England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  There is a sudden loud explosion close by. A dull thud; it has not hit us, but I’m sure it was not far away. I take a quick look: salvoes are landing beyond the jetty, there is also a lot of dust; I think the jetty got hit. The shell was ranged on us, but just a little too much to the left as seen from HMS Hood. The bastards will correct their aim and then it will be us. The Strasbourg is already moving, slowly going forward. I think we shall go last, after the other three battleships. It’s going to be a long wait. The shelling is now intense, but it seems to me that it is still falling on the jetty, or beyond it. And, suddenly, it is not the jetty, but us … our stern got it … Bretagne vibrates all over, trembling under the blow which I felt go through me. Towards the stern – but where? There’s no time to start thinking, another blow, even stronger, and an even more violent trembling of the ship – immediately followed by another. Now it is two shells that have hit us, or something has exploded following the first! It’s still towards the back, but perhaps a little closer to me … I try to think where they could have landed, but from my little hole I can’t see much. Enormous white clouds hide the Strasbourg from me.

  It is not clear whether Boutron’s white clouds were the geysers raised by near misses or steam. Perhaps a mixture because Strasbourg was beginning to move away. Her commander, Capitaine de vaisseau Collinet, had had his crew standing by so that, without waiting for orders from Gensoul, they could cast off and start engines as soon as he heard the first shot. If Dunkerque, her sister ship, was not quite so well prepared it was probably because Gensoul was aboard and for a long time Gensoul had believed that the British were bluffing. It was inevitable that Capitaine de vaisseau Sanguin, like many a commander before him whose vessel has been selected as the squadron’s flagship, had to put up with a certain amount of back seat driving from his resident admiral. Now he was waiting for the word to slip his moorings and go.

  All the armoured hatches had been sealed. In the engine and boiler rooms, poised for the start signal, Ingénieur mécanicien en chef Egon, Xavier Grall, another ingénieur mécanicien named Quentel and the 120 or so ratings and petty officers they commanded could hear only distant echoes of the gunfire above them. But the vibrations that had begun to shake the ship at regular intervals told them that at least some of their guns had swivelled to starboard and were engaging the English by firing blindly over the Mers-el-Kébir spit.

  At last the order came down the voice pipe from the bridge: ‘Fifty revolutions both sides.’ Four Rateau turbines started up. Then, almost simultaneously, the Dunkerque was hit by the first of four 15-inch shells – a half salvo from one of Somerville’s three battleships. Whoever had made the final decision on the bridge had left it just too late.

  In that semi-automated age, even on a ship as modern as the Dunkerque, men were mixed in with machinery in a way that would become unthinkable long before the century ended. The four armour-piercing shells (one of which failed to explode though it still did a great deal of damage) killed 180 men on the battle cruiser including five officers: about 12 per cent of her crew. Well over half the dead were among the artificers, stokers and electricians. In one section those who survived a scalding cloud of steam were incinerated when engine oil spilling from damaged tanks caught fire.

  Some, the lucky ones, died instantly in the havoc wreaked by the third shell that exploded in the medical store and blew a gaping hole in the starboard side. En route it had detonated a conveyor belt of shell charges for one of the two smaller 5.1-inch turrets, set fire to the air-conditioning plant that cooled the engine room and plunged the vessel into darkness by shattering the major electricity control panel. ‘All the men in that section were shredded to ribbons,’ said a damage report, ‘their charred remains buried under an enormous heap of ironwork which completely covered the access hatch to the engine room.’

  Immediately below this carnage, locked in a dark oven that was warming by the minute, Grall was telling his artificers not to panic. Above them the fire had developed enough heat to start melting down the four large aluminium trunks that delivered cool air to the engine room and even ignited its molten flow. An acrid yellow smoke that watered eyes and smarted throats began to drift into the engine compartment. The only exit not blocked by debris was the port escape hatch but, as they climbed up towards it, the yellow smoke got thicker and breathing harder.

  Some gave up and went back down where they could find somewhere that was marginally cooler and lie down. Despair and stubborn courage were in touching distance. A middle-aged quartermaster screamed for his mother while a chief stoker of the same vintage named Pierre Le Gall calmly tended the boiler which allowed Dunkerque’s one working engine to take them away from the jetty, perhaps even away from the shells.

  About fifteen forced themselves up to the port hatch through the smoke only to discover, in a panic of pounding fists, that it refused to open. Ingénieur mécanicien en chef Egon and Ingénieur mécanicien Quentel restored order and raised the hatch an inch at a time using the emergency pump the others had overlooked. Egon called to Grall to join them. But Grail was surrounded by cursing, sobbing, half-suffocated men, stumbling about the narrow engine room walkways in the dark too disorientated by heat and fumes to try to get back up and begging him not to abandon them. ‘No, lad, I won’t leave you,’ he was heard to tell one young sailor. Then the emergency hatch went down and could only be opened by being pumped up again from the inside. Grall began to climb back up but at some point he lost a shoe which fell to the bottom of the companion way.

  The Bretagne had taken several more hits and at least one magazine had exploded, but cocooned behind his armour plate and with his communications to the bridge down Boutron had no idea of any of this. He stepped out of his fire control turret for a better look but there was so much black smoke, particularly towards the stern, that it was hard to tell how serious the damage was. Then he noticed people were abandoning ship.

  I look left and see men come up onto the deck and jump into the water … How will the crew in the engine-rooms, the boilers, manage to get up through the flames and the smoke? … And then, suddenly, the ship begins to list more rapidly. I feel almost relieved: we’ll capsize before we blow up! There will perhaps be fewer casualties because, if we explode, even those already in the water will not survive. The ship is now turning. It appears to be cracking, loses its balance … Holding on tight, almost upright on the guard rail which is falling rapidly, I see to port my range finder being snatched by the water whilst to starboard the deck is turning towards me … Then it was the bubbling waters which swept me away, and the feeling of being sucked down to the bottom. It was all over. I did not lose consciousness. I could barely see anything, it was completely black in the middle of a sea of fuel oil. I thought I was in a whirlpool and that the Bretagne, completely overturned, was pushing me down … It didn’t seem worthwhile to struggle! An immense and complete indifference took hold of me. A quick thought of my mother and my son, that was all.

  In the space of ten minutes Somerville’s three battleships fired 36 salvos of 15-inch shells – a total of 288 rounds or 96 a ship – after which he called a halt in order to ‘give the French an opportunity to abandon their ships and thus avoid further loss of life’. By now Mers-el-Kébir was wreathed in black oil smoke and the crews of the spotting Swordfish from Ark Royal were finding it difficult to see what the bombardment had done. All Somerville knew for certain was that, three minutes after it began, a tremendous explosion had started a column of smoke several hundred feet high. One of his spotters thought it had been caused by the ‘blowing up of a battleship of the Bretagne*class’. Another, smaller explosion, seemed to mark the destruction of a destroyer.

  This would turn out to be the Mogador, flagship of Bouxin’s 2nd Light Division, her stern amputated by a 15-inch shell which detonated all the depth charges she carried for her anti-submarine role. From her complement of 228 crew thirty-seven were killed and several seriously wounded, though the truncated ship – cut off at a w
atertight compartment and perfectly afloat – would be towed back to her anchorage at Saint André. Nearby were the Dunkerque and Provence who had both limped away from the jetty to run themselves aground there. The Provence, which had returned fire from her aft 13.5-inch turrets over both the Dunkerque and the Mers-el-Kébir spit, was also badly damaged in her stern where a serious fire had only gone out when that part of the ship slipped under water. But unlike the Dunkerque, casualties were light: her single fatality the gunnery officer who had supervised the return fire.

  The only sign of the Bretagne was a large and spreading blot of glutinous fuel oil studded with various bits of wreckage, on some of which the clinging forms of treacled men could be discerned. The old battleship had blown up and then capsized with the loss of 1,079 lives. Among the 180 survivors was her commander Le Pivain and Lieutenant Jean Boutron, another anonymous tar baby recognized only by his wristwatch by the doctor friend who pumped and pummelled at his unconscious form until Boutron had at last brought up enough of the oil he had swallowed to live.

  By an enormous fluke, Bretagne’s immediate neighbours along the jetty, the big seaplane carrier Commandant Teste and the battle cruiser Strasbourg escaped the initial bombardment almost unscathed with only minor damage from shrapnel and nasty bits of concrete. Strasbourg then went on to make her own luck.

  Bouxin, the amiral the priest had needled for not following the dictates of his heart over the armistice, had been leading the dash for the open sea in the Mogador when the 15-inch shell brought his personal participation to an abrupt end and left him marooned on his propellerless flagship. Directly behind the truncated Mogador came the other two super-destroyers of the 2nd Light, Volta and Le Terrible. All Bouxin could do was watch and wave them God speed as they swerved around him like horses in a steeplechase, working their engines up to 40-plus knots.

  From the Volta Bezard, the officer who had started the day with water sports on his mind, looked across at the Mogador and saw her bareheaded second-in-command standing with a fire extinguisher in his hands among the twisted and blackened steel plate that marked his ship’s new stern. Life-jacketed corpses were in the water but most of the crew had survived and gave them a cheer as they passed, the dead men bobbing in their wake. From his undamaged bridge Bouxin watched the Volta with his heart in his mouth, for he reckoned that, even with the extra leeway gained by Gensoul’s bright idea to remove part of the torpedo net, they were too close to the magnetic mine cluster the British had dropped. Sure enough, the water suddenly stirred and welled up under her stern.

  ‘The Volta’s done for!’ shouted Bouxin and, for a moment, so it seemed. But the mine was too deep and the Volta too fast. Undamaged, the destroyer roared on, still under fire and shooting back, as was Le Terrible behind her, their combined sixteen 5.5-inch guns firing blindly at the smoke screen the English had laid around their ships. Smoke screens would soon become redundant because there was not much more than two hours’ decent light left. As soon as it was dark, Volta’s Capitaine de frégate Jaquinet, temporary commander of the 2nd Light now that Bouxin could do no more than organize a tow for the stricken Mogador, planned to double back with Le Terrible and empty her thirty-eight torpedo tubes at Somerville’s ships.

  Then, to his delight, out of the smoke haze behind them, appeared the Strasbourg, all eight of her 13.5-inch guns blazing and apparently intact, though making a lot of extra black smoke through a funnel holed by the shrapnel at the jetty. Behind her was the old destroyer Tigre, panting to keep up. This changed everything. If Strasbourg had to run through a British gauntlet of combined sea and air attacks she would need every extra gun and depth charge around her she could get.

  Somerville was first warned that Strasbourg might have escaped by one of Ark Royal’s spotters about fifteen minutes after he had ordered the ceasefire, but he chose not to believe it. ‘Since the French knew that the entrance to the harbour had been mined, I felt quite positive that no attempt would be made by them to put to sea.’

  Furthermore the smoke from burning ships and shells still made it difficult to be sure of anything. He preferred to stick with ‘the certainty I entertained that the French would abandon their ships’. The assumption that France’s sailors would be as demoralized as its soldiers was in the back of Somerville’s mind throughout the Mers-el-Kébir affair, though there had been no defeat at sea and there was great pride in their new and untested ships. Gensoul exploited this because, knowing that Strasbourg and the 2nd Light were attempting a sortie, he now ran up the chequered flag Holland had arranged if he wished to renew negotiations. At the same time he sent radio and visual signals to Somerville asking for confirmation of a ceasefire followed by a second message which said that his fighting ships were ‘incapable of action’ and he was evacuating their crews.

  It is perhaps to his credit that, despite the hideous casualties he had just incurred, Gensoul was troubled that his chequered flag ploy was not entirely honourable. He would tell Darlan:

  the conditions required by the English were being met and I did not hesitate to use that signal for a short time … for these ships the intentions of the English had been achieved … for the time being … and as a result we should make every effort to stop the English from reopening fire … I planned – provided the English did not return to finish us off – to try and put to sea during the night. I knew that Dunkerque was unfit to fight, but could, using two boilers and the main engine, reach 18 knots.

  Somerville’s reply to Gensoul’s entreaties was a brutal-sounding: UNLESS I SEE YOUR SHIPS SINKING I SHALL OPEN FIRE AGAIN. But the commander of Force H, more disgusted than ever by his mission, had no intention of doing any such thing if he could possibly avoid it. He had ordered his ships to make smoke and move north-westwards because he wanted to get them away from both the coastal batteries, which had been the first to return fire with their newly restored breech blocks, and any of the bigger guns on Gensoul’s Force de Raid that remained in action.

  At first most of the French fire had fallen short but they soon got their eye in and, though there had been no direct hits, some of Somerville’s ships had experienced narrow escapes as carnival plumes of bright red, yellow and purple sea water rose around them, for La Marine Française dyed its shells so that each vessel could see where her shot was falling and correct accordingly. Several had been straddled by salvos that fell either side of them, including Hood where shell splinters had blinded an able seaman in one eye, winged an officer and inflicted minor damage. The destroyer Wrestler, detached from the main force to watch for submarines leaving Oran harbour 5 miles up the coast, estimated that at least 100 of the smaller 4-inch and 6-inch shells fired by coastal batteries had landed near her.

  When another report from Ark Royal’s aerial reconnaissance alerted Somerville to a flurry of activity at the previously moribund Oran airfield, it persuaded him to move even further away from the entrance to Mers-el-Kébir harbour ‘to avoid a surprise attack by aircraft under cover of smoke’. Then young Briggs and the others on the Hood’s flag deck began to realize that something was wrong. Staff officers were running to and from the admiral’s bridge and the compass platform. The Hood began to move off towards the east, rapidly building up speed. It had been confirmed, beyond all doubt, that one of the Dunkerque class battle cruisers and several destroyers had got out, and that their head start was such that they were already approaching Oran.

  ‘The resultant delay in commencing the chase, though not appreciably affecting the situation, could have been avoided,’ confessed Somerville. This must have raised some eyebrows at the Admiralty, for it was obvious that it would not have occurred at all had he continued to cover the harbour mouth and not put the safety of his ships before what he would always call ‘this beastly operation’.

  Somerville’s first move was to divert to the Strasbourg six bombed-up Swordfish with a fighter escort of three Blackburn Skuas which had been bound for Mers-el-Kébir to administer any coup de grâce required on the wounded s
hips there. Skuas were the Fleet Air Arm’s first all-metal monoplanes with enclosed cockpits and retractable wheels. In Norway they had initially done well as dive bombers, sinking the cruiser Koenigsberg, but had fared badly when they came up against Messerschmitts, being neither manoeuvrable nor fast enough (top speed 225 mph) to merit being called fighters.

  But before they could get on the trail of the Strasbourg the three Skuas found themselves engaged in a series of dogfights with French fighters. First they intervened to save two of the Ark Royal’s spotting aircraft which were being attacked by five American-built Curtiss Hawk 75s, the interceptor in which the French had shot down their first Messerschmitt 109s of the war. With its big Pratt and Whitney radial engine, the Curtiss was almost in the same league as the RAF’s earliest model of the Spitfire and could fly rings around the slow, two-seater Skua. Soon Petty Officer Airman Tom Riddler’s aircraft was sent spinning into the sea and both he and his observer/gunner, Naval Airman Harold Chatterley, were killed.

  Then the Curtisses broke off the engagement and went in pursuit of the Swordfish, followed some way behind by the two remaining Skuas under Lieutenant Bill Bruen, a regular who had switched to flying after five years as a ship’s officer and now commanded the Ark Royal’s Skua squadron. They were not hard to find because the enormous amount of black smoke Strasbourg was making through her holed funnel was visible for miles: all the aircraft bent on attacking or defending the French battle cruiser were heading for it.

  Bruen and the other Skua, piloted by Sub-Lieutenant Guy Brokensha, the 22-year-old son of a Scots high court judge with a Distinguished Service Cross from the Norwegian campaign, were the third set of aircraft to get to the smoke. They caught up with the Swordfish just in time to ambush their ambushers who now outnumbered the Skuas almost five to one, having been joined by four Morane 406s. Moranes were the mainstay of the French fighter fleet and looked a bit like a stubby Spitfire, though appearances were deceptive for they were under-powered and poorly armed. Even so, in most circumstances they were more than a match for a Skua. But in this case the Fleet Air Arm pilots had the advantage of surprise and the sun behind them and they took it well. Next day the Dublin-born Bruen wrote a short account of this second half of these opening shots of the air war against France for his squadron’s war diary.