Never Surrender

by John Kelly

  * * *

  Late in the afternoon of June 22, a copy of the Germany armistice terms was cabled to Chequers, the country residence of British prime ministers. The terms filled nine pages of small type, but three articles leaped out at Churchill. The first was the zone of occupation. German domination of the French coast from Dunkirk to the Pyrenees would require a large naval presence along Britain’s sea routes to Gibraltar, Malta, and the Suez at a time when every warship was needed in home waters to meet the invasion threat. The second article, which demanded the release of all German prisoners of war, was in itself unremarkable except for one point. Among the released POWs were the four hundred German pilots Reynaud had promised to turn over to Britain before France surrendered and who would now be available for the imminent air war against Britain. The third article—all French warships were to return to home ports immediately to be demobilized and disarmed under German or Italian control—was so alarming it brought Churchill rushing back to London for a 9:30 p.m. session of the war cabinet. More bad news awaited him upon his arrival: the French had agreed to the German terms.

  Eleven days later, July 3, Force H, a Royal Navy task force, stood off Mers-el-Kébir, a half moon of sand, sun, and sea along the Algerian coast where the French had a major naval base. When HMS Hood took up position a little before 8:00 a.m. that morning, the sights and sounds of a port town in the rising day were unfolding along the shore: sailors swabbing decks, painting hulls, and loading and unloading supplies under a crowded sky of noisy seagulls. Even from a distance, the jaunty pom-pom caps and tight-fitting striped jerseys gave the French sailors a dash lacking in their British counterparts. As the silhouettes of the Hood, a battle cruiser, and the HMS Valiant and HMS Resolution, two battleships, filled the horizon, the French sailors shouted to one another: “The British have arrived. They have come to get us to continue the fight against the Nazis.” Watching the scene from the deck of the Hood, Vice Admiral James Somerville, commander of Force H, had reason to recall First Sea Lord Dudley Pound’s final words to him the previous night: “You are charged with one of the most disagreeable tasks a British admiral has ever been faced with.” Operation Catapult, the action that Force H was participating in, arose from Churchill’s fear that the French fleet would fall into German hands and the Pétain government’s failure to assuage that fear. In addition to attacking Mers-el-Kébir, later in the day Royal Navy units would descend upon French warships at Portsmouth and Plymouth and at the British naval base in Alexandria (Egypt) and offer the ships’ captains four choices: fight with Britain; scuttle their ships; neutralize them; or face attack. Operation Catapult went more or less to plan and with minimum loss of life everywhere except at Mers-el-Kébir. Admiral Marcel-Bruno Gensoul, the French commander, assured the British emissaries who visited his office that he would not permit his ships to fall into German hands, but he warned them that any attempt to seize the ships would be met with force. A long, hot July day of frustration, anxiety, and misunderstanding ended at 5:55 that afternoon, when what sounded like a locomotive barreled across the sky. The first salvo of three-quarter-ton British shells sent the seagulls fluttering and produced ear bleeds in the startled French sailors. A moment later, the docks at Mers-el-Kébir disappeared in a ball of flame. André Jaffre, a French sailor who was blown off his ship by a British shell, described the scene in the harbor. The sea was filled “with oil, severed heads, and men with stomachs blown open.” The wounded were shouting, “Finish me off, kill me, kill me, please.” Some of the French ships returned fire, but, unable to maneuver in the narrow confines of the harbor, they were at the mercy of the British guns. “I swam underwater as far as possible away from the ships,” Jaffre recalled sixty years later, but “every time I came up [for air], I came up into this boiling oil. So I’d breathe in the smoke and oil and dive in again for as long as I could.” During one visit to the surface, Jaffre saw the battleship Bretagne roll onto its side and disappear into the sea, taking a thousand men with it. When Somerville gave the order to cease fire at 6:04, Mers-el-Kébir was enveloped in an enormous plume of black smoke, and Force H had killed 1,250 Frenchmen in the space of nine minutes.

  As a military operation, the attack on Mers-el-Kébir was a mixed success. The Bretagne was sunk, and its sister ship, the Provence, beached; but two 1910-class battleships did not pose a serious threat to British dominance of the Channel, Atlantic, and Mediterranean sea lanes. The two modern battle cruisers at Mers-el-Kébir did, however, and while one, the Dunkerque, was run aground during the attack, its sister ship, the Strasbourg, escaped, along with its destroyer escort. In psychological and political terms, however, Mers-el-Kébir was an unqualified success. The word “waiting” had floated through the June morale reports like a little black rain cloud. People seemed to be bracing—for what, they were unsure; but in the meantime they seemed unwilling to look up, down, or sideways for fear of a “smashup.” Mers-el-Kébir changed the national mood overnight. On July 4, Home Intelligence reported: “News about the French fleet has been received in all regions with satisfaction and relief. . . . There is considerable regret that we had to take the actions against some elements of the French fleet . . . [But] it is felt that this strong action gives welcome evidence of government vigor and decision.” The next day, July 5, the British public liked the Mers-el-Kébir attack even more. “All regions express widespread approval of our action against the French fleet. The public feel that no other course was possible and they welcome this evidence of our initiative.” The boldness of the attack also made a deep impression on America. “Fair-minded opinion will agree. The British were right in what they did,” the New York Times noted in a July 5 editorial. The Boston Globe, like a number of other papers, singled out Churchill for special praise: “This latest decision shows he still possesses the courage and audacity for needed decisions.” The White House was also impressed. During a visit to London in January 1941, Harry Hopkins, a Roosevelt confidant, told John Colville it was Mers-el-Kébir that convinced the president that Joe Kennedy was wrong; Britain would remain in the war, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. Churchill reiterated his no-surrender policy in a speech to the House of Commons on July 4, the day after the attack.

  The action we have already taken [at Mers-el-Kébir] should be, in itself, sufficient to dispose once and for all of the lies and rumors which have been so industriously spread by German propagandists and fifth columnists’ activities that we have the slightest intention of entering negotiations in any form and in any channel with the German and Italian governments. We shall, on the contrary, prosecute the war with the utmost vigor by all the means that are open to us until the righteous purposes for which we have entered upon it have been fulfilled.

  The moment Churchill finished speaking, the entire House, including the previously cool Conservative MPs, leaped to their feet and cheered and shouted for a “full two minutes.” “What it was all about, I still don’t know,” Eric Seal, Churchill’s private secretary, told his wife a few days later. Churchill knew what it was about. In his memoirs, he wrote: “The elimination of the French Navy as an important factor almost in a single stroke by violent action produced a profound impression in every country. Here was the Britain which so many had counted down and out, which strangers supposed to be quivering on the brink of surrender . . . striking ruthlessly at her dearest friends of yesterday and securing . . . to herself the undisputed control of the sea.”

  Mers-el-Kébir also had another important consequence. After it, talk of a compromise peace became less frequent, and, as national resolve stiffened, the two leading advocates of a negotiated settlement were put on their back foot. Lord Halifax’s last foray into peace diplomacy occurred on June 17, the day France fell. That morning Rab Butler, a Halifax confidant, ran into Björn Prytz, the Swedish ambassador, in St. James’s Park and invited him back to the Foreign Office for a talk. In 1965, after a quarter of a century of rumor, innuendo, and speculation, Prytz published the account of the talk h
e sent to Stockholm on the night of the seventeenth. In it, he has Butler making a number of incriminating statements, including “the official attitude [of the British government] will for the present be that the war should continue but . . . no opportunity should be missed [for] a compromise if reasonable conditions could be agreed on.” He also has Butler saying that “no diehards [likely a reference to Churchill] would be allowed to stand in the way.” The report also included a quote from Halifax, who summoned Butler to his office during Prytz’s visit and asked him to convey a message to the Swedish ambassador: “Common sense and not bravado would dictate the British government’s policy.”

  When Churchill learned of this episode a few days later, Halifax assured him that Butler “had been completely loyal to the government policy.” But two pieces of evidence suggest that the official explanation for Halifax’s and Butler’s incriminating statements—Prytz misconstrued their words—may not be the whole truth. On June 18, the day after the Swede’s visit to the Foreign Office, Alex Cadogan noted cryptically in his diary: “No reply from Germans.” The cable the Italian ambassador in Sweden sent to Rome that day is also suggestive: “The British representative [Victor Mallet, the British ambassador in Stockholm] requested an interview with the Swedish foreign minister and notified him that the British government is inclined to enter into peace negotiations with Germany and Italy. The secretary general of the Foreign Ministry here . . . informed me . . . that this declaration by the British representatives is of an official character.” Churchill never commented publicly on this episode. But it may be indicative of his feelings toward Halifax that when Lord Lothian, the British ambassador in Washington, died unexpectedly in late 1940, the foreign secretary was shipped off to America as ambassador over his vigorous protests and the even more vigorous protests of Lady Halifax.

  Lloyd George, who placed a close second to Halifax in the shadow contest to replace Churchill and who was the most famous public figure to advocate a compromise peace, also began to fade from the scene. He continued to refuse invitations to join the Churchill government and to advocate for a negotiated end to the war; but he refused an offer to become spokesman for the Stokes Group, thirty antiwar MPs who had gathered around the Labor MP Richard Stokes. The position would have given Lloyd George a larger megaphone for his views, but by July he had come halfway to Churchill’s position. In an article in the Sunday Pictorial, he said the predicate for a negotiation with Germany should be a British battlefield victory. He was also approaching seventy-eight, and at that point in his life he probably found it easier and more fun to remain in the backbenches, make mischief, and wait for “Winston to go bust.”

  By mid-July Britain, in all its divisions and branches, creeds and constituencies, had united behind Churchill, but, until tested in the battle, it was impossible to tell how strong this unity was.

  * * *

  A little after one in the afternoon on July 14, 1940, Charles Gardner, an enterprising young BBC reporter, stood on a bluff above the Dover Straits watching a convoy of freighters embroider frothy white patterns in the sea with their propellers. Above the ships a half dozen Hurricanes, the convoy’s escort, were making lazy circles in the gray-blue sky while waiting for their charges to clear the straits. The people who lived in this tidy little corner of southeast England knew that sooner or later the war would come to them. Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincoln—all the towns and villages, factories, and military installations along the east coast of England and Scotland—were supplied through the Dover Straits. But the Luftwaffe’s first attacks on the straits in June had been surprisingly modest: just a flight or two of light bombers, whose bombs rarely hit anything except the water. Then, abruptly and for no apparent reason, on July 10 the attacks escalated sharply, and with the escalation came a new name for the straits—Hellfire Corner—and the attention of dozens of reporters, including Gardner, who had decided to record a broadcast from the straits for the BBC’s evening news program. At around 1:30 p.m. Gardner took out the script he had prepared. The sound man nodded, and Gardner began to read. He was a few sentences in when the drone of plane engines broke his train of thought. When he looked up, what seemed to be the entire Luftwaffe—forty Junkers 87 dive-bombers and too many Me 109 fighters to count—was flying straight at him from a dot in the Channel sky. Behind him Gardner heard the familiar throb of British engines. The Chain Home radar system had picked up the German flight over Calais and scrambled several Hurricane squadrons to reinforce the convoy’s escort.

  Gardner threw away his script and began to narrate extemporaneously. “There’s one coming down in flames—there somebody’s hit, a German—and he’s coming down—there’s a long streak—he’s coming down completely out of control—a long streak of smoke—ah, the man’s bailed out by parachute—he’s a Junkers 87 and he’s going slap into the sea and there he goes sma-a-a-sh. Oh boy! I’ve never seen anything so good as this—the RAF fighters really have these boys taped.” Thus was the British public introduced to what would later be called the Battle of Britain.

  In 1980, the British historian A. J. P. Taylor called the battle a “decisive” contest, and it was decisive—but only for one side. Between mid-May, when an unenthusiastic Grand Admiral Erich Raeder first raised the question of invading Britain, and August 13, the date the German calendar marks as the beginning of the Battle of Britain, Hitler’s enthusiasm for an invasion waxed and waned; mostly, though, it waned. The conquest of London and Leeds would not get Germany a mile closer to Kiev or Moscow, to the creation of the new German Empire in the east that would keep the name Adolf Hitler alive for a thousand generations. True, subduing Britain before striking east would enhance Germany’s security, but not enough to make invasion a necessity. At the end of the French campaign invasion was only one of several options available to Hitler, and the evidence suggests it was not an option he was giving much thought to. Expecting the British to seek terms, on June 15 Hitler ordered the German Army reduced in size. Eight days later, on June 23, Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and a Hitler intimate, told a gathering of fellow ministers: “We are very close to the end of the war.” The Churchill government would fall soon and a “compromise government [would be] formed.” After Mers-el-Kébir, Hitler ordered an invasion plan drawn up but told his commanders, “If the results of the air war are unsatisfactory, invasion preparations will be stopped.”

  On the British side of the Channel, the question that commanded attention in the early summer of 1940 was not whether the Germans would invade; the intelligence seemed clear on that point. In late June, maps of Britain had been distributed to German antiaircraft units; the Luftwaffe’s long-range bomber force would finish refitting on July 8; and what appeared to be invasion rafts were under construction in Kiel harbor. In July, London’s attention was focused on a second question: can an invasion be repelled? There were not enough fully trained and equipped divisions in Britain to mount a credible defense of the east coast from Dover to the Tyne, 318 miles to the north, and many of the brigades in Kent—among the most likely landing sites—had no more than three or four thousand men to defend a four- to five-mile front. Like nearly everyone else in Britain that summer, the senior soldiers and War Office officials were quoting Shakespeare’s “Come the three corners of the world in arms, and we shall shock them,” but only in public and not to one another. Toward the beginning of July, Sir John Dill, the CIGS, told Chamberlain: “The troops are not trained and may not be steady when the test comes.” “Dill sounded like all the other soldiers,” Chamberlain wrote in his diary that night. General Edmund Ironside, who as commander of Home Forces was responsible for repelling the invasion, quietly sent his diaries to Canada, just in case. Even General Alan Brooke, who replaced Ironside in July and was famously resolute, took up his new post with a heavy heart. “I knew well enough the dangers we were exposed to,” Brooke wrote later. “The probability of an attempt to invade these islands, the unpreparedness of our defense, the appalling lack of equipment, th
e deficiencies of training and battle-worthiness in the majority of our formations. The idea of failure was . . . enough to render the responsibility almost unbearable. Perhaps the hardest part of it all was the absolute necessity to submerge all one’s innermost feelings and maintain a confident exterior.”

  The senior naval officers were visited by similar doubts and fears. Eight hundred destroyers, corvettes, and other small, nimble warships had been assembled in the waters of southern England to meet an invasion; but should the Luftwaffe overwhelm this force in the battle for air superiority, the battleships and battle cruisers of the Home Fleet, currently safely out of harm’s way in northern Scotland, would be called south to meet the invaders. In the view of many senior naval officers, that would be tantamount to a suicide mission. The big ships would be well within the range of German bombers and fighters based in France and Holland, and, unable to maneuver in the narrow seas of the south, would make easy targets. During a visit to Downing Street in July, Admiral Charles Forbes, Commander of the Home Fleet, told Churchill that under no circumstances would he risk his capital ships south of the Wash, a bay and estuary roughly midway up the east coast of England. Pug Ismay, who was present at the meeting, waited for Churchill to explode. Instead, the prime minister smiled “indulgently” at Forbes and said he “never took much notice of what the Royal Navy said they would or would not do in advance, since they invariably . . . undertook the impossible without a moment’s hesitation. [He] had not a shadow of a doubt that if the Germans invaded the south coast of Britain, we would see every available battleship storming through the Straits of Dover.”

  As the summer days passed and the strength and frequency of the German air attacks increased, it became evident to the officials studying the invasion threat that the fate of the Home Fleet, and of the small, underequipped British Army defending the coast of Suffolk, Essex, and Kent, would be determined by the contest between the elephant and the whale.