Attack on Mers-el-Kébir

• 1. Introduction

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  The third British salvo struck Bretagne's magazine at Mers-el-Kébir, and by 6:09 p.m. on the 3rd of July 1940, 977 French sailors had died. Days earlier, Britain and France had been fighting the same enemy. Churchill wrote, 'This was the most hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned.' Admiral James Somerville, who commanded the attacking force, called it 'the biggest political blunder of modern times.' The attack killed 1,297 French servicemen in total and sank a battleship. France was not an enemy. It was a defeated ally whose powerful fleet Britain feared would pass into German hands. What drove a wartime ally to open fire on its own partner's ships, and whether that decision was necessary or catastrophic, is a story that begins on the coast of French Algeria in the summer of 1940.

• 2. A Fleet Between Enemies

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  Admiral François Darlan commanded the second largest concentration of capital ships in Europe, behind only the Royal Navy. By tonnage, about 40 per cent of the French fleet sat at Toulon, near Marseille. Another 40 per cent lay in French North Africa. The remaining 20 per cent was distributed between Britain, Alexandria, and the French West Indies.

  France had three older battleships and four fast battleships. Combined with German naval strength, that force could have threatened British supply lines across the Atlantic and severed communications with the British Empire. The British War Cabinet understood this clearly. So did Adolf Hitler, who feared that any attempt to seize the French fleet would push it into British hands instead.

  Benito Mussolini had made overtures, but practical obstacles existed. French warships required equipment incompatible with German and Italian standards. The Kriegsmarine and Italian Navy would have struggled to man and operate them. Churchill and Hitler each viewed the fleet as a potential threat. French leaders, meanwhile, used the fleet as a bargaining counter against Germany. They hinted it might rejoin the Allies, hoping to keep German troops out of unoccupied France and French North Africa.

  Darlan had his own standing orders for this eventuality. He had directed the French Atlantic fleet to Toulon and instructed commanders to scuttle their ships before allowing any foreign power to capture them. He gave Churchill personal assurances on the 24th of June that the fleet would remain under French control. Churchill and the War Cabinet judged those assurances insufficient, in part because the armistice terms were ambiguous. Article 8 of the German armistice declared that Germany had no intention of demanding the French fleet during peace negotiations. The British considered this a conditional statement, not a guarantee. At Italian suggestion, the armistice had been amended to let the French fleet stay temporarily in North African ports. Italian troops from Libya were within reach of those same ports.

  Because the fleet at Toulon was well guarded by shore artillery, the Royal Navy settled on attacking the base in North Africa instead. The Admiralty remained uneasy about the choice. A strike that failed to disable the ships might push France into declaring open war. French colonies, if war broke out, would be far less likely to break with Vichy.

• 3. An Ultimatum at Oran

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  Admiral Marcel-Bruno Gensoul commanded the most powerful group of French warships at Mers-el-Kébir. His force included two older battleships, two newer Force de Raid battleships, and a seaplane tender. Alongside them rode a flotilla of six destroyers: Mogador, Volta, Tigre, Lynx, Kersaint, and Le Terrible.

  Admiral James Somerville, commanding Force H from Gibraltar, was ordered to deliver an ultimatum to the French. Its terms were directly contrary to the German-French armistice. Somerville delegated the task to Captain Cedric Holland, a French speaker who commanded the British carrier. Gensoul was affronted. He considered a matter of this gravity to require a more senior officer. He sent his lieutenant, Bernard Dufay, to conduct negotiations in his place. The delay and confusion that followed cost precious hours.

  Darlan, the French Navy commander, was at home on the 3rd of July and could not be contacted. Gensoul, in reporting the situation to the French government, listed only two options: internment or battle. He omitted a third, sailing to the French West Indies, which had been among the terms presented. Darlan had himself given Gensoul standing orders to sail to American waters rather than let a foreign power seize his ships. Those orders played no part in the afternoon's talks.

  Forty-two French aircraft were armed and prepared for take-off while the negotiations continued. Six British Fairey Swordfish had already dropped five magnetic mines in the harbour exit, escorted by three Blackburn Skuas. Five French Curtiss H-75 fighters intercepted the escort and shot one Skua into the sea. Gensoul had also signalled for assistance. Six warships were summoned from Algiers, but they would not arrive in time.

• 4. Thirty Salvoes

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  The British opened fire at 6:00 p.m. Provence replied within ninety seconds. Dunkerque and Strasbourg could not return fire immediately. Both ships were tied up at the mole with their sterns toward the sea. Their main armaments were mounted forward of the superstructure and could not be brought to bear.

  Dunkerque was struck by three shells, severely damaged, and run aground to prevent her from sinking. Provence sustained serious hits and was beached as well. The destroyer Mogador lost its stern. Two more destroyers were deliberately grounded by their own crews. After thirty salvoes, the French ships ceased fire.

  Strasbourg managed to avoid the mines and break out of the harbour, accompanied by three destroyers and a gunboat. Swordfish bombers from Ark Royal attacked the escaping group. The French shot down two Swordfish; both crews were rescued by a French destroyer. Somerville ordered his ships to pursue at 6:43 p.m. When Hood had closed to 25 nautical miles from Strasbourg, Somerville received word of a French force from Algiers steering to intercept. It comprised four heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, and several destroyers. Without his two trailing battleships, Valiant and Resolution, he calculated his force would be outnumbered. His ships were expected to reach Strasbourg shortly after 9:00 p.m. His force would also be silhouetted against the evening twilight, giving French gunners the advantage. At 8:20 p.m., Somerville called off the pursuit.

  Strasbourg reached Toulon on the 4th of July. On the same day, a British submarine off the Algerian coast mistook Rigault de Genouilly for a cruiser and sank her.

• 5. Resentment and Retaliation

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  Marshal Philippe Pétain, appointed Prime Minister of France on the 16th of June, severed diplomatic relations with Britain on the 8th of July. Darlan ordered the French fleet to attack Royal Navy ships wherever it found them. Pétain and his foreign minister, Paul Baudouin, overruled the order the following day.

  Baudouin's position was direct: 'the attack on our fleet is one thing, war is another.' Military retaliation took a different form. On the 5th of July, the French Air Force made a small night raid on Gibraltar; most bombs fell into the sea. The larger response came on the 24th of September, when sixty Vichy French aircraft dropped 45 long tons of bombs on Gibraltar. That same night, another 81 bombers delivered 60 more long tons.

  Gibraltar's civilian population had been caught in the middle before any of this began. In early June 1940, about 13,500 civilians had been evacuated from Gibraltar to Casablanca in French Morocco. After the bombardment, the Vichy government found their continued presence an embarrassment. Commodore Crichton arrived with 15 British cargo vessels to repatriate 15,000 French servicemen rescued from Dunkirk. French authorities held the ships until Crichton agreed to take the evacuees away. The civilians were escorted to the docks at bayonet point, stripped of many of their possessions.

  On the 27th of September, Force H put to sea after word arrived that the entire Toulon fleet was coming out to fight. It never appeared. An informal understanding settled in. Britain would not attack stronger French forces at sea, nor strike ships in port. The French would not force a broader confrontation. In the autumn of 1940, a French convoy passed through the Strait of Gibraltar untroubled. Charles de Gaulle had been recognised by the British as leader of the Free French Forces on the 28th of June. Every attack on a French ship further strained his relationship with Churchill.

• 6. History Argues Back

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  The Italian foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, recorded in his diary that the Royal Navy had retained the 'ruthlessness of the captains and pirates of the C16th.' Other reactions were warmer. Eric Seal, Churchill's principal private secretary, recorded that Churchill believed the American reaction to the attack 'was of the first importance.' On the 4th of July, Roosevelt told the French ambassador that he would have done the same.

  In 1997, Martin Thomas noted that the attack remained controversial while other historians had concluded it demonstrated Britain's will to fight on. David Brown, writing in 2004, found that foreign opinion had generally been favourable to Operation Catapult. Colin Smith, in 2010, called the attack the first big triumph of Churchill's premiership. The governments of the United States, Turkey, Greece, and Brazil had received it favourably, he noted. Spain and Switzerland condemned it. The attack also rallied the British Conservative Party around Churchill. Neville Chamberlain, his predecessor as Prime Minister, was still party leader at the time.

  George Melton, writing in 2015, challenged the conventional reading. He described much of the attack's historiography as a 'Churchillian perspective' that obscured how thoroughly the operation had failed. The attack had done little to neutralise the French fleet. Strasbourg was intact. Dispersed French ships that had been beyond Axis reach were now concentrated at Toulon, far more exposed to seizure than before. Melton used the word 'obsession' to describe Churchill's fixation on the four modern French battleships, Jean Bart, Richelieu, Dunkerque, and Strasbourg. He argued that anger at France's capitulation had driven the decision as much as strategic logic.

  Jean Lacouture, writing in a biography of De Gaulle, blamed the tragedy mainly on miscommunication. If Darlan had been reachable on the day, an agreement might have been reached. Somerville's character, Lacouture suggested, was also a factor. Lacouture accepted that a genuine risk of seizure existed. The ease with which the Germans later took French ships at Bizerte in Tunisia, in November 1942, gave that danger credibility.

  On the 19th of November 1942, German forces moved to seize the French fleet at Toulon as part of Case Anton, the military occupation of Vichy France. French sailors scuttled every ship of military value before German troops could reach them. Among the vessels destroyed were Dunkerque, Strasbourg, and seven modern cruisers, four heavy and three light. Darlan had been true to his word. For many in the French Navy, the scuttling at Toulon was the final proof that their ships would never have served the Axis.

  A Navy News magazine in 1990 described the attack as 'one of the most distasteful acts the Royal Navy has ever had to perform.' Admiral René-Emile Godfroy, who had kept the French squadron at Alexandria disarmed since July 1940, finally joined the Allies on the 17th of May 1943. The ships that France had refused to hand over, and that Britain had attacked to keep from enemy hands, spent the last years of the war fighting on the same side.