England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  ‘They say “never”, sir,’ I translated.

  ‘ “Are your sure?”

  ‘ “Yes, sir.”

  ‘ “Right, open fire.’ ”

  In the twelve months since the outbreak of war the cruiser had been attached to the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow and seen little action. This was the first time the Australians had used their main armament in anger. Over the next 16 minutes their eight 8-inch guns would fire eight salvoes, a barrage of 64 shells. On the bridge, ears ringing, Roberts was thinking, ‘I’ve started all this. I hope to God I’ve got it right.’

  At least one other man aboard had mixed feelings and his French was probably a bit better than the teenaged midshipman’s. Ordinary Seaman Pierre Austin from Melbourne was the same age at Roberts. His father had been badly wounded at Passchendaele and married one of the French nurses he had met in hospital. Even so, their son never doubted that Stewart had made the right decision: ‘I had a French mother and it was a French ship but it had to be done.’

  L’Audacieux, her bridge wrecked, soon began to burn in several places. Eighty-one French sailors were killed. By the time her crew abandoned ship she was ablaze from stem to stern and drifting towards the shore where next day, still smouldering, the surf beached her not far from Rufisque’s peanut jetties. An attempt by one of Australia’s destroyer escorts to pick up survivors was deterred by a coastal battery who were probably unable to see exactly what was going on, but the Surprise, though the sloop claimed to have come under British fire, turned up in time to rescue 186, of whom about half were discovered to be wounded in some way.

  While the Australia was bludgeoning the good-looking super destroyer into a blackened hulk the cruisers Georges Leygues and Montcalm and L’Audacieux’s sister ship Le Malin slipped by. They were only about 3,000 yards apart and could hear the sound of the guns but could not work out where it was coming from or what it was about. Had L’Audacieux found the ships they were looking for, though there had been no radio message? Or had the British begun a more serious bombardment of the forts? The last thing they wanted was to risk bumping into Cunningham’s cruiser and destroyer screen and have them call up the battleships’ artillery. So they continued on their south-easterly course confident that, providing the fog held no nasty surprises, they had more than enough firepower to sink the kind of troop carriers and small escorts seen heading towards Rufisque. They had no idea that the defector Charles de Gaulle was on one of them.

  Chapter Ten

  War gamers subject some moves to the throw of a dice to represent the element of luck which so often determines the outcome of any military endeavour and was the quality Napoléon demanded that his generals have above all else. Certainly, chance played a major role in events at Rufisque Bay on 23 September 1940 and with far-reaching consequences. For had the dice rolled one way instead of another, twentieth century France would have been deprived of its best known and most influential leader and Vichy would have had a stunning triumph.

  The dice was the fog, rolling this way and that. Without the fog the landings of the fusiliers marins would have been supported by the firepower of the Australia and the two British destroyers. Without the fog none of Vichy’s warships in Dakar would have dared leave the harbour in broad daylight in the face of overwhelming odds including 15-inch guns that could sink them with impunity. In the fog L’Audacieux lived up to her name, did not get the luck she deserved and paid the price.

  De Gaulle’s first attempt to set foot on French territory since he had fled France with Spears some three months before had suddenly placed him and the nucleus of his little army in considerable danger. But he only became aware of this when Major John Watson, who was General Spears’s aide-de-camp, came onto the bridge of the Westernland waving a signal from Admiral Cunningham about the two Vichy cruisers that had broken out of Dakar. An Ark Royal Swordfish had spotted them less than 2 miles away from the Free French ships and none of Cunningham’s fleet was close enough to come to their rescue. If the cruisers found them Spears thought it unlikely, even if it was offered, that de Gaulle would surrender. He envisaged a Free French Götterdämmerung with ships blazing like torches, their flames extinguished only as they sizzled beneath ‘a shark-infested sea’.

  Fog was only partly to blame for the absence of Royal Navy protection. As the day wore on communications between Cunningham on the Barham and de Gaulle on the Westernland had grown progressively worse. There was a simple reason for this. The army had provided both ships with a Royal Signals detachment using the very latest equipment: radio telephones coupled with a scrambler device that would leave Vichy wireless monitors listening to a manic warbling garble.

  But there was one insurmountable problem. Every time they tried to use them they shut down all the flagship’s wireless telegraphy. Cunningham could not speak to his fleet. Wavelengths were changed and antennae adjusted but the end result was always the same. So with great regret the wonderful radio telephones were switched off. Unfortunately, somebody forgot to inform the Barham’s own naval operators who had their work cut out taking and deciphering messages from every other ship in the fleet and tended to give the Westernland’s messages low priority assuming that all her urgent signals had already been relayed by radio telephone.

  Because of this wireless messages were sometimes taking over an hour to be encyphered, tapped out in Morse then decyphered and passed on at the other end. The most crucial example was two requests from Cunningham for the position of the French transports so that he could get the Australia and the destroyers to rendezvous with them. The first was sent at 2.15 p.m. then repeated at 3.02. A reply timed at 2.45 giving Westernland’s latest position was not received until 4 p.m., hopelessly out of date. In the end, Cunningham despaired and advised that he was cancelling his end of Plan Charles.

  But by the time de Gaulle received this message his fusiliers marins were already attempting to land. As it turned out it was probably just as well that he did not send his Legionnaires in first because, with their élan, they were much more likely to have established a bridgehead and might well have been abandoned on it. There was no such problem with the French marines. Spears described their lacklustre performance as ‘pathetic’ and accused them of lacking both leadership and training and ‘even the minimum required for brave men to dash for an objective’.

  He was being too harsh. From the beginning the whole ethos of Operation Menace had been all about bluff and bloodless victory: bouquets not bullets. First of all two of the sloops had come under fire from machine guns and some small 3.7-inch mountain cannon placed near the lighthouse by the peanut lighter jetties. These guns were under a young aspirant (a cadet officer) who rather later in his career was adamant that he planned to give up as soon as his position became dangerous.

  These pious intentions did not prevent his battery from scoring a bull’s-eye on the sloop Commandant Duboc which killed three men. The ship, which was not badly damaged, rapidly removed herself, as did the accompanying Savorgnan de Brazza which started to return fire with her 5.5-inch guns, demolishing the little lighthouse and sending the aspirant and his men running for cover. Next it was decided to put the marines into motorboats and disembark them on what was expected to be a deserted beach further south. They were within 300 yards of the shore when a few rifle shots from some Senegalese troops scared them away, though in less troubled times the askaris’ French commander, like the aspirant, would insist that he was astonished at this outcome and merely intended a token resistance before surrender.

  By now de Gaulle had received the warning about the cruisers on the loose and ordered the sloops and the marines to withdraw. The Westernland and Pennland were already hastening away through the fog, missing the cruisers by about 1,500 yards as the Vichy ships gave up their search and returned to Dakar. The crippled Richelieu, which was acting as the Vichy naval communications centre, had informed them by wireless of what happened to L’Audacieux and this must have made them feel that the fog was not necessarily their
friend.

  ‘Having begun we must go on to the end. Stop at nothing,’ Churchill cabled his commanders at the end of Operation Menace’s first day, which could at best be described as disappointing. The messaged revived Admiral Cunningham’s flagging spirits. So it was to be Situation Nasty after all: no more pussyfooting around trying to get people to see the error of their ways. ‘Desiring Frenchmen not to fight against Frenchmen in a pitched battle General de Gaulle has withdrawn his forces,’ it was explained in an ultimatum to Governor Boisson due to expire at 0600 next morning, at which point, if the governor had not agreed that the Free French could land, the Royal Navy would start to exact a terrible retribution. ‘Once fire has begun it will continue until the fortifications of Dakar are entirely destroyed and the place occupied by troops who are ready to fulfil their duty.’

  Vichy losses included a destroyer and a submarine and exceeded the British but their morale was high. The Anglo-Gaullists had come with their ships and their smooth talk and, when that had failed, they had huffed and they had puffed but they had come nowhere near to blowing down their house. The ultimatum, especially a line that they were obviously prepared to hand Dakar over to the Germans, caused great indignation. Were they expected to collapse because of more threats from these blowhards? Some of the young officers on Boisson’s staff, exhilarated by their success, wanted to use the famous single-word reply with which Napoléon’s Old Guard were said to have refused English demands to surrender at Waterloo. Merde! But this was rejected. It was too poignant a reminder of a terrible French defeat. And Boisson was beginning to sense that this was not going to be a defeat.

  Instead he got the navy signallers on the Richelieu to send: ‘France has entrusted me Dakar. I shall defend Dakar to the end.’

  Boisson’s reply was picked up at about 4 a.m. Two and a half hours later, well after first light, six Skuas, each carrying a 500-pound semi-armour-piercing bomb, left the Ark Royal, flew over the fog and attacked the Richelieu and other ships. The results were disappointing: three near misses that might have sprung a few plates, two on the battleship and one on a destroyer. Their crews reported light anti-aircraft fire but Vichy fighters made no attempt to intercept them. Half an hour later another six aircraft, this time Swordfish, bombed the coastal guns at Fort Manual that had put Cumberland out of action. Again there was no serious opposition and eight hits were claimed. Photo-reconnaissance of a tight rash of grouped bomb craters was deemed to confirm this, though it is doubtful if any of those looking at them knew exactly where the dug-in and camouflaged Maginot line-style gun battery bunker was supposed to be.

  Meanwhile, the aircrew of a second six-strong Swordfish strike on the fort, each aircraft armed with four 250-pound semi-armour-piercing bombs, were sitting in their cockpits with their engines running waiting for the carrier to turn into the wind and allow them to fly off. Among them was the observer Charles Friend who had last been over Dakar scattering leaflets the day before. They all watched as the Duty Boy, a teenager armed with a small blackboard, came down from the conning tower. Once on the flight deck, bracing himself so that no sudden movement of the ship sent him into a moving propeller, he went up to each aircraft and held up his blackboard so that the pilot could see it. Friend saw that on it was chalked: ‘Change target to Richelieu.’ All the pilots acknowledged by giving the Duty Boy the thumbs-up sign then he stepped back from the din and the danger and the carrier completed her turn into the wind and they took off.

  In the air they split into two sub-flights of three that, in order to make themselves a narrower target, changed into line astern formation as the harbour came into view. Friend’s aircraft was at the rear of his sub-flight. Immediately in front of him, in a Swordfish piloted by ‘Aggie’ England, was ‘Goon’ Richardson who had been on the observer course immediately before his. Although they were in the same squadron – 810 – Friend had never learned the first names of these officers any more than he could be sure of the identity of the rating in his rear cockpit manning the Lewis machine gun. In his own aircraft the man sitting immediately behind him with his pans of .303 tracer ammunition was Leading Seaman Huxley. Big black puffs of smoke began to burst around them and Friend thought the French anti-aircraft gunners had judged their height nicely.

  As we lined up to dive bomb the Richelieu I was facing forward looking over Jock’s [the pilot’s] shoulder and I saw one Stringbag ahead hit by flak and falling out of the line in flames. Then I was startled by a heavy thump on the back from Huxley who was heaving up the rear gun as I looked round. He pointed astern at three or four fighters – one of which was obviously bent on attacking us – Curtiss Hawks. Pointing and shouting were the only means of communicating with the air gunner although I was linked to Jock by the Gosport tube voicepipe. I said to him, ‘There’s a fighter on our tail.’ ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘Tell me when to turn.’ Huxley opened fire just before I saw the flashes of a cannon firing through the Hawk’s propeller and said, ‘Now!’ Next thing, Huxley and I were up on the end of our ‘monkey chain’ harnesses as Jock turned over to starboard and back. The fighter flew on in a wide turn, unable to follow us round. He, or one of the other Frenchmen attacked the Stringbags ahead and one more of them was shot down before our eyes. Jock jettisoned our bombs over the roadstead outside the harbour and we flew back on our own to land on Ark. Three of the strike were lost, the two I had seen hit and another which fell to the high angle guns. I began to think it was a pretty odd war in which our erstwhile allies the French shot at us from aeroplanes made by the Americans who seemed to be on our side. But I suppose we started it.

  Four of the nine missing Swordfish aircrew were killed. The only survivor from Lieutenant Ian England’s machine was the observer ‘Goon’ Richardson. He had great difficulty separating himself from the aircraft which had turned upside down in the water and to which he was still umbilically attached by his flying helmet’s connections to the radio and the Gosport speaking tube with the pilot. Half conscious, he surfaced with a broken arm and his mouth tasting of petrol to discover that the aircraft’s rubber dinghy had also escaped but was floating bottom up. This made it impossible to get at the flares and fresh water it contained but Richardson was in no condition to right it; all he could do was to haul himself onto its slippery underside and hang on. He was eventually rescued by the Vichy submarine Bévéziers, commanded as it happened by a capitaine de corvette called Lancelot, whose crew treated their captive well, as did the Dakar military hospital to which they delivered him.

  At this point the Bévéziers had become the sole survivor of the three submarines Vichy started with in Dakar. Shortly after 8 a.m. the Asdic operator on the destroyer Fortune had detected the Ajax about to make a torpedo run on the battleships and dropped a single depth charge which twenty-six minutes later brought Ajax to the surface where she immediately showed a white flag. The crew were transferred to the destroyer and the submarine sunk by gunfire though not before a boarding party had gone through her control centre and officers’ quarters, snatching all the documents they could find. Their biggest trophy was an order from Amiral Darlan instructing his fleet to use a certain radio code, explaining it could also be read by the Axis powers. Spears was outraged, pointing out to London that it made a mockery of Vichy’s insistence that they were neutral because all their reports on the location of British ships were being shared with Berlin and Rome.

  But this was the only British triumph of another indecisive day where all the Vichy defenders were required to do was to remain undefeated. The early morning air attacks had been a fiasco. The coastal battery on Cape Manuel had hardly got dusty. Nor had any of the ships taken a single hit. Even if they had, the 250-pound bombs on the Swordfish were unlikely to have pierced the Richelieu’s 8-inch-thick armoured deck plate. ‘We might as well have dropped house bricks,’ admitted one squadron commander. A change of ordnance brought no more success. In the afternoon nine Swordfish with an escort of three Skuas attacked the two cruisers that had been searching fo
r the Free French forces off Rufisque. The only hits were on the Swordfish with two downed by anti-aircraft fire. This brought the Ark Royal’s total aircraft losses up to eight: three Skua monoplanes had also been lost in the earlier attacks, either shot down or too damaged for a deck landing so that their crews had to ditch alongside the carrier then escape their sinking machines before they drowned with them.

  None of this would have mattered if the ship-to-shore bombardment, particularly the sixteen 15-inch guns of the two battleships, had been as terrible and awe-inspiring as was expected but little of it was accurate enough to make a difference. The fog had not gone away and the French destroyer Hardi did her best to improve on nature by constantly laying smoke screens. Directing fire from the air was becoming increasingly difficult and also dangerous with the French Curtiss Hawks waiting to pounce on any lumbering Swordfish or Skua that dared venture low enough to take a good look.

  On the troopships the Royal Marines had barbed-wire entanglements in mind and to blast a path through them were busy assembling Bangalore Torpedoes, the extendable metal tubes packed with fused gun cotton extensively used by British infantry in 1914–18. Few of the marines had any doubt that they would soon be the sharp end of a full-scale amphibious assault on well-defended Vichy positions. The night before, the lieutenants expecting to lead their platoons into action for the first time had been signing bar chits with the abandon of young men with the best excuse in the world.