, at least in public, were the views being openly espoused by the newly arrived American military attaché in London, General Raymond E. Lee, a descendant of the Confederate leader Robert E. Lee. The general contradicted his ambassador’s gleeful forecasts of Britain’s imminent collapse with fulsome praise for Operation Catapult. ‘After all the defeatism in France and elsewhere,’ he said, ‘the British mean to win.’

  Nor was Lee on his own. Approval, often mingled with astonishment, was widespread. From the Balkans to Brazil, British ambassadors and naval attachés reported favourable reaction. For once the Turks and the Greeks were of the same opinion though the Hellenic Navy thought they would have made a better job of it. A predictable contra was Spain with all its military debts to the Axis; nonetheless there was said to be, within Franco’s immediate circle, a grudging admiration for ‘the English pirates’. Another exception was Switzerland where editorials in most of the French-and German-language newspapers almost all blamed the British. ‘It is a mortal insult to soldiers like Pétain and Weygand,’ declared La Suisse and predicted it would revive an Anglophobia dormant since Fashoda. ‘A monstrous presumption,’ pronounced Bund. But even in hostile Rome, Mussolini’s mercurial son-in-law and Foreign Minister Count Ciano, who was currently inclined to think that Adolf Hitler was a genius (this would change), could not resist a rueful diary entry on the enduring fighting spirit of the Royal Navy which ‘still has the ruthlessness of the captains and pirates of the 16th century’.

  No doubt Admiral Somerville, the self-styled ‘unskilled butcher of Oran’, would not have found this flattering. Nor would the eastern Mediterranean commander Cunningham who, by persistent negotiation, had persuaded Amiral Godfroy to accept the hopelessness of his tactical position and mothball his squadron in Alexandria with reduced crews. The surplus personnel were to be repatriated to Vichy France unless they wanted to join de Gaulle which very few did. Neither Somerville nor Cunningham were lacking in fighting spirit. On the contrary, soon they would be making life very miserable indeed for the Italians and obliging the Germans to divert resources needed elsewhere. But brave, hard, practical men that they were, unafraid of new technology, tactically creative, unpretentio
us yet careful of their honour, they still lacked that slither of ice in their hearts that enabled Churchill to do evil that good might come. In his own account of Mers-el-Kébir his defiance shines from every word. These included some that were first uttered in defence of regicide by Georges Danton, of all France’s revolutionary heroes the one whose patriotism, oratory and life-enhancing hedonism matched his own.

  It was Greek tragedy. But no act was ever more necessary for the life of Britain and all that depended upon it. I thought of Danton in 1793: ‘The coalesced Kings threaten us, and we hurl at their feet as a gage of battle the head of a King.’ The whole event was in this order of ideas … Here was this Britain which so many had counted as down and out, which strangers had supposed to be quivering on the brink of surrender to the mighty power arrayed against her, striking ruthlessly at her dearest friends of yesterday and securing for a while to herself the undisputed command of the sea. It was made plain that the British War Cabinet feared nothing and would stop at nothing.

  Or rather Churchill would stop at nothing. Mers-el-Kébir was the first major triumph of his premiership which was now towards the end of its second month. On 18 June, Waterloo Day as it happens, he had made the speech that ends ‘this was their finest hour’ and starts, ‘The battle of France is over. I expect the battle of Britain is about to begin.’ By now the music he made with the English language, the speeches which de Gaulle observed ‘stir up the heavy dough of the English’, was in full flow.

  But until 3 July, as far as the British were concerned, nothing much had happened since the evacuation of the army from Dunkirk ended on 3 June and the Norwegian campaign shortly afterwards. As yet there was no sign of a German invasion and, despite all the dire pre-war predictions of civilians massacred by chemical warfare, not a single gas mask had been used for its intended purpose. To date, air attacks had mostly been limited to shipping strikes in the Channel. The Battle of Britain Churchill had alluded to had still not begun and perhaps it never would.

  Nonetheless, there was plenty of apprehension that things might get much worse. Only two weeks before Mers-el-Kébir Duff Cooper’s Ministry of Information was warning that defeatism would grow ‘unless there was a strong lead from the prime minister’. There was talk of German peace feelers. These went with other rumours that Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, who had been of the appeasement tendency, was waiting in the wings, ready to take over once Churchill messed up. Certainly, a lot of Conservative MPs still regretted the passing of Chamberlain and would have preferred to have been led by his crony Halifax. Most of the Prime Minister’s support in the coalition government came from the Labour and Liberal benches.

  Then the day after the attack on the French fleet Churchill spoke to the House, enlarging on the brief and often confused newspaper reports of what had occurred, starting with the boarding of the French ships in British ports before spelling out the implications of the ‘melancholy action’ at Mers-el-Kébir: ‘In itself, sufficient to dispose once and for all of the lies and rumours that we have the slightest intention of entering into negotiations with Germany.’ For good measure, he finished by reading ‘the admonition’ he had sent the day before to the inner circles of all government departments, civil and military, demanding a curb on any defeatist talk.

  The Prime Minister expects all His Majesty’s servants in high places to set an example of steadiness and resolution. They should check and rebuke the expression of loose and ill-digested opinions in their circles or by their subordinates. They should not hesitate to remove any persons … whose talk is calculated to spread alarm and despondency. Thus alone will they be worthy of the fighting men who have already met the enemy without any sense of being outmatched in martial quality.

  Pegged as they were to bloody proof that Nazi Germany did not have the monopoly on brutal surprises, Churchill’s words must have been beyond the wildest dreams of the ‘strong lead’ advised by the men from the Ministry of Information. When he had finished speaking old enemies joined with his supporters in giving the Prime Minister a cheering, shouting, order-paper-waving, foot-stomping standing ovation and thus began the process that would soon make his position as Britain’s war supremo unassailable. ‘It is not often that the House is so deeply moved,’ reported The Times. With the exception perhaps of the recipient of these praises who, as was his wont, greeted his applause with tears of joy coursing down his cherubic cheeks. He had been in the House for over thirty years and it was, he said, ‘a scene unique in my own experience’.

  The jubilation with which the Commons greeted the Prime Minister’s account of the sinkings at Mers-el-Kébir is sometimes cited as proof of the deep-rooted Francophobia of the English. But it seems to have had much more to do with an immense feeling of relief that Churchill had at last matched the pledge of no surrender he made after Dunkirk with action. Ships that might have fallen into the hands of the enemy had been denied to them and England was safer for it. It was as simple as that. ‘The House is at first saddened by this odious attack,’ the writer and National Liberal member for Leicester Harold Nicolson noted at the time. ‘But is fortified by Winston’s speech.’

  That a feeling existed that Pétain and the men around him had ‘let us down’ was true but there was certainly no delight in killing Frenchmen. On the contrary, there was such horror at France’s plight, often coupled with guilt that Britain had been no more ready for war with Germany than their ally, that Nicolson was by no means the only one to find the idea of inflicting further suffering odious. ‘Horrible but necessary … to be weak is to be destroyed’, declared the editorial in next day’s News Chronicle, flagship of British liberal opinion. ‘There can be little pleasure in contemplating the defeat of enemies whom we believe to be at heart our friends,’ lamented The Times. The Battle of the Brothers’, the socialist Daily Herald called it though they praised the government for its ‘fearless and terrible decision’. The conservative Daily Telegraph was in total agreement: ‘An Inexorable Duty’. And at the end of the week The Observer summed it all up as a case of ‘human reluctance and relentless necessity’.

  Nor was it quite over. In the early hours of Monday, 8 July, under a pale African half-moon, a wooden-hulled motorboat painted a matt black for the occasion edged alongside the stern of the brand-new battleship Richelieu as she lay in shallow waters at Dakar. The boat belonged to the British aircraft carrier Hermes which was a few miles offshore, and its nine-man crew, faces boot-polished the same colour as their craft, included two Royal Marines manning a Vickers machine gun in the bow. But that night its main armament was four depth charges, each as big as a 40-gallon oil drum, which had affected the boat’s trim so badly there had been times over the last three hours when they feared the heavy Atlantic swell might capsize them.

  The previous day Pierre Boisson, the Governor General of French West Africa, had dismissed an ultimatum presented by Acting Rear Admiral Rodney Onslow offering him the same choices for the Richelieu that Gensoul had turned down at Mers-el-Kébir. Boisson, who had lost a leg at Verdun under Pétain, said that such demands were ‘shameful’. And a few hours later the British had picked up a radio signal ordering all French shipping in the harbour to ‘meet attacks from the English enemy with the utmost ferocity’.

  Onslow knew Boisson and Amiral Placon, the local naval commander, quite well. Until the armistice Hermes had been based in Dakar as part of the Anglo-French squadron deployed there to hunt down German commerce raiders in the South Atlantic. But once his terms had been rejected Onslow did not linger. He took his old ship, Britain’s first purpose-built carrier, and her escort of two cruisers – one of them HMAS Australia – almost out of range of the Richelieu’s eight 15-inchers, which could easily have wreaked revenge for Mers-el-Kébir. Then Hermes’ motorboat and volunteer crew under Commander Bobby Bristowe, Onslow’s executive officer whose idea the raid was, had headed for the harbour with only one of its twin engines working. The other had been wrecked by an unfuzed depth charge when they were loading th
em in a heavy swell. Also a casualty was Commissioned Torpedo Gunner Grant, Bristowe’s deputy, who had been knocked cold by a swinging cargo sling loading the second depth charge and was unconscious for much of the approach.

  One engine or two, Bristowe was determined to press on. At first light the French would be receiving torpedo attacks from the carrier’s Swordfish. But the Richelieu was a big, thickly armoured modern ship; it would not be easy to inflict enough damage to meet the Admiralty’s requirement to keep her out of the war for at least a year. This was something extra, something that would take them by surprise and he was determined to make it work. In case the battleship had slipped out, or changed her position in the harbour, he also had a reconnaissance role and had been equipped with a radio which in 1940 was a novel concept on a small boat. To everyone’s surprise, it worked well and he was able to keep Hermes informed of his progress.

  Bristowe was familiar with the harbour and, having narrowly avoided collision with a French destroyer, navigated its several breakwaters before stopping his engine and sliding his boat’s shallow draught, as he always thought he could, over the chain and steel mesh that was the port’s defence boom. Richelieu was surrounded by several merchant ships which provided good cover as he sneaked towards the battleship at 3 knots. A harbour launch signalled a challenge with a series of red and white flashes but when Bristowe failed to respond did not open fire, presumably unwilling to believe that anything so small could possibly be dangerous.