England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Once there de Boislambert and his team set to work with a will. Their brief was a simple one: recruit as many officers as they could to their cause; sabotage communications and prepare for the arrival of a Free French contingent who were about to be landed from a large British task force. A blond stocky figure who could easily have been mistaken for an Englishman, de Boislambert was under the impression that key members of the Dakar garrison were ready to defect to the Free French. But he soon discovered this was wrong. Embittered by the slaughter at Mers-el-Kébir, old friends advised him to leave before he found himself facing a court martial. De Boislambert was not the sort of man who gave up easily but, as he admitted later, if he had had a radio he would have urged de Gaulle to call the whole thing off. Since that was not an option, on the eve of the scheduled landing he saw that all telephone links were cut between General Headquarters and the coastal batteries at Cape Manuel and Gorée. Then the three of them went under cover and hoped for the best.

  The Anglo-Gaullist expedition to Dakar towards the end of September 1940 was code-named Operation Menace. It was a bold plan in that it involved diverting precious resources from Britain when the German invasion scare was still at its height and the Luftwaffe’s aerial assault on the island by no means over, though it was becoming apparent that Goering’s airmen were having difficulty defeating the RAF. In many ways it was a consolation prize for the failure to persuade the French to continue the fight from North Africa with all the Mediterranean coastline and warships this would have secured. For the time being these colonies were too tough a nut to crack. Vichy had well over 100,000 troops in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, mostly colonial and poorly equipped yet fiercely loyal to their officers. But to the south of them, in the lightly garrisoned outposts of the sub-Sahara, the situation looked much more favourable.

  ‘Remember this, France does not stand alone,’ de Gaulle had announced on the BBC back in June. ‘Behind her stands a vast Empire.’ And shortly afterwards he sent to Africa Commandant Philippe Leclerc, nom de guerre (he feared reprisals against his family) of Viscomte de Hauteclocque, a cavalry officer who had fought under Pétain in the Moroccan Rif Wars. He chose well.

  Leclerc, who was almost 40, had already demonstrated great determination escaping to England in the first place despite a head wound and a brief period in German captivity. By the end of August, in a series of almost bloodless coups, he had succeeded in rallying Gaullist support in the Cameroons, a former German colony that had been part of the booty from Versailles, and the French Congo, though both places would need consolidating if they were to withstand a Vichy response. Most crucial of all, he had also helped secure Chad after Félix Eboué, its clever mulatto governor, partly out of revenge for a punishment posting, had declared himself for de Gaulle.

  Eboué was born the maternal grandson of a slave – his father was a French gold miner – in Guiana, France’s South American colony next door to Brazil, which is mostly famous for its Devil’s Island penitentiary where Dreyfus served his time. In 1910 he was accepted by the colonial service and his rise through its ranks showed France at its liberal best when this level of advancement for a non-white was almost unthinkable in the British Empire, not even in India. Most of his career was in Africa, but in 1936 Eboué became governor of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean where his social reforms irritated enough people in Paris to see him transferred to Chad, France’s poorest African possession. He was 56 and it should have been the end of his career. Instead it brought undreamed-of honours. Chad might have been a backwater, but for de Gaulle these 500,000 square miles of central Africa were important: Mussolini’s Libya lay on the other side of Chad’s northern frontier. It was the only colony not in Vichy hands that offered the possibility of the Free French hitting back against one of their Axis occupiers.

  All this was good news but Churchill and his War Cabinet were mainly interested in Dakar for the same reasons they were obsessed with the French fleet. They worried that Vichy might allow the port to fall into German hands as a base for U-boats and surface raiders preying on Britain’s South Atlantic shipping. The Americans, always alarmed at any enhancement of German naval power, were also concerned and reopened a consulate in the port they had closed down some nine years before to save money. Thomas C. Wasson arrived on 15 September, about a week before the Royal Navy turned up on the horizon, but the only German speakers the new consul could discover were five Jewish refugees dreaming of US visas.

  Initially, de Gaulle was suspicious of British plans for Dakar. Spears, his personal liaison officer with a direct line to Churchill, called it Fashoda complex. ‘He could never accept that we had no territorial ambitions at France’s expense, always believed we would succumb to the temptation to help ourselves to some tempting morsel of the French Empire.’

  Once these suspicions had been set aside, though by no means entirely extinguished, de Gaulle began to question the tactics. Instead of a frontal assault he proposed a landing at Conakry in Guinea, almost 500 miles south of Dakar and only 50 miles north of British Sierra Leone, to be followed by an overland march on the port, gathering support as he went. This was turned down as impractical because it would take too long. Then Churchill asked de Gaulle to come and talk things over. Their meeting took place at Downing Street on 6 August 1940, two days after the anniversary of the opening shots in 1914, a date that had led to speculation among the British High Command that Hitler might think the runes favoured it for invasion day. Above them vapour trail graffiti scratched a mostly blue sky. Goering had briefed his aircrews that the 15th must be Eagle Day, the date by which the Luftwaffe established total supremacy over the RAF. De Gaulle left his own account of how, despite these more pressing matters, Churchill had convinced him of the prospects for Operation Menace, ‘colouring his eloquence with the most picturesque tints’.

  Dakar wakes up one morning, sad and uncertain. But behold, by the light of the rising sun, its inhabitants perceive the sea, to a great distance, covered with ships. An immense fleet! A hundred war or transport vessels! These approach slowly making radio messages of friendship to the town, to the navy, to the garrison. Some of them are flying the tricolour. The others are sailing under the British, Dutch, Polish or Belgian colours. From this Allied force there breaks away an inoffensive small ship bearing the white flag of parley. It enters the port and disembarks the envoys of Général de Gaulle. These are brought to the Governor. Their job is to convince him that, if he lets you land, the Allied fleet retires, and that nothing remains but to settle the terms of his co-operation; if he wants to fight he has every chance of being crushed … During this conversation Free French and British aircraft are flying peacefully over the town dropping leaflets. The military and the civilians, among whom your agents are at work, are discussing passionately among themselves the advantages offered by an arrangement with you and the drawbacks presented by a battle fought against those who, after all, are the Allies of France. The Governor feels that, if he resists, the ground will give way under his feet. Perhaps he will wish ‘for honour’s sake’ to fire a few shots. But he will go no further. And that evening he will dine with you and drink to final victory.

  Thus it was that shortly before dawn on 23 September a large number of ships assembled before Dakar. Not quite the ‘immense fleet’ Churchill had predicted but impressive enough. The star of the show, on loan from Somerville’s Force H, was the Ark Royal, still under the command of Hooky Holland who had been so disgusted by the French casualties at Mers-el-Kébir that he had written a letter asking to be relieved of his command but had been persuaded by Somerville not to put it in. Next in line were the old battleships Barham and Resolution. The Barham was recently refitted and it was hoped that the new fire control for her 15-inch guns would prove more successful than her new plumbing which, despite the latitude, refused to provide water that was less than boiling. In their wardroom officers sipped grim cocktails of gin and lime juice served at teapot temperature.

  Around the big ships, that wou
ld, if necessary, supply the heavy artillery or deliver the air strikes, was a screen of three heavy and two light cruisers, nine destroyers and seven sloops or patrol boats, five of them Free French. Also under their protection were six converted liners carrying almost 6,700 troops of whom 2,400 were French and the rest British, mostly a brigade of Royal Marines. The French were on the Dutch Pennland and Westernland where de Gaulle’s new emblem, the Cross of Lorraine, flew alongside the Netherlands’ tricolour.

  These ships carried the Narvik veterans of the Foreign Legion’s 13th Demi-Brigade, his best troops, sometimes called Brigade Monclar after the alias of its diminutive commander Colonel Raoul Charles Magrin-Vernerey, a tiny terror of a man in wire-rimmed spectacles, seven times wounded during 1914–18 and a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur with eleven bravery citations. Apart from carrying de Gaulle, the Westernland’s other distinction was that she was the only ship with women on board. These were ten ambulance driver-nurses, six of them British and mostly the kind of adventurous, expensively educated, thirtyish Francophiles who had not been out of France much longer than the Gaullist officers they met when they signed up in Carlton Gardens. Susan Travers, a naval officer’s leggy daughter brought up in Cannes and a semi-professional tennis player, had returned to England via Finland where she had gone with the French Red Cross to nurse Finnish soldiers wounded by the Russians.

  The presence of these women was the cause of much speculation among their allies and along familiar lines. Soon the British were telling each other that the ‘nurses’ were not really nurses at all and the hot-blooded French, typically unwilling to accept the communal nature of their calling, were knifing each other over exclusive possession. This apparently explained the large numbers of burials at sea. There was at least one killing or death by misadventure because General Spears happened to trip over the body outside his cabin. Otherwise, I’amour was by no means a monopoly of the French. Years later Susan Travers admitted to starting an affair aboard ship with one of Spears’s junior British liaison officers though, since they were both sharing cabins, it was not consummated until they got ashore.

  The British troop were spread over four ships: the Bombay-registered Karanja, two converted P&O liners – the Ettrick and the Kenya – and the Sobieski, a new Polish liner whose dedicated light orchestra had been playing in the salon where the officers dined ever since they left Liverpool. On the Ettrick, where he was delighted to discover that Goanese stewards were serving duty-free shots of gin for about the price of a newspaper, was Captain Evelyn Waugh, who was attached to one of the Royal Marine battalions as its intelligence officer while waiting to see whether his application to join the newly formed Commandos had been accepted. The novelist had covered the Italian invasion of Abyssinia as a newspaper correspondent but this was his first campaign as a soldier and, like thousands of others throughout Britain’s armed forces, he was ignoring standing orders and keeping an occasional diary.

  Sunday 1 September, [this was the day after Waugh left Scapa Flow] At about 5pm the cruiser Fiji next to us in the convoy put up a signal which was variously interpreted to mean, ‘I am dropping depth charges at 800 feet’ and ‘I have been torpedoed and am proceeding to UK’. The latter proved to be correct. She made port under her own power taking with her highly important people … 7 September. Saturday night at sea observed by hard drinking … Sunday 8 September. I suggested Lamond [Free French liaison officer] should lecture the officers on French politics: idea treated as shocking. Drunk before luncheon. Sleep. PT under Teeling. Adjutant bottles junior officers for rowdiness …

  The U-boat attack on Fiji, which left five dead in a wrecked engine room soon after the convoy entered the North Atlantic, was an unfortunate start. There had already been considerable delay in putting the expedition together. At one point the crews of some of the small Free French cargo ships involved went on strike because it was a long time since anybody had remembered to pay them. Allegations that, even when this was remedied, they refused to sail unless sufficient champagne and foie gras were included in their rations, and that one captain insisted that his mistress accompany him, sound like predictable Francophobe slanders though they are faithfully repeated by at least one French source.

  Without doubt there seem to have been some startling lapses of security with Free French officers toasting ‘À Dakar!’ over a pre-embarkation dinner at Liverpool’s Adelphi Hotel and de Gaulle himself casually informing a London military outfitter that he required tropical lightweights for West Africa. Then at the last moment, when it had got as far as Freetown, it had almost been cancelled altogether after three Vichy cruisers got into Dakar carrying naval gunners to take over from some of the Senegalese crews manning the coastal batteries. En route they had stopped at Casablanca where a British reconnaissance aircraft got close enough to be shot down by French gunners.

  At the time London did not know who or what the cruiser squadron was carrying. Nor did they think the additional firepower would make much difference if they came up against the 15-inch guns of the British battleships. What concerned them was that its arrival would greatly improve the morale of the somewhat neglected Dakar garrison and that Operation Menace would not lead to the bloodless capitulation they were banking on. The Admiralty was particularly anxious that they should not risk provoking an all-out war with Vichy by inflicting casualties on a Mers-el-Kébir scale and finding what was left of Darlan’s navy, which included the Strasbourg and some of their super-destroyers, added to Hitler’s invasion fleet.

  In an uncharacteristic change of heart, for once even Churchill, whose ‘picturesque tints’ had so inspired de Gaulle, was among the nay-sayers.

  I had no doubt whatever that the enterprise should be abandoned … it was possible however to cancel the plan without any loss of prestige, so important to us at the time, and indeed without anyone knowing anything about it. The expedition could be diverted to Douala and cover Général de Gaulle’s operations against the French Cameroons and thereafter the ships and transports could be dispersed or returned home.

  Another reason for calling it off was that, even before the cruisers arrived, there had been at least one clear indication that reports of crumbling Vichy morale and a growing Gaullist tendency in the colony were probably at best exaggerated. The Dakar-based coaster Poitiers, bound for neighbouring Libreville with railway rolling stock and ammunition, was intercepted by the cruiser Cumberland but it took a shot across the bows to persuade her captain to stop engines. By time the British had boarded, opened sea cocks were flooding the holds and her petrol-soaked deck cargo was already well alight. Meanwhile, the crew had abandoned ship and were pulling strongly towards Africa before a close burst of machine-gun fire persuaded them to stop and come alongside, when they greeted their rescuers with cries of ‘Vive Pétain!’ and ‘Vive Hitler!’

  ‘There was no mistaking their sympathies,’ wrote 18-year-old Roger Emden in the log all midshipmen were required to keep. Or their prisoners’ pleasure when it took sixty-seven shells from the Cumberland’s secondary 4-inch guns to sink Poitiers, named after the site of a famous Gallic victory over the Moors though better known in England for a battle the Black Prince won there some 600 years later.

  Undoubtedly the arrival of the cruisers and the Poitiers incident would have ended Operation Menace had it not been for an unusual development. ‘It was very rare at this stage of the war for commanders on the spot to press for audacious courses,’ Churchill would later admit. ‘Usually the pressure to run risks came from home.’ By which, of course, he meant from himself.

  But in this case the reaction was entirely the opposite. De Gaulle, Admiral John Cunningham who was in command of the ships (no relation to the other Admiral Cunningham who had sweet-talked Godfroy into disarming the French squadron at Alexandria) and Major General Noel Irwin who was commanding the troops, all argued that the operation should go ahead. Their main point was that since the arrival of the cruisers had not significantly altered the military balance its ef
fect on morale should be put to the test. De Gaulle in particular, buoyed by his successes elsewhere in Africa, felt the tide was going in his direction. Churchill changed his mind. ‘The men on the spot thought it was time to do and dare.’

  Certainly, on the eve of battle there was nothing much wrong with the morale of the men under their command judging from the racket coming out of Ark Royal’s aircrew’s wardroom where British and Free French officers were swapping rugby songs. ‘I learned some very vulgar French words … they learned some very vulgar English words,’ remembered Sub-Lieutenant Charles Friend, who was an observer on a Swordfish. The English grew particularly fond of the tale of the lubricious monk Frère Le Guillaumet, who was interrogated in monastic plainsong about the secrets of his success with women and the chorus, his stock replies roared out with much refilling of glasses. About twenty French airmen, flyers and airframe fitters had come aboard the carrier at Freetown, transferring from the merchant ship Pennland. With them – flown to England in July by escaping French pilots – came two Lucioles, their air force’s two-seater communications biplane which was rather similar to the British Tiger Moth trainer but with a slightly better figure.

  So as the dawn came up on the 23rd, Cunningham’s fleet was arrayed before Dakar more or less as Churchill had promised de Gaulle it would be. Unfortunately, the Vichy defenders were denied this awesome sight. A thick wet tropical fog, which showed no sign of clearing, had descended. When Dakar woke up that morning, feeling nowhere near as sad and uncertain as Churchill envisaged, it could have been any other day. The entire Royal Navy might have been out there or nothing at all. Undaunted, from Ark Royal came the sound of aircraft engines starting up.