England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Peters had made Duncan his Chief of Staff and lighter of the little black cheroots he chain-smoked. But tonight Duncan had a starring role and was costumed for the part in US Army combat garb with a brace of revolvers in open western holsters on his hips. In his right hand he clutched a bullhorn through which he would shortly be calling on the hidden listeners of the night to stop firing at their American friends. This would all be in the American-accented French he had been trying out on Marshall and his officers, whose forbearance did them credit.

  ‘I think we’ve got a good chance of carrying out our mission without firing a shot,’ Peters said at his last officers’ conference in the wardroom. As they closed with the shoreline and, one by one, the chains of amber lights that beaded the slopes above the port were snuffed out, Disher overheard Meyrick pass on a message from the command ship Largs that seemed to confirm their commander’s prediction. ‘It says landings up to now have been carried out without shooting. Don’t start a fight unless you have to.’ Everybody on the bridge laughed. So they were the hard men who had to be kept on a short leash. En route to Gibraltar, over the nightly drinks in the wardroom, Peters had made sure that Disher understood that he was a man who loved to smell the powder, once confiding to him that he only felt properly alive when he was being shot at.

  Then briefly a searchlight got onto them before darting off in another direction as if its operators had been too confused to examine what they were doing. But somebody had a good idea where they were. First lazy blobs of red tracer arched slowly towards them followed by the clang of a coastal battery. Disher felt the ship shudder from near misses: once, twice. Orders were shouted and the Walney began to turn away. Hartland followed. Once again a beam was briefly on them then lost and they were heading back towards the open sea and the safety of Troubridge’s big ships. Then Disher heard Peters say something to Meyrick. He failed to catch the actual words though he soon realized what they meant because Admiral Meyrick’s middle son – the eldest was a destroyer captain and the youngest on cruisers – was ordering his helmsman in a loud, clear voice: ‘Turn her, we’re going back in.’ Peters was going to sniff the powder.

  Just like Algiers there was a harbour boom defence to get through. This one was a chain followed by tethered line of what looked like coal barges. The two accompanying motor launches began to lay the smoke screen that had blinded the Epervier. Everybody except the carefully braced Disher was lying flat, as they had been trained to do, in anticipation of a crash that would knock them off their feet. But a prow meant for Great Lakes ice had no more problem with the boom than a good knife on a wedding cake, parting it with a gentle crunch. Even so, it was no bad thing to be lying down because the Walney was beginning to take a few hits, though at this point the most terrible sound was a grinding crash as they hacked the bow off one of the smoke screen launches disorientated by its own work. The craft, still able to steer, bumped back towards Troubridge’s ships for first aid.

  Not long after this a gentle offshore wind began to disperse the smoke screen and both cutters started to take heavy punishment. One of the first casualties was Captain Michael Bolitho, of the Coldstream Guards, who was standing by the forward 3-inch gun when it took a direct hit. Bolitho, whose mother was from Jersey’s prominent Anglo-French Lemprière family, was part of a small Special Operations Executive explosives team who were on board to defuse any mines and booby traps on the port’s installations. The SOE team were to be delivered to their targets by Commando canoeists. After the destruction of the forward gun the next shell to hit Walney wrecked her engine room and she was no longer under power. Disher recalled the ‘sudden quiet’ as they began drifting, temporarily unmolested, into the harbour past a breakwater wall on which, illuminated by one of the flares the French were putting up, he read in stencilled capitals: LA BELLE FRANCE.

  A little behind them the Hartland, caught in searchlights, had one of her gun crews wiped out by heavy machine-gun fire then started taking shell hits, first from the 8-inch guns on Fort Laumone, then the destroyer Typhon’s 5.7-inchers and then from La Surprise and almost every other ship, launch or submarine with something that could reach her. On the bridge was Lieutenant Commander Godfrey Billot who was 36 and, like the older Peters, had rejoined the service from the Royal Naval Reserve having taken his discharge as a lieutenant in the early 1930s when the navy was looking for cuts.

  Billot had just been temporarily blinded in one eye by shrapnel, which may account for the Hartland missing by a few feet the gap Walney had made in the boom and ramming a pier. Bouncing back on his buckled prow, Billot did not make the same mistake twice but by the time they entered the harbour both his ship’s 3-inch guns were out of action and she was on fire. On deck the hoses needed to put it out were covered by mounds of dead and dying Americans. Engine room steam pipes cracked and hissed and scalded screaming stokers to death, while in the wardroom’s makeshift dressing station the wounded were being wounded again. When Billot gave the order to abandon ship the flames were almost funnel-high and he could hardly stand from fresh wounds in his legs, but he got into the water.

  On the drifting Walney Peters and his officers could see that the Hartland was in serious trouble but there was nothing they could do about it and they were busy trying to save themselves. On the bow Colonel Marshall and one of his company commanders were throwing grenades and firing bursts from their Tommy guns at a submarine that had manned her deck gun, while from the bridge, Lieutenant Duncan RN was letting them have it in what he fondly imagined was American French: ‘Ne tiray pas! Noo sarmes vos armis. Noo sarmes Americaine. Ne tiray pas! Noo sarmes Americaine!

  The only response Duncan got was a burst of machine-gun fire, which killed him. He fell against Disher who noticed how ‘strangely soft’ his friend’s body felt, nothing like the stiff muscles of a man merely thrown off balance. The next shell mortally wounded two doctors toiling in the wardroom dressing station, one American the other British. Then the harbour current tugged them towards the Epervier whose dark bulk was intermittently illuminated by moon and gun flashes.

  Peters saw it as his salvation. Casualties were mounting but he still had at least 150 fully armed infantry at his disposal eager to get out of this hell and kill somebody. He would make fast alongside her – they had been supplied with grappling hooks with that very purpose in mind – and Marshall’s men would storm over the side in a good old-fashioned boarding party. Once she was in their hands he would launch his canoes and the Commandos would dart across the harbour, silent as snakes, attaching limpet mines to those ships that had the temerity to fire at them.

  They were now less than 100 yards away. Suddenly the ship put a searchlight on them. Some of the Americans and Peters’s surviving antiaircraft crews started shooting at her. The light went out and the French, hesitantly at first, started shooting back with heavy machine guns. Paul Laurin, the captain of the Epervier, had been taken by surprise. At first he had thought this ghost vessel drifting silently towards them was a French ship. But, as it drew closer, Laurin realized that he did not recognize her shape and told his searchlight crew to give him a better look at her. As soon as he saw the large American flag flying from her stern, he ordered his light switched off.

  By this time the American ship started firing at us. We replied with the Browning machine-gun starboard of the bridge and the starboard Hotchkiss. I ordered the 5.7-inch and the 37mm guns to open fire. The order was not immediately executed. The navigating officer rushed to the 37mm and the gunnery officer to the 5.7-inch guns. The gunnery officer loaded gun No. 5 and fired at the enemy ship which was about 50 metres from us. The other rear guns also opened fire.

  The last time the French had fired at British ships at this range – Laurin put it at 50 metres – the cannon had been Napoleonic. By 1942 a couple of 5.7-inch shells were probably the high-explosive equivalent of the average Trafalgar broadside. According to Laurin’s report the Epervier fired seventeen of them altogether with ‘many rounds of 37mm and 13.2mm
’. It was as one-sided as Mers-el-Kébir though without the preliminaries. Both Walney’s 3-inch guns were out of action and Colonel Marshall was killed leading by example and trying to get his men to do what they could with rifles, Thompsons and grenades.

  The French concentrated their fire on the bridge which had already had some of its thin armour-plating shot away. So far its most senior casualty had been the Anglo-French Lieutenant Duncan, cut down in mid-spiel. It probably took only one other 5.7-inch shell to kill or maim most of the rest on the bridge who appear to have numbered almost twenty people including signallers and lookouts. Among them was Meyrick, the Walney’s captain. There were at least two survivors. One was Peters, who had a shoulder wound and, like Billot on the Hartland, had lost the sight in one eye. Somehow he managed to reach the quarterdeck where, despite his injuries, he got some men around him and tried to organize the lowering of an anchor. The other was Disher who had lost his crutches and it seems, for a bit, his mind as he crawled about the bridge, choking on the thick smoke and fumes rising from the fires on deck, trying to orientate himself.

  The blasts were so loud they hurt, seemed solid … I was the only living person moving. I crawled to the starboard bridge … Some fire was blazing below and in its glare I saw a piece of broken, floating wreckage. I could see nothing else. I lifted the Colonel’s pistol and slowly fired shot after shot at the wreckage. I can’t explain. It just seemed the thing to do … There was a triple crash of shells. The blast caught me, hurled me back on the bridge with wounds in my legs. Once more I began crawling. Then behind me appeared a figure. A voice yelled, ‘Is that you Captain Peters?’ ‘No, it’s Disher.’ He started to say something else. A shell exploded near us … I must have been knocked unconscious for, when I was thinking again, I was crawling in the blackness over bodies, over glass and pieces of metal. And as I crawled I thought this is it, this is the end.

  Total casualties, dead and wounded, for Operation Reservist exceeded 90 per cent of all those involved. Marshall and 189 of his men were killed. Another 157 soldiers needed medical attention. Some would never soldier again. On the Walney, which only doused her fires when she capsized, 82 British sailors died and Hartland lost another 32 including Lieutenant Jacques de Bourgeois, her French-Canadian surgeon. Among the wounded 86 were Royal Navy and of about 20 attached US Navy personnel, including marines, 5 died and 7 were hurt. At least one member of SOE, Bolitho, was killed. As far as the French were concerned they had been fish in a barrel and their own casualties had been light. On the Epervier Laurin had one dead and four others in his sick bay. All the survivors, wounded and unwounded, appear to have been captured, though perhaps a couple of evaders got to the beaches on which the main landings had taken place.

  Peters was picked up by Enseigne de vaisseau Schillte and his shore party when he came into the docks with thirteen others on a Carley float, one of the canvas and kapok life rafts used by both the British and American navies. Schillte had them all locked up in the dock canteen until daybreak when they were escorted to naval headquarters.

  Despite his lack of crutches Disher found his way off the bridge, climbed down a ladder being licked with flames, removed his helmet and fell into the sea through a broken guard rail before he was quite ready for it. He was a strong swimmer but almost drowned. Shrapnel had punctured the inflated tubular British life belt around his chest but the one that had been secured to his leg cast was still intact and this was bringing his feet up and keeping his head below water. Choking and spluttering, the reporter managed to get rid of it and ‘with infinite weariness’ began swimming until he got between a swaying merchant ship and a pier. Here he found a dangling mooring line and began to pull himself up.

  I got my elbows over the pier rim. Then the full weight of the cast on my leg caught me and I knew I couldn’t make it. I began to lose my grip. A single hand groped down and braced me. I swung my good leg up and it caught. Then the hand from above began to pull and I rolled over the edge with open, gasping mouth pressed against the stone surface of the pier. I could see the man who had pulled me as a hazy, unreal figure swaying near me. He had only used one hand because the other had been shot away. I never knew his name, never even knew his nationality because just then a bullet struck my injured foot. I was sprawling in the dirt, crawling again.

  Disher took cover behind a pile of timber where perhaps the same sniper wounded him again, this time in the buttocks. Later another group of survivors named the men they claim to have seen being machine-gunned in the water. ‘Lieutenant George Lawrence of Cadiz, Kentucky was killed as he swam,’ Disher would write in a piece for Collier’s, then at the peak of its popularity and selling over 2.5 million copies a week. ‘And so died Lieutenant Charles D. Buckley of Princeton, New Jersey and Lieutenant C. Browning of Bowling Green, Kentucky.’ Perplexed and grieving parents, who imagined their sons had gone off to fight the Germans, were left to wonder whenever this cruel war with France had started.

  Once they were face to face with the French the survivors were almost invariably well treated. After a long moment, when weapons were cocked and they were dazzled by flashlights, the men on the pier were picked up by a foot patrol. One of them managed a fireman’s lift and single-handedly carried the broken and bleeding Disher to a field dressing station. Later, in a long ward of mostly Allied casualties, a French nurse placed a cigarette between Disher’s lips while a doctor examined the reporter’s twenty-six wounds: eleven from gunshots and the rest shrapnel. When these had been dressed he was put into a bed and tried to get some sleep but found this difficult because Oran’s forts were now coming under close bombardment from the 15-inch guns on the shallow-draught monitor HMS Roberts with the battleships Rodney and Duke of York occasionally joining in from further out. The whole building shook though they were assured they were well out of danger. A visiting French officer told the Americans and British in the ward: ‘Soon we shall all be your prisoners.’

  The survivors of the late Colonel Marshal’s battalion (his body was never found) did not feel much like they were about to become victors. Nor in Algiers did Svenson’s Singing Third, the majority of whom were being marched into captivity. The exception were fifteen killed and about sixty who had managed to scramble back aboard HMS Broke which had hung around the harbour being intermittently shelled by the overlooking clifftop batteries without much effect until 9.20 a.m. when she was hit by a salvo of five 8-inch shells.

  Badly listing and on fire, she staggered back out to sea with nine crew killed and about twenty wounded, including her surgeon who had lost an arm and was taking morphine while instructing the surviving sick berth attendant on amputation. The destroyer HMS Zetland rushed up to provide cover with her 4.7-inch guns, put down a smoke screen and take Broke under tow. But a heavy sea came up and it was obvious that the old destroyer was never going to reach Gibraltar. Once the wounded had been transferred GIs and sailors jumped onto mattresses and hammocks spread onto Zetland’s forecastle which then put Broke out of her misery with a couple of shallow-fused depth charges.

  When Lieutenant Commander Layard had blown the agreed recall signal on Broke’s siren, on shore Colonel Svenson had not been too downhearted that he and most of his men had been unable to fight their way over open dockland to the ship. Almost everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. Half his command had never got ashore when the damaged Malcolm had withdrawn; another sixty had departed with the Broke. And it was only too apparent that the batteries above the harbour had certainly not been dealt with, as planned, by Commando parties coming from the beaches. Nor did the landings either side of the city appear to have drawn defenders away from the harbour as one rosy British scenario they had heard in Gibraltar had suggested. But he still had over 200 men with him on the Môle Louis Billiard and, though he suspected the French outnumbered them by at least twice that, they contented themselves with sniping or sneaking close enough to throw a grenade. Furthermore, the British Fleet Air Arm had given him some support and bombed at least
one battery into silence.

  There was still a good chance, he thought, that any moment the good old 168th Infantry Regiment, part of the Iowa National Guard, would arrive from their beach landing. There would be a flurry of shots and there they would be, large as life and twice as ugly, and they would all be joshing and laughing and saying, where the hell have you boys been? What Svenson had not expected were tanks. They were the ubiquitous Renault R35s, the same little two-man machines with the thick armour, 37mm cannon and Riebling machine gun that had made such inroads into the British infantry in Syria.

  Some American battalions had been given the new Bazooka, the world’s first hand-held rocket-propelled anti-tank weapon but this only seems to have applied to Patton’s infantry which had come directly from America. Certainly the Singing Third were not among the Bazooka-blessed. All they had were a few rifle grenades, a cumbersome weapon shot from a special discharger screwed into the muzzle. Some of these rifle grenades were allegedly armour-piercing but so was the British Boys rifle and neither could make a hole in an R35. When they had used them all up, and the tanks and the infantry were getting closer, Svenson gave the order to fix bayonets. Then he came to his senses and surrendered. It was 12.30 p.m. over three hours since the Broke sailed away and he had thirty-three wounded men on his hands. In the course of patting their prisoners down for hidden weapons Senegalese soldiers removed watches, cigarette cases and lighters until Svenson complained and their French officers made them give them all back.