Scuttling of the French fleet at Toulon

• 1. Introduction

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  The scuttling of the French fleet at Toulon began before dawn on the 27th of November 1942. The flagship Strasbourg transmitted three words by radio, visual signal, and dispatch boat: "Scuttle! Scuttle! Scuttle!" Within minutes, French sailors were opening sea valves and arming demolition charges across the harbor. By morning's end, 77 vessels lay on the harbor floor. But the path to that harbor floor required years of duplicity on all sides. Why did the fleet's own senior admiral refuse to sail it to safety when he had the chance? And how did Adolf Hitler end up deceiving his own naval command about his true intentions for the ships?

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• 2. The Armistice Trap

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  The Armistice of the 22nd of June 1940 split France into an occupied zone and a zone libre. Both were nominally administered by the Vichy government, but only one was free of German soldiers. Under its terms, the French fleet was to be disarmed and confined to its harbors. The French retained ultimate operational control, and their ships included some of the most sophisticated warships then afloat.

  On the 3rd of July 1940, British forces attacked the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir. A second confrontation came at the Battle of Dakar on the 23rd of September 1940. For the British, the prospect of those ships in German hands was considered a life-or-death matter. France's armistice fleet was already a target before any lasting political settlement had been reached.

  On the 8th of November 1942, the Allies launched Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa. Adolf Hitler responded immediately by ordering Case Anton, the full German occupation of Vichy France. Both the Franco-German and the Franco-Italian armistices had explicitly forbidden any foreign power from seizing the French fleet. That prohibition was about to be tested. What Hitler actually planned to do with the ships was not what every German officer had been told.

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• 3. Hitler's Hidden Agenda

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  Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, commander of the Kriegsmarine, believed French officers would never hand their ships to a foreign power. Hitler reinforced that belief. He described a plan to exploit anti-British sentiment among French sailors and bring them to the Italian side. That was not the actual plan. Hitler intended to have German sailors seize the French ships directly and transfer them to Italy. When German officers who knew the real plan objected, Hitler ignored them. He issued orders to implement it on the 19th of November.

  Vichy's Secretary of the Navy, Admiral Gabriel Auphan, correctly guessed that Germany intended to seize the fleet. He ordered Admirals Jean de Laborde and André Marquis to oppose any foreign entry to naval facilities without bloodshed. If that resistance failed, they were to scuttle the ships. The original order called for capsizing the ships. This was later amended to sinking them upright, on the calculation that they might be salvageable after the war.

  On the 15th of November, Laborde met privately with Marshal Philippe Pétain and Auphan. Auphan pressed Laborde to take the fleet to the Allies before the Germans could act. Laborde refused. He would obey nothing short of a formal order from the French government. Auphan resigned shortly after, leaving behind a scuttling plan already in motion. Aboard the warships themselves, crews had spent months falsifying fuel reports and tampering with gauges. They had stored enough oil to reach North Africa.

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• 4. A Harbor Under Watch

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  Rumors of Admiral Darlan's defection spread through the ships in mid-November, and what had been hostility toward the Allied invasion began to shift. Aboard several ships, sailors were chanting "Long live De Gaulle! Set sail!" On the 12th of November, Darlan escalated matters by formally calling on the fleet to join the Allies.

  Vichy military authorities in Toulon lived in fear of a coup de main organized by the British or the Free French. The population of Toulon itself, largely defiant of the Germans, supported the Allied cause. Soldiers and officers reserved a particular hostility for the Italians. They were seen as both duplicitous and as victors who had not earned their position.

  Between the 11th and the 26th of November, numerous arrests and expulsions took place. Admirals Laborde and Marquis required subordinates to swear allegiance to the Vichy regime. Two senior officers, Humbertand and capitaine de vaisseau Pothuau, refused. Crews were confined to their ships initially, and when they were permitted ashore, the Service d'ordre légionnaire monitored those suspected of Resistance ties. German armored units would enter the city before dawn, and only the sentries at the main gate stood between them and the harbor.

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• 5. Into the Arsenal

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  The force assigned to capture the fleet intact was the 7th Panzer Division. It was reinforced by combat groups that included two armored units and a motorcycle battalion from the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich. A special naval unit, Marinedetachment Gumprich, was embedded with one of the groups specifically to prevent any scuttling. German naval vessels took up position offshore, and mines were laid to catch any ship attempting to run.

  Combat groups entered Toulon from the east and west simultaneously at 4 a.m. At Fort Lamalgue, German troops arrested Admiral Marquis within the hour. They failed, however, to stop his chief of staff, Contre-Admiral Robin, from telephoning the arsenal. Robin reached Contre-Admiral Dornon, who transmitted the order to scuttle to Admiral Laborde aboard the Strasbourg. Laborde was taken aback by the speed of the German advance. He ordered preparations for scuttling and directed that any unauthorized personnel approaching a ship should be fired on.

  Twenty minutes after the first arrests at Fort Lamalgue, German troops in the submarine pens began machine-gunning the vessels there. The submarine Casabianca cast off, cleared the harbor entrance, and dove at 5:40 a.m. The German main force searching the arsenal lost its way and fell an hour behind schedule. When they reached the main gates of the base, French sentries did not resist; they asked for paperwork. By the time German armor pushed through, demolition charges were already being armed across the harbor.

  Fighting broke out at 6:45 a.m. near the Strasbourg and the cruiser Foch, killing one French officer and wounding five sailors. When German forces attempted to negotiate a surrender, an officer demanded that Laborde yield his ship. Laborde answered that the ship was already sunk. Strasbourg settled on the harbor floor, and her captain ordered demolition charges ignited, destroying her armaments and machinery and igniting her fuel stores. She was a total loss.

  The cruiser Colbert exploded and burned for twenty days. A second cruiser was capsized by her captain; when German troops asked to come aboard, the request was denied, and she burned for seven days. German forces boarded a third cruiser by force and closed her sea valves. Her captain, Moreau, lit charges in the main turrets with shortened fuses. French and German crews alike fled as explosions and fire took hold. That ship burned for ten days.

  German troops disarmed the demolition charges aboard the cruiser Jean de Vienne, which lay in drydock. Her open sea valves flooded and sank her, blocking the drydock. In a second drydock, the captain of the battleship Dunkerque initially refused orders to scuttle. A colleague in an adjacent cruiser persuaded him. Dunkerque had been damaged by British torpedo attacks at Mers-el-Kébir years before. Her crew opened those same torpedo holes to send her to the bottom. As Dunkerque sank, La Galissonnière flooded herself by the same method. Elsewhere, Germans who had come aboard a submarine before her crew opened the seacocks were left scrambling to close valves they could not find. Unfamiliar with the interior of a submarine, they narrowly avoided drowning as she went down. The main guns salvaged from the battleship Provence would end up in a fortification above the Toulon waterfront, and they would be needed.

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• 6. The Reckoning

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  Operation Lila was declared a failure. Germany seized 39 ships in total. These included three disarmed destroyers, four badly damaged submarines, three civilian ships, and the hulks of two obsolete battleships. The French had destroyed 3 battleships, 7 cruisers, 15 destroyers, 13 torpedo boats, 6 sloops, and 12 submarines. Also gone were 9 patrol boats, 19 auxiliary ships, a school ship, 28 tugs, and 4 cranes. Some of the major vessels smoldered for days. Oil from their fuel stores polluted the harbor so heavily that swimming there would be impossible for two years.

  Casabianca and Marsouin had ignored the scuttling orders and reached Algiers. Glorieux made port at Oran. Iris sailed to Barcelona. One auxiliary surface ship, Leonor Fresnel, also escaped to Algiers. General Charles de Gaulle was sharply critical of the Vichy admirals. He had wanted the fleet to sail for Algiers rather than sink in place. The Vichy regime, by choosing destruction over defection, lost what credibility it still held with Germany.

  Adolf Hitler took a different view of the outcome. He had little use for large capital ships, especially after the loss of the Bismarck. Eliminating the French fleet was, to Hitler, sufficient justification for Case Anton. His naval war staff, who had wanted the ships intact, were not pleased.

  Jean de Vienne and La Galissonnière were pulled from the harbor floor and assigned Italian designations, FR11 and FR12. The light destroyer Le Hardi became FR37; her four sisters were redesignated FR32 through FR35. Fuel shortages and Allied bombing prevented the Italians from putting any of them back into service.

  Saint-Mandrier-sur-Mer, the fortification above Toulon's sea approaches, received the four 340mm guns removed from the scuttled Provence. That battery fought Allied battleships during Operation Dragoon in 1944 for more than a week before it was silenced.

  A year after Toulon, the Italian fleet did what de Gaulle had urged Vichy to do. Following the Italian Armistice in 1943, almost all major warships of the Regia Marina sailed to North Africa. They reached their destination. France, which had sunk rather than preserved its navy, had to rebuild its entire fleet after the war.

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