England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  The Wehrmacht’s Norwegian campaign was a foretaste of all they were about to do in much of the rest of western Europe, a much smaller affair but characterized by what Churchill, with grudging admiration, called ‘surprise, ruthlessness and precision’. As the panzers rolled though Jutland and the Kriegsmarine glided unopposed into Copenhagen’s harbour, so the world’s first airborne assault took place. Paratroopers seized the airfields at Oslo and Stavanger where the British-built Gloster Gladiator biplane fighters that were the core of Norway’s minuscule air force were based. Then the Luftwaffe flew in its squadrons complete with logistical back up and soon its Stukas and Messerschmitts had established the kind of air superiority European powers could only normally expect over camel cavalry.

  Within thirty-six hours, starting at Oslo, the Germans captured seven Norwegian ports, ending at Narvik 1,400 miles away. At Narvik the assault troops landed from destroyers and were met by units that had infiltrated the harbour in the holds of the innocent-looking German ore carriers lining its quays. These ships were also carrying their artillery, ammunition and other heavy weapons. In the first twenty-four hours the only serious opposition the Norwegians had put up was at Oslo where the heavy cruiser Blücher was sunk by the Krupp guns and torpedoes mounted in the Oscarsborg fortress. The first foreigners to come to Norway’s assistance were the crew of the British-based Free Polish submarine Orzel which torpedoed the German troopship Rio de Janeiro. A large number of survivors were picked up by Norwegian fishing boats. They informed their rescuers they had been bound for Bergen to help the Norwegians resist an Anglo-French invasion.

  Originally there had been an Allied plan to deny Narvik to the Germans by intervening on the Finnish side in their war against Stalin’s Russia which, an accomplice in Hitler’s invasion of Poland, proceeded in November 1939 to try to settle its territorial disputes with Finland the same way. The Baltic was a German lake and there was no question of sending men and equipment through Helsinki. It was felt that Norway, which sided with Finland, could hardly object if an Anglo-French military mission planted a big logistical base at Narvik, not 100 miles from the Finnish frontier. Churchill, who as First Lord of the Admiralty oversaw the trade blockade against Germany, was a firm supporter, saying it was ‘worth all the rest of the blockade and provides a great chance of shortening the war’.

  Two British brigades and one of French Chasseurs Alpins were earmarked for the expedition – 20,000 men – and staff work began. But the Allies were not ready to move until March 1940 by which time the Finns, who had fought doggedly against overwhelming odds, were about to call a ceasefire and concede territory. Force Avonmouth, as it had been code-named, was then stood down, much to the relief of some senior British officers who had always considered it ‘harebrained’.

  Nonetheless, both Neville Chamberlain and Paul Reynaud, who at last had replaced Daladier as Prime Minister, wanted to take action in Norway before Germany did. It was decided that the British would mine the approaches to Narvik, thus forcing the German ore boats further out to sea where they would be easy prey for submarines. In response to the German objections and threats that were bound to follow, the Allies would then send troops to take over Narvik and three other ports along the coast: Trondheim, Bergen and Stavanger.

  The Narvik operation was postponed from 5 to 8 April, a delay that turned out to be crucial and for which there were mutual recriminations though at the time the British were not unduly concerned because they felt the outnumbered Kriegsmarine would never dare risk making the first move in the North Sea. Thus, only hours before the first German paratroopers dropped among them, the Norwegian government, determinedly neutral against all comers, was far more perturbed by British mines fouling the approaches to its valuable northern port than vague reports of troops massing on the Danish frontier and warships leaving Wilhelmshaven.

  When air reconnaissance confirmed that a battle cruiser, two light cruisers, fourteen destroyers and what looked like a troop transport had put to sea, Churchill admitted, ‘we found it hard at the Admiralty to believe this force was going to Narvik’. Even so, reinforcements were despatched to back up the battle cruiser Renown, the cruiser and eight destroyers already off the Norwegian coast covering the mine-layers. From Scapa Flow went the battleships Warspite, Rodney, Valiant and the battle cruiser Repulse plus two cruisers and ten destroyers. More cruisers and at least a score of destroyers sailed from Rosyth, though not before some of the cruisers had disembarked the infantry that were to have made unopposed landings at the ports now in German hands.

  As it was, these ships arrived twenty-four hours too late to prevent the enemy establishing a firm foothold in Norway. For many of them their first task was to go back and collect the men who would be the first British soldiers to meet the Wehrmacht in open battle in the six months since war had been declared. The result did not impress their allies.

  Two Territorial brigades, about 8,000 men, had been selected to garrison the Norwegian ports in what had originally been intended as a kind of police operation. If the Norwegian militia made any difficulties platoon commanders were to be instructed to avoid force and ‘use bluff and good humoured determination’. Now the Territorials were landed north and south of German-occupied Trondheim with orders to make a pincer attack on an enemy not easily amused. Apart from naval gunfire the British had no artillery support (owing to a mix-up the gunners arrived sans guns), no mobile anti-aircraft weapons, no anti-tank guns and, of course, no air cover and no white camouflage.

  From a Messerschmitt cockpit the frozen, khaki-clad figures sprawled on the open snow below looked like a scatter of chocolate buttons on a bedsheet. Amazingly, casualties were mercifully light. When morale crumbled it probably had more to do with exhausting snow marches in sub-zero temperatures while Austrian ski troops harassed their flanks. Napoleonic retreats to the coast began, their trails blazed by discarded Bren light machine guns which weighed twice as much as a rifle, mortars, radios and smallpacks. One brigade was reduced to about 300 officers and men; most of the missing were the cold and disheartened, cut-off stragglers glad to be taken prisoner.

  Help in the shape of two fully equipped brigades of regular soldiers, one of them Guards, arrived in time to stop the rot and, backed by artillery denied to the Territorials, handed out some bloody noses to the overconfident. But without air support there was a limit to what they could do. Towards the end of April it was decided to evacuate all the troops involved in the fighting around Trondheim in central Norway and concentrate on the capture of Narvik in the north where the Guards, who were heavily engaged, had just been considerably reinforced. France had sent three battalions of ski-trained Chasseurs Alpins and two of the Foreign Legion, plus four battalions of exiled Poles that had been attached to the French Army. All were under the command of Britain’s Lieutenant General Claude Auchinleck who arrived on 11 May. This was twenty-four hours after the Germans had started their offensive in France and Churchill, as a result of the Commons debate on the reverses in Norway, had replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister of an all-party national coalition with a five-man War Cabinet in which he was Minister of Defence.

  The irony of Churchill profiting from Britain’s Scandinavian misadventures has often been pointed out. After all, he was as much in favour of intervening in Norway as Chamberlain, probably more so. His conviction that stopping Germany’s supply of Swedish iron ore was a war winner was no less deeply held than his belief in 1915’s Gallipoli landings which had almost ended his political career and led to a penitential year in the trenches as a battalion commander.

  But quite apart from the House of Commons making it plain that, as Germany moved from sitzkrieg to blitzkrieg, they wanted a failed peacemaker replaced by a more warrior breed, Churchill had also been boosted by a brave and reassuring performance by the senior service. ‘In their desperate grapple with the Royal Navy the Germans ruined their own,’ the Prime Minister would write and it was true that Germany’s surface fleet, which to start with
was so much smaller than Britain’s, would never quite recover. After the Norwegian batteries had opened the score with the Blücher off Oslo, the British sank two light cruisers, ten destroyers, eight U-boats, and a torpedo boat. In addition the pocket battleship Lützow, the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, as well as another three light cruisers, were all badly damaged and in need of months of repair.

  The Germans, as they usually did, gave as good as they got and the British also suffered heavy losses. Among the last was the only capital ship to go down, the old aircraft carrier Glorious (built on the hull of a 1915 cruiser) which, along with her two escorting destroyers, was homeward bound when intercepted and sunk by the Scharnhorst. But not before the carrier’s doomed escort HMS Acasta torpedoed the battle cruiser, which retired to Trondheim. In all, almost 1,500 British sailors died, over half of them from exposure because there was a wireless failure and rescue ships were late on the scene. The only survivor from the Acasta turned out to be one of the torpedo men who had hit back.

  A measure of the intensity of the naval warfare around Norway in the two months from 9 April to 8 June 1940 may be gauged by the award of the war’s first three Victoria Crosses, two of them posthumous, to Royal Navy officers engaged in it. One went to the captain of the destroyer Glowworm which met the heavy cruiser Admiral von Hipper in stormy weather, missed with her torpedoes then, too badly hit to escape, rammed the heavy cruiser before capsizing with one gun still firing. Captain Hellmuth Heye was so impressed he positioned the Hipper, which was holed above the waterline and not seriously damaged, so that an icy swell carried Glowworm’s gasping survivors towards her. Her commander, Lieutenant Commander Gerard Roope, aged 35 and a well-known navy cricketer, was almost among the thirty-one Heye saved; but he had spent too long in the freezing water encouraging others and could not keep his grip on a rescue rope.

  Narvik, where about 2,000 Germans had held out against a combined force of British, French, Poles and Norwegians ten times that size, was finally taken on 28 May after a tremendous naval bombardment was followed by an assault by the Foreign Legion and the Poles. Some 400 German prisoners were taken. But, though the Norwegians were the last to be told, it had already been decided that the situation in France – at Dunkirk the evacuation of the BEF had already begun – was far too serious to continue with the Norwegian venture. King Haakon VII and his Cabinet, who had retreated to the Arctic sealing town of Tromso, refused to surrender. Instead, they boarded a British cruiser and set up a government-in-exile in London which brought with them Norway’s huge merchant fleet, most of it in foreign waters, which before long would be delivering almost half of Britain’s oil imports.

  Eleven days after they had captured it all Allied troops had been withdrawn from Narvik. They left its port a wreck, though the Germans had it up and running again in six months – which was more than they could do with their navy.

  For the army, the campaign had come as a shock. ‘Some of our finest troops, the Scots and Irish Guards, were baffled by the vigour, enterprise and training of Hitler’s young men,’ admitted Churchill. In France Britain’s senior soldiers could (and usually did) blame the French for all that went wrong. In Norway, in both planning and execution, there was nobody to blame but themselves and, if anything, their allies came out looking better. The navy might be satisfied that its crews still had hearts of oak but Churchill was only reflecting the army’s own doubts about the quality of some of its infantry. ‘By comparison with the French, or the Germans for that matter, our men for the most part seemed distressingly young, not so much in years as in self reliance and manliness generally,’ noted General Auchinleck, though British Indian Army officers could be notoriously biased against Home regiments.

  The French, usually willing to concede that the English performed better at sea than on land (though not always good enough for Surcouf and his kind), thought that even the Royal Navy had let them down. True, the English had started well enough, subjecting the Kriegsmarine destroyers bottled up in the narrow fjords around Narvik to a Nelsonic harpooning and winning their second VC. * But they had got there too late to prevent troops being unloaded. The number of German ships sunk could not disguise their failure to inflict the devastating defeat expected of an ally who had so often justified its feeble contribution to the land war by reminding France of its naval traditions. From Paris a few weeks later US Ambassador Bullitt reported that Darlan had told him that the British fleet ‘had proved to be as great a disappointment as the French Army’. It was, of course, outrageous to compare the rout of the French Army with the fight the Royal Navy had put up in Norwegian waters.

  The fault lay in not getting there in time and in Paris there was almost universal agreement among its chattering classes that they would have done much better. Norway was not an Allied defeat. It was a British one.

  Gensoul’s Force de Raid had escorted some of the French troop convoys to Narvik but in June 1940 they were back in the Mediterranean looking for the Italian fleet which wisely kept out of the way. Mussolini had waited for the Germans to enter Paris and then, with what the New York Times called ‘the courage of a jackal on the heels of a bolder beast of prey’, declared war on France and Britain. ‘All I need to sit at the peace conference is 2,000 Italian dead,’ Mussolini confided to Marshal Baglioni as his mountain troops were mown down in Alpine passes by well-dug-in machine gunners.

  Three French divisions held something like ten times that number of Italians on the Franco-Italian border while an Italian incursion into the Côte d’Azur is said to have been repulsed by a sergeant and seven men. But when RAF Wellington bombers attempted to use an airfield near Marseilles to attack northern Italy, French fears of Italian reprisal raids were such that they blocked the runway with trucks. If les Anglais wanted to bomb Turin they could do it from British territory and let the reciprocal bombs that would surely follow fall on them.

  Darlan despatched some of his cruisers from Toulon in a 200-mile dash up the Côte d’Azur in a hit-and-run bombardment of the northern Italian naval base at Genoa. There were also plans for French ships to join the British in shelling Italian military positions along the Libyan coast. But by the time Général Huntziger was signing the armistice in the famous restaurant car at Compiègne, Dunkerque and Strasbourg and the rest of Amiral Gensoul’s ships anchored in Mers-el-Kébir, the old corsairs’ lair across the bay from Oran, had yet to fire a shot with their main armament.

  By the ceasefire, at least half of France’s fleet, including almost all its heavy units, were in African ports: Bizerte, Algiers, Oran, Casablanca and Dakar. The Richelieu and the Jean Bart, the bigger gunned successors to the Dunkerque class with the same forward turret design, were so new they had not been quite finished when they escaped. The Richelieu, which was the most complete, fled to Dakar in French West Africa. The jean Bart, which was far less ready having never even started her engines, found sanctuary in the Moroccan port of Casablanca, arriving there with only one of her two four-gun turrets in place.

  This dispersal suited Darlan. The armistice permitted France to maintain vessels in its colonies for their protection and if they were already in situ it would be easier to negotiate their numbers and whereabouts rather than try to extract them from a pool of mothballed vessels in Toulon. Having rejected several invitations to sail his fleet to British ports, what did not suit Darlan at all was the number of his ships still under the control of France’s erstwhile ally.

  In the Egyptian port of Alexandria, surrounded by the Royal Navy and not far from where the rotting timbers of an older French fleet lay where Nelson had left it after the Battle of the Nile, was Amiral Godfroy’s squadron. This was made up of the battleship Lorraine and four cruisers – three of them the 8-inch gun type the Royal Navy was so short of at the Battle of the River Plate – and various support craft. In Britain itself, mostly in Portsmouth and Plymouth, there were 2 battleships, 4 light cruisers, several submarines including the mammoth Surcouf, and about 200 smaller vessels, many
of them the kind of converted trawlers that were so useful for minesweeping and anti-submarine work.

  All of them had sought sanctuary there before the signing of the armistice and Darlan wanted them back or rendered useless. Certainly, he was not going to have the English fighting their hopeless battle with French ships. Among other things, German willingness to release the thousands of recently captured French soldiers almost certainly hinged on a firm display of neutrality. If French warships were not for the Germans they were not for the British either.

  Chapter Four

  At Devonport, shortly before dawn on Wednesday, 3 July 1940, the radio operator on the Surcouf, who was monitoring the long-wave channels, received an ‘officer only’ signal from French naval headquarters which had moved to Bordeaux and was still out of German hands.

  Even an English summer was warming up and the air inside the submarine was stifling. Capitaine de corvette Paul Martin had ordered all but one of Surcouf’s four deck hatches to be battened down. Only the hatch nearest the bow was open and that was to enable the two duty sentries, big Lebel revolvers holstered at their waists, to get back inside fast if they had to. One sentry, the duty petty officer, kept an eye out for waterborne intruders by patrolling the hull casing or climbing up into the conning tower and trying to make out if there were any small craft moving between the dim outlines of the ships moored in the blacked-out harbour. The other stood at the submarine’s end of the gangplank joining it to one of the lower deck hatchways on the Paris whose dark bulk loomed above them like an overhanging cliff. To get to the Surcouf from the quay you first had to pass through the old French battleship, which made them doubly secure from that direction.