by Colin Smith
Any agreement entered into between France and Germany which partook of the character above mentioned would definitely wreck the traditional friendship between the French and American peoples, would permanently remove any chance that this government would be disposed to give any assistance to the French people in their distress and would create a wave of bitter indignation against France on the part of American public opinion.
Pétain dismissed it all with a massive Gallic shrug, allegedly confiding to a friend: ‘It will take six months to discuss this programme and another six months to forget it.’ There was some truth in this. Nothing much ever did come out of the Montoire talks. A few days later Hitler became distracted by the prospect of Germany being dragged into an unnecessary Balkan campaign after Mussolini had ignored his advice and started a winter war with the Greek dictator Metaxas. There was no offensive deployment of the French fleet against the British. Nor was there any mass repatriation of the 1.5 million French prisoners of war in German hands – about the population of Marseilles – though a few hundred officers and NCOs were liberated to reinforce Vichy’s North African garrisons.
By mid-November, little more than three weeks after his meeting with Hitler, Pétain was confiding to Robert Murphy, the American chargé d’affaires in Vichy that, though he felt no love for the British and would defend French territory against them, ‘their victory is much better for France than that of Germany’. Pétain’s tendency to tell people what he thought they would most like to hear, a habit uncommon in the elderly, was undiminished. And there was no doubt that American sympathy for the defiant British was stronger than ever.
Two days before Pétain’s latest meeting with Murphy the Luftwaffe’s night bombers had visited the English Midlands and flattened twelve of the armament factories in the old Saxon town of Coventry, killing almost 600 people in the process and demolishing all but the twin spires of its medieval cathedral. Deaths from what Fleet Street called the Blitz were averaging 3,000 to 5,000 a month which Churchill considered an endurable casualty rate, as did the large American press corps sharing the risks in the capital who seemed unanimous in their belief that ‘London can take it’. There had also been a major British success against the Axis. Flying off the carrier Illustrious, twenty Swordfish fitted with new long-range fuel tanks had made a moonlight attack on ships harboured at Taranto in the south-eastern toe of Italy. All the Fleet Air Arm had learned failing to sink Darlan’s fleet at Mers-el-Kébir and Dakar was put to good use and it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. This time most of the torpedoes ran straight and true and detonated when they made contact. Three Italian battleships, including the new Littorio, had been put out of action. Smaller vessels and the docks had been damaged by bombs. Next day almost everything that could still move sailed for Italy’s west coast ports where they were safer but not as well placed to intercept Malta convoys. Within the space of a couple of hours, and for the loss of three airmen killed and three captured, the naval balance in the Mediterranean had been utterly changed.
Suddenly the prospects of an eventual British victory were not perhaps as ludicrous as Laval and his supporters liked to believe. At the beginning of December there was more unexpected success for British arms. It had started in August when, against the advice of Brooke and other senior officers trying to prepare for an invasion, Churchill had persuaded the War Cabinet to send half of the best tanks Britain then possessed – the heavy Mark Two Matildas – to Egypt. And that, for a while, was the last most of the War Office had heard of them: the source of some bitterness among those expecting the imminent arrival of a panzer army.
In Cairo the taciturn Archibald Wavell, the poetry-loving general who had been Middle East supremo since 1939, seemed in no hurry to go on the offensive. It looked as though Italy’s 10th Army, which had crossed the Libyan frontier in September then dug itself in about 70 miles inside Egypt’s western desert at Sidi Barrani, could expect to celebrate New Year there. The nearest British position of any consequence was Major General Richard O’Connor’s Western Desert Force almost 100 miles away at Mersa Matruh. In Cairo there were rumours that some of Wavell’s forces might be sent to help the Greeks.
Then on 9 December, in a brilliantly executed manoeuvre that had taken weeks of painstaking staff work, O’Connor sneaked forward, slipped his Matildas through a hole in the Italian defences south of Sidi Barrani, turned right and right again and surprised them from the rear. It was a rout. Within seventy-two hours the remnants of the ioth Army were out of Egypt, leaving behind 237 intact field guns, 73 tanks and 38,000 prisoners – more than O’Connor’s entire command. ‘We’ve five acres of officers and 200 acres of other ranks,’ exulted one of the landed gentry who officered the Coldstream Guards. Total British casualties were just over 500, of whom 133 were killed. Churchill’s gamble with the tanks had paid off. ‘Your splendid victory fulfils our highest hopes,’ he cabled the imperturbable Wavell, who had masterminded the entire operation with such secrecy that not only had the Prime Minister been one of the last to know, but until they were almost within sight of the enemy, O’Connor’s spearhead had believed they were on a training exercise.
The first three British casualties in the war against the Vichy French, killed in the gun fight aboard the Surcouf, lie in a small military section at Plymouth’s vast Weston Mill cemetery. Commander Sprague (INSET) and Lieutenant Griffiths are buried almost alongside each other. Leading Seaman Albert Webb is nearby. The body of Ingénieur Mécanicien Daniel, the only French death, was removed to France in 1948.
In the late 1930s the Surcouf was the biggest submersible in the world, but it was a white elephant which never lived up to the bold privateer it was named after.
INSET: Admiral James Somerville opened fire on the French ships with great reluctance. Afterwards he referred to himself as an ‘unskilled butcher’. ABOVE: Mers-el-Kébir. The British begin their bombardment of the trapped French ships.
French dead on board the battle cruiser Dunkerque. Her maiden voyage was to Britain for George VI’s coronation and a naval review at Spithead.
The battleship Bretagne on fire and about to capsize.
Almost 1,300 French sailors were killed in about ten minutes. Amiral Marcel Gensoul addresses the survivors at the mass burial of their comrades. ‘If there is a stain on a flag today,’ he assured them, ‘it’s certainly not on yours.’
The entrance to the Royal Air Force training station at Habbaniya, which Rashid Ali’s rebels besieged with belated support from Luftwaffe planes transiting through neighbouring Vichy Syria.
These burned out trucks, destroyed from the air by the hastily converted training aircraft from RAF Habbaniya, marked the beginning of the end of Rashid Ali’s revolt, and of Vichy hopes of a sympathetic regime installed next door to French Syria.
Futile hopes of weak Vichy resistance were raised three weeks before the British invasion when Colonel Alibert Collet’s Circassian cavalry followed him across the Lebanon–Palestine border to join the Free French. But half of these Sunni Muslims, originally from the Caucasus, went back.
A Free French Marine in Syria carries a British Bren gun. Having joined de Gaulle to fight the Germans, most of the Free French soldiers had little enthusiasm for combat with other French troops.
A forward artillery observer uses a captured periscope in Lebanon’s rocky terrain, where snipers on both sides made it pay to keep your head down.
In a shallow tributary of the Litani a Cheshire Yeomanry patrol waters their horses. Much of the hill country in Lebanon and Syria was impassable to wheeled or tracked vehicles and both sides used horsed cavalry for reconnaissance.
An officer examines one of the few French Renault-35 two-man tanks to be captured intact. Their thick armour made them impervious to Boys anti-tank rifles and they wreaked havoc among General Jumbo Wilson’s infantry.
Locals wearing fezzes and smoking hookah water pipes in a pavement café in the port of Sidon must have seemed like something from The Arabian Nights for these Australian
troops, almost certainly away from home for the first time.
On the first day of the Syrian campaign an Australian wounded in the right hand during the fighting to capture the customs and police post at Khirbe gets a light for his cigarette.
Under fire amidst the ancient ruins of Palmyra, British infantry leap from their slow-moving Bren gun carrier and run for cover.
The fighter aces Pierre Le Gloan (RIGHT) and the Australian Peter Turnbull (LEFT) were the top scorers of the Syrian campaign. Le Gloan, flying a Dewoitine 520, added 7 British aircraft to the 4 German and 7 Italian planes he had downed in 1940. Turnbull’s American-built Tomahawk accounted for at least 4 French machines. Both were killed later in the war, by which time they were flying on the same side.
German airfields in occupied Greece were made available to Vichy French as refuelling stops on the way to Syria. This Dewoitine fighter with French and Luftwaffe personnel standing around it was probably in Salonika.
Australian infantry advancing across some of Lebanon’s flatter terrain.
A hostage comes home. On 10 September 1941, two months after the Syria ceasefire, a pleased-looking Général Henri Dentz inspects a guard of honour of French Arab troops at Marseille. The British had held Dentz and other senior officers until all the British prisoners sent to France through Greece had been returned.
As France entered its sixth month of defeat and occupation Pétain, like Weygand, had to concede that the British had done much better than he had ever imagined they would. The Channel, Churchill and the RAF had denied Hitler his chance to complete his victory in 1940. The winter weather meant that there was no chance of mounting an invasion until the spring of 1941 and by then the Americans would have made sure the British were even stronger. Admittedly, air raids like the one on Coventry, turned into another Guernica by British propaganda despite its munition factories, sometimes took their toll on morale as well as lives; but as yet there had been no reports of the kind of mass panic that had emptied Paris before a bomb had fallen or a German soldier set foot there.
When Pétain told Murphy that a British victory was better for France than Germany it was no more than the truth. An outright British victory would mean a liberated France. Unfortunately, there seemed little chance of a 1918–style German defeat even if the pro-British Roosevelt, who had just enjoyed a landslide victory over the isolationist Wendell Wilkie, did bring America into the war. A separate Anglo-German peace was more likely. In July the English had turned down Hitler’s olive branch and for six months withstood the worst he could throw at them and survived. Now they could expect much more favourable terms if they cared to start negotiating.
But the Americans assured Pétain that the illogical Churchill – a drunk with the luck of the devil – was sincere when he said England would never make any kind of peace with Hitler. So they were in for a long war with France, a surrendered non-belligerent, languishing in its painful armistice limbo. Laval would argue that this was all the more reason to take the Montoire route and get closer to Germany before it was too late. But Pétain did not want any more photographs with Hitler. Nor did he want any more of Laval blowing smoke in his face while he announced that he had just done something he should not have done without consulting him first. What the maréchal wanted was to bide his time and see how much he could trade selected acts of collaboration for the release of more of their prisoners. Bringing the boys back home would be another Verdun.
Chapter Twelve
Some Frenchmen were already coming home. These were the last of the overwhelming majority of officers and men, army and navy, who had found themselves in England when the armistice was signed and refused to join de Gaulle. On 21 November 1940 what would turn out to be the penultimate repatriation was about to take place from Liverpool docks, already bombed almost 300 times since the war began. Recent collateral damage included the Anglican cathedral and Walton Jail where twenty-two convicts had died.
Before they embarked on the French ship Djenné the returnees were frisked by military police while customs officers searched luggage for anything they considered might be of use to the enemy or in some way contravened Britain’s economic blockade on France. Some of this luggage belonged to Lieutenant Bouillaut and his friend Dr Le Nistour who had started the shooting on the Surcouf and between them killed the officers Sprague and Griffiths and Leading Seaman Webb.
Both received special attention from a Lieutenant Alders Kaye whom Le Nistour describes as ‘the English political officer’. Kaye was one of the French speakers on the staff of Rear Admiral Geoffrey Watkins, a highly decorated 1914–18 submarine captain, who was the senior British liaison officer to all the French naval forces. Both the French officers had met Kaye before and their dislike was evidently mutual.
Le Nistour and Kaye watched as the customs officers emptied his suitcases and shook carefully folded clothes, ‘without finding anything’. Then Kaye motioned to a couple of military policemen and they all walked into a side office where the doctor was asked to strip to his underwear.
I felt insulted, a young woman was present. Kaye accused me of having done everything ‘except practise medicine’ in England. He claimed to have proof of my anti-British and anti-Gaullist activities. Then he pretended to reflect on the seriousness of my case and decided that he lacked sufficient authority to deal with me. Whilst awaiting orders about me he had me locked up for an hour in an adjacent building.
Le Nistour was eventually allowed to board the Djenné after he agreed to sign a statement that the Surcouf’s crew had not been treated as prisoners of war or in any way mistreated during their four months in England. ‘I told Kaye that this blackmail had no value but he was happy and smiled. I crossed the gangplank with a sigh of relief.’
But, as it turned out, Kaye had by no means finished with the men who started the shooting. Bouillaut was already aboard and had been for over an hour. He had experienced no trouble with the customs and military police searches. Before leaving his last internment camp on the Isle of Man he had taken the precaution of distributing among some of the other officers copies of his account of the Surcouf gunfight, written in hospital while recovering from his wounds, so that at least one would get through and he would not have to write it again from a more faded memory. When young Enseigne de vaisseau Massicot was relieved of his copy Bouillaut was not unduly concerned. ‘We were all convinced that the British Admiralty knew perfectly well what had happened and had decided not to bother with me.’
This may well have been the case until first Kaye, then Admiral Watkins, read in black and white Bouillaut’s full and frank account of his decision to open fire and exactly how he did it. ‘No order to resist by force of arms had been given to me but this situation was one of those where one cannot wait for orders … I took a pace forward and shot at Commander Sprague, Lieutenant Commander Griffiths, the two English sailors and then again on their officers …’ And perhaps most damning of all, the quote from Lieutenant de vaisseau Crescent, the man whose life he believed he was saving: ‘I believe you were very wrong to have done that.’ As far as Kaye and Watkins were concerned the document was nothing less than a confession to murder.
Bouillaut was promptly removed from the Djenné and lodged in a cell in a military detention centre where the only personal possessions he was allowed to keep on him were his pipe and a photograph of the wife he thought he was about to go home to. Dinner was ‘a little cheese and some bread’.
The next morning I was visited by Lieutenant Kaye who asked me to confirm my identity and the fact that I had killed Commander Sprague and Lieutenant-Commander Griffiths. He added that the competent authorities would at some time let me know the fate awaiting me. I immediately wrote several protest letters: to Winston Churchill, to Admiral Sir Dunbar-Nasmith [the Commander Western Approaches at Plymouth who had planned the boarding of the French ships], in which I said that my behaviour on the Surcouf was only a reaction to the threats of the English officers and that, in my place, any honourable
officer would have done the same had he been able to … and finally I protested that the measures taken against me certainly did not accord with my being an officer. Then I wrote to the French Consul-General in London [the British had allowed him to remain as another conduit to Vichy] so that he could inform our government. I asked my jailers to send off these letters though I had few illusions of the fate that awaited them.
The food got a little better though sleep was difficult because at night he was kept awake by various air-raid noises, some loud and quite close. An old soldier took him out for solitary bouts of exercise in the yard and, according to his prisoner, once whispered, ‘Any officer would have behaved like you, sir.’
Rear Admiral Watkins disagreed. As a submariner himself he felt a special affinity for this later generation already suffering enough casualties at Axis hands without having to deal with bloody-minded Frenchmen. Almost all the Surcouf boarding party, including Lieutenant Talbot who had found the way in through the conning tower escape hatch, were now dead: killed off the Norwegian coast the following month in the submarine Thames. Watkins would have almost certainly known both the officers Bouillaut killed and been unimpressed by claims that French honour was at stake. Now he had the opportunity to make him sweat it out a little: contemplate the awful majesty of British justice and a leather-lined noose at dawn.
