England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  At about 1910, while at 12,000 feet, 9 French fighters (Curtiss 75 AS and Morane 406s) were observed above and astern of the Swordfish. A dog fight ensued during which Brokensha obtained some hits on a Curtiss 75 which broke off the engagement. I was able to get a long burst on a Morane, which was on Brokensha’s tail. This aircraft was also engaged by Leading Airman F. Coston. [Coston was Brokensha’s rear gunner so the Morane was coming under fire from both front and rear.] Several hits were observed and the machine broke off combat and dived away. Several other aircraft were engaged by both Skuas. Three guns on each Skua jammed during this fight. [This would have left these aircraft with two working guns.] At about 1930 three Curtisses appeared and a dog fight ensued with no apparent results on either side. Shortly after this the Swordfish started their attack and the Strasbourg fired a barrage in front of us. We returned towards the carrier. On the way back we met a Berget ‘Bizerte’ flying boat and carried out attacks on it. During my second attack she dropped some bombs on a destroyer [they missed]. Brokensha put one engine out of action and observed streams of petrol coming out of the tank. We returned to the carrier and landed just after sunset.

  Meanwhile, the Swordfish did no better than the French flying boat. All twenty-four of their 250-pound armour piercing bombs and forty-eight anti-personnel bombs missed and the Strasbourg proved to have a sting.

  Two of the six were shot down by her well-trained anti-aircraft gunners who, their attackers had noticed, had showed commendable restraint by waiting for the first bomb to be dropped before opening fire. Fortunately the Swordfish floated rather better than a Skua and all six aircrew were picked up by the destroyer Wrestler, which had spent most of the early evening dodging the coastal battery fire off Oran. The destroyer also went to investigate a small craft flying two flags and heading relentlessly towards Force H. On closer inspection the two flags turned out to be the Royal Navy’s White Ensign and a white flag of truce. Hooky Holland and his entourage were retrieved but not Foxhound’s motorboat, which was left to drift away.

  By the time all the ditched aircrew were safely aboard, Wrestler had been joined by the Hood and her escorts, Somerville having decided to leave the slower Valiant and Resolution behind. Leading the British pursuit, and screening the Hood, were the eleven destroyers of the 6th and 13th flotillas. On Keppel Captain Francis de Winton, who commanded the 13th and whose five ships included Wrestler, had just signalled 30 knots. De Winton had no more desire to hurt the French than Somerville but he was thoroughly enjoying himself.

  It was a fine sight, and must have been rare in the war, to see two destroyer flotillas ahead of a battle squadron in full pursuit of the enemy. It recalled the numerous occasions in fleet exercises between the wars when flotillas proceeded ahead at full speed to fire torpedoes at the ‘enemy’. The only thing was, this was the wrong enemy, at the wrong place and the wrong time.

  The wrong enemy was building up on its torpedo carriers too. Strasbourg’s three escorting destroyers had been joined by the fast frigates Poursuivante and Bordelais which had slipped out of Oran as soon as Wrestler’s back was turned. And from the other direction the Algiers-based squadron of cruisers and destroyers were on their way to join her.

  Meanwhile, the protection afforded by Strasbourg’s guns briefly tempted another small vessel to leave Oran and join the battle cruiser in her dash for Toulon. For half an hour or so Rigault de Genouilly, a shallow-bottomed gunboat named after the amiral who had captured Saigon, also tagged along. But though recent additions included a set of torpedo tubes and mine-laying equipment, she was essentially a colonial police work cutter built with river estuaries and a more tropical pace in mind. Unable to keep up, Lieutenant de vaisseau Louis Frossard had turned back for Oran, hugging the coast, when a couple of miles out to sea along came the Hood and her escorts including the cruisers Arethusa and Enterprise. Frossard could not resist it. Years later Briggs, who watched the French attack unfold from the flag deck of the Hood, would describe it as ‘the bravest thing I have ever seen’.

  Where there had been six destroyers in our screen on the starboard wing, there was unaccountably a seventh, and this interloper was heading straight for the Hood at full speed … She was close to the shore and making a torpedo run … From twelve thousand yards the Arethusa opened fire; from eighteen thousand yards the Enterprise joined in; the Hood’s guns roared again, too, at this mosquito which might have a deadly sting … hits were observed on the lone raider, but before she veered away the Hood had to veer, too. The Rigault de Genouilly managed to unloose two torpedoes, and we swung 180 degrees off course to port to avoid them. I looked back and saw the bubbles boil by well astern of us.

  Although Frossard’s attack was futile, in other respects fortune did, at least for the moment, favour the brave. Pursued by 15-inch shells from Hood and Valiant, which was using her stern guns at long range, his little ship managed to return to the sanctuary of Oran harbour. At least one submarine there was badly hit and had to be beached but no serious damage had been inflicted on the Rigault de Genouilly. Briggs ‘s hits must have been near misses.

  Now it was Somerville’s turn to try torpedoes. Having tried to do it with bombs, Ark Royal’s Swordfish were going to make another attempt at least to slow down the Strasbourg with what was supposed to be their main weapon. The light was fading fast as the Stringbags, their ordnance set for a depth of 20 feet, wobbled off the carrier, then, keeping about 15 miles offshore, flew in an easterly direction until the battle cruiser’s giveaway black smoke came into view. They closed up to confirm they had found their target, encountering in the process some surprisingly accurate long-distance anti-aircraft fire, then turned south to be swallowed up by Algeria’s gathering gloom.

  Sunset was at 8.35. Two Swordfish had already been lost on bombing runs and the low, slow and level approach required for torpedo attacks made them even more vulnerable. Flying up and down the coast, Lieutenant Commander Guy Hodgkinson delayed his squadron’s attack for another twenty minutes until he judged the Strasbourg was best silhouetted by the afterglow. Only then did Hodgkinson, seated behind his pilot in the observer role and at 37 a bit old for aircrew, let his Swordfish start their torpedo runs at 300-yard intervals and no higher than 20 feet.

  Since none of the French ships had the radar that was fast becoming standard in the Royal Navy surprise was complete. Four Swordfish had dropped and gone before the last two attracted some machine-gun fire. None was damaged and all six navigators found their way home for moonlit landings on Ark Royal’s gently pitching deck. ‘One or two hits were possibly obtained,’ reported Hodgkinson. ‘Darkness and funnel smoke made definite observation impossible.’

  More than one of his aircrews were certain they had seen the orange flash of an explosion but Hodgkinson was right to be cautious. Despite a textbook attack Strasbourg was unscathed. One torpedo had almost hit her stern but its track was spotted by Poursuivante and a frantic radio warning permitted evasive action. The orange flash came from it exploding just behind the target when its sensitive detonator was activated by the big ship’s turning wake, apparently a common enough occurrence with 1940’s torpedoes.

  This was the last offensive action of the day. As soon as the Swordfish had located and radioed back Strasbourg’s latest position, some twenty minutes prior to their actual attack, Somerville had decided to abandon the chase. The battle cruiser was now 25 miles ahead of him and, unless the Swordfish sank it, would have been reinforced by the cruisers from Algiers long before the Hood was on the scene. In his report he listed good tactical reasons for not pressing on, his main one being the foolishness of exposing his outnumbered destroyers to a night action before Hood’s 15-inch guns were there to back them up. These considerations apart, Somerville made plain his mounting contempt for the operation. ‘I did not consider,’ he told Their Lordships, ‘the possible loss of British ships was justified against the possibility of French ships being allowed to fall into German or Italian hands.’

  The
re was nobody to censor an admiral’s mail and in a letter home to Molly Somerville, his wife of twenty-seven years, he poured his rebellious heart out:

  I was quite determined that I would not have any of my destroyers sunk or big ships seriously damaged in this beastly operation and I succeeded. Wonder if anybody will think I had cold feet? Shouldn’t be surprised. But the truth is that the action left me quite unmoved. I just felt so damned angry being called on to do such a lousy job. I never thought they would fight in spite of what the French admiral said … But the French were furious that we did not trust them … We all feel thoroughly dirty and ashamed that the first time we have been in action was an affair like this. I feel I will be blamed for bungling the job and I think I did. But to you I don’t mind confessing that I was half-hearted and you can’t win an action that way.

  So Force H turned back leaving behind them the submarines Pandora and Proteus, which had been in place for several days, with orders to attack any French ships they encountered along the coast. It was thought Pandora might be in a good position to intercept Strasbourg off Algiers. Somerville intended to go back to his original plan to launch another air strike at whatever remained intact among the oil and flotsam in Mers-el-Kébir. Since Gensoul had assured him that he had evacuated his ships he was unlikely to kill many more Frenchmen and perhaps he thought that it was a way of making amends for the lack of due diligence that had allowed the Strasbourg to escape. On Ark Royal twelve Swordfish and nine Skuas were being readied for take-off at first light. Then a teasing Mediterranean fog came down, swirling around the ships so that one moment the bridge could not see their own bows before it cleared and descended again almost in the space of the same minute, a regular dance of the seven veils. By dawn it had tired of being capricious and settled into something much thicker. Even if the aircraft got off there was not much chance they would get back on. The attack was called off and Somerville set course for Gibraltar.

  On the Dunkerque, on which Gensoul had left 400 men to start basic clearing up and repairs, they had spent the foggy evening trying to get to the last of the engine room men trapped in the bowels of the ship. The battle cruiser had beached herself in an upright position among the fishing boats in front of the village of Saint André but the shock of running aground had toppled more debris onto the emergency hatches and hampered rescue.

  Eight half-crazed artificers were discovered in a compartment that also housed thirty broiled dead. Then the word went round that also among the living was Ingénieur mécanicien Xavier Grall. ‘At about eight o’clock the first of the rescuers could get into the engine room,’ recalled his friend Albert Borey. ‘Xavier was kneeling between the control panel and the signal board, leading towards the gangway which would have let him escape. He was at his last gasp, already unconscious … For hours three doctors worked desperately, giving their all. Until ten o’clock we still hoped, he was fighting.’

  Grall died about an hour later. Borey was convinced that his friend had refused to save himself to stay with his men and drifted into unconsciousness while kneeling in prayer just as he said he would during their discussion the previous Sunday.

  Total casualties incurred by the French through British operations on and around Mers-el-Kébir are usually put at 1,297 dead and about 350 wounded. This includes five of the Strasbourg’s engine room personnel who, like Grall, died from inhaling poisonous fumes as they kept up the revs during their dash for Toulon which they reached without any encounters with the Pandora. Instead the submarine chanced on and torpedoed the gallant Frossard’s Rigault de Genouilly, making her second attempt to go east towards Algiers, and twelve of her crew went down with her. In the harbour itself, the longest casualty list was inevitably from the capsized Bretagne with her 1,079 dead. Another fifty died on the Mogador and two tugs which were hit. Dunkerque would end up with 210 of her crew killed, the last after a French radio broadcast claiming that the ship had only been slightly damaged resulted in the re-staging of the air attack that had been cancelled by fog.

  At sunrise on 6 July, almost exactly three days after Hooky Holland had turned up in the destroyer Foxhound to deliver his ultimatum, twelve torpedo-carrying Swordfish fell on Gensoul’s crippled flagship, her bows stuck firmly in the mud of Saint Andre. After various malfunctions in the shallow water it seems that only two of their torpedoes exploded and neither of these hit the Dunkerque. But as it turned out, this was quite enough. The first one went off under the stern of the habour patrol boat Terre Neuve which sank with the loss of eight lives and forty-four depth charges aboard less than 100 feet from the battle cruiser. Some minutes later the second torpedo, tracking an almost identical path, hit the submerged depth charges which went off as one 7-ton parcel of TNT, tearing a huge hole in the battle cruiser’s side and killing another twenty-five of her crew as well as wounding many more.

  ‘And so that filthy job is over at last,’ wrote Somerville in another letter home to his wife and in certain company, whenever the subject came up, he would sometimes refer to himself as ‘the unskilled butcher of Oran’.

  Chapter Seven

  At Mers-el-Kébir the French buried their dead as quickly as they could, for it was July and there was not enough mortuary space to cope decently with this shoal of slippery, oil-blackened corpses. Amiral Gensoul wore tropical whites and parade-ground gloves and stood among the files of coffins and the sailors who had borne them there, while photographers and at least one film cameramen took the pictures that French, German and Italian audiences would see but not the British. When he spoke Gensoul addressed both the living and the dead. ‘If there is a stain on a flag today,’ he assured them, ‘it’s certainly not on yours.’

  Some forty-eight hours before these funerals, Darlan and Pétain had already given the American Ambassador William Bullitt a surprising glimpse of an Anglophobia that Gensoul’s casualties were about to fan to furnace heat. Bullitt had these first informal chats with the new regime at Clermont-Ferrand, about 40 miles south-west of Vichy, and what they had to tell him had clearly come as a dreadful shock. At the beginning of an encrypted 2,500–word telegram sent, as usual, directly to President Roosevelt he told him:

  The impression which emerges from these conversations is the extraordinary one that the French leaders desire to cut loose from all that France has represented during the past two generations, that their physical and moral defeat has been so absolute that they have accepted completely for France the fate of becoming a province of Nazi Germany. Moreover, in order that they may have as many companions in misery as possible they hope that England will be rapidly and completely defeated by Germany.

  The American journalist William S. Shirer thought it was probably the most disillusioning day in the Francophile Bullitt’s life. ‘But it produced what must be by far the most enlightening diplomatic dispatch he ever wrote.’

  Bullitt, an aristocratic Philadelphian, twice divorced and author of a bestselling novel about the unhappiness high birth, money, charm and good looks can bring, was as dedicated to his work as he was to the pursuit of beautiful and intelligent women. One of his lovers, until she dumped him for King Edward VIII, was Wallis Simpson. In 1938 a New Yorker magazine profile had summed him up as: ‘Headstrong, spoiled, spectacular, something of a nabob, and a good showman’.

  True to form, the ambassador had remained in Paris when the Germans entered on 14 June, defying the wishes of Secretary of State Cordell Hull – his immediate boss – that he remain in close touch with France’s government by following them south. Instead Hull had to be content with Bullitt’s deputy Anthony Biddle, who was becoming something of an expert on blitzkrieg, having previously been ambassador in Warsaw. One of the reasons Hull wanted Bullitt there rather than at the more operatic occasion in Paris was that even at this stage, three days before Pétain agreed to a ceasefire, neutral America shared Britain’s concern that the French fleet might fall into German hands and threaten the western Atlantic. ‘Should the French government … permit the French F
leet to be surrendered to Germany, the French government will permanently lose the friendship and the goodwill of the United States,’ he instructed his ambassador.

  But Bullitt, aged 49 and at the height of his powers, was much too egocentric to leave centre stage and miss his chance to give a once-in-a-lifetime performance of grace under pressure in the city he loved best. American ambassadors, he reminded Roosevelt, had remained in place when Madame Guillotine was working overtime during the Terror; again in 1870 throughout the Prussian siege and the subsequent horrors of the Commune; most recently in 1914 when, shortly before the Germans were repulsed on the Marne, the US Embassy had demonstrated more faith in Maréchal Foch than his own government which had already departed for Bordeaux. Bullitt was not going to have it said that he was the first to run away.

  His decision was much appreciated by Prime Minister Paul Reynaud who, after declaring the capital an open city, asked Bullitt to get in touch with the Germans to ensure an orderly entry. Of particular concern was a clandestine Communist radio station broadcasting from one of the industrial suburbs which was urging the capital’s workers, those who remained, to rise up and murder the bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the State Department had met his request to supply a dozen Thompson sub-machine guns for embassy protection – ‘I am fully prepared to pay for them myself’ – via neutral Lisbon which the American light cruiser USS Trenton was visiting en route for home. Their delivery was accompanied by a message from Hull stressing: ‘Every precaution should be taken to avoid publicity.’