England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Laborde’s slogan-shouting dissidents were more cause for concern and had every reason not to feel alone. Following the Axis takeover of the Tunisian ports, General Georges Barré, the French Army commander in Tunisia, had rallied to Darlan and the Allies. So had Governor Boisson in Dakar, bringing with him his huge West African territories. Isolated French Somaliland on the Red Sea, where in Djibouti Governor Pierre Nouailhetas would not surrender until shortly before Christmas after 101 days of British blockade, was the only French African colony that remained loyal to Vichy. In Algiers Général Giraud, who Darlan had put in charge of all the French military in North Africa just as the Allies had always wanted, declared in the name of the maréchal that as soon as Tunisia was finished he would attend to the liberation of metropolitan France.

  It was four days after Boisson’s defection and well before first light when, on Friday, 27 November, the first tanks finally rolled downhill towards the port at Toulon. At 4.30 a.m. Krug von Nidda, who had been waiting in his car outside the front door of Laval’s home at Châteldon refusing to come in until precisely that hour, handed to the prime minister a copy of Hitler’s second letter to Pétain in sixteen days. (There seems to have been a convention that the old gentleman himself should not be disturbed at these ungodly hours.) It got quickly to the point. ‘French generals and admirals have broken their word of honour by their intention to open to the Anglo-Jewish warmongers metropolitan France as well as North Africa. I have given orders to occupy Toulon at once and prevent the ships from leaving port or to destroy them.’

  Operation Lila promised the ships to Italy, which had lost so many of its own in their Mediterranean campaign against the British. Hitler was uninterested in acquiring more surface vessels. Soon the defeat of the battleship Hipper and destroyers by a Royal Navy escort that stopped her sinking any of an important Russian-bound convoy would result in Raeder being replaced by the U-boat supremo Doenitz. In any case Hitler expected the French to scuttle their fleet, a choice he wished they had made in 1940, though this was among many secrets he never shared with Mussolini. ‘I fear the French fleet will not come to us intact,’ he wrote to Il Duce when he notified him that Operation Lila was about to take place. ‘But if this does happen Italy is the only lawful possessor.’

  As it happened, the Germans very nearly pulled it off. Despite the blatant building up of their forces they managed to achieve a large element of surprise. Their first move was to enter the outlying La Valette police post, cut its telephone lines and kidnap one Gendarme Le Moigne who was made to sit on a tank and direct them to Fort LaMalgue where they knew they would find Amiral Marquis. But here things began to go wrong. LaMalgue was a much built upon, rabbit warren of a place, old when Admiral Hood had made it his headquarters during the English occupation of Toulon in 1793. German officers, sometimes deliberately misdirected, got lost stomping around its endless corridors in search of command centres.

  None of this would have mattered had they made it a priority to cut the telephone lines as they had done at La Valette when they picked up Le Moigne. As it was, senior staff officers had the opportunity to alert Laborde on the Strasbourg who, reluctant to believe that von Frappart’s promise had been so casually broken, even had time to call LaMalgue back and check. ‘Hello, yes the Germans are all around me,’ whispered a voice he recognized as belonging to an Amiral Robin. ‘Please don’t call back.’ Then the line to the fort went dead.

  At this point Laborde knew that, unless he immediately gave the order he had always dreaded giving, his ships would soon be flying a different flag. Sabordez la flotte! Sabordez la flotte! It went out by radio, Morse lamp and despatch boat while slowly descending parachute flares, released by a Luftwaffe squadron that had wakened the whole town with its engines, lit up the still darkened harbour. Once the Junkers could see the ships were still there they flew further out to sea to lay magnetic mines a little beyond its entrance in case they tried to make a run for it.

  Without Laborde’s knowledge five submarines did just that. Diesel engines were much faster to start up than the ships’ boilers and, as the Germans came down their quay, they slipped mooring lines and were off. In the dark, their low profiles were difficult targets for small arms and they were soon out of range. The captain of one of them, the Venus, was merely making sure he scuttled his boat in waters deep enough to make her hard to recover. But the other four wanted to join Darlan and persuaded the tug manning the steel anti-submarine net to pull open the gate for them. Two had enough fuel to go directly to Algiers, the Casablanca being the first to arrive on 30 November. The other two put into Barcelona to refuel where they were promptly interned by Franco’s navy though one of them, Glorieux, eventually managed a second escape. Only two surface vessels got to North Africa. One was a tug, possibly the one that opened the gate for the submarines. The other was the Leonor Fresnel, which is usually described as a buoy tender.

  Otherwise every French warship in Toulon did her best to destroy herself just as Gensoul had promised Somerville they would when the war between Britain and France began twenty-eight months ago. It was intended to render them utterly inoperable so it was not just a matter of opening the seacocks and allowing them to settle into the harbour mud. Explosives were attached to most machinery, weaponry, bridges packed with all their navigating tools, engine rooms and fuel tanks. By tampering with the gauges the tanks usually contained far more oil than the Armistice Commission permitted, easily enough to have got them to Algeria if Laborde had been willing to do it. None of the big gun magazines appear to have had charges set, probably because there were fears that not everybody would be able to get off in time, and there were few large explosions. In most cases there appears to have been a sharp series of bangs leading to varying degrees of billowing, black oil smoke followed by a slow subsidence, almost imperceptible at first, until the main decks were well awash.

  Laborde’s flagship, the 8-year old fast battle cruiser Strasbourg that was at the Milhaud jetty, was the first to go. In her engine rooms the splendid Rateau turbines, the machinery that in July 1940 had produced over 30 knots to escape HMS Hood at Mers-el-Kébir, were blown into twisted scrap. Soon, brown harbour water was lapping around their broken blades. Outside, the first Germans had arrived on the quay, a young officer interpreter speaking through a bullhorn and demanding in passable French that they hand over the ship intact. ‘Too late,’ Laborde shouted back. ‘The ship is sinking.’ There was a pause while this was digested. Then the same voice came back: ‘Amiral, my Colonel orders me to say he admires you.’

  Strasbourg’s siren started up, the agreed and appropriate keening signal for mass suicide in the unlikely event that there was a ship’s captain in the Toulon basin who was unaware. Only one man hesitated. Capitaine de vaisseau Amiel commanded the Dunkerque, Strasbourg’s slightly older sister ship and the template of the class, which was the vessel that had been left for dead at Mers-el-Kébir. First she had been crippled by the Hood’s 15-inch shells then holed when a Swordfish’s torpedo detonated a clutch of spilt depth charges from another casualty. Eighteen months later the British had turned a blind eye when the patched-up battle cruiser crept across the Mediterranean and into intensive care at Toulon’s dry dock for the best ship surgery that could be provided in France’s straitened circumstances. After nine months’ work the battle cruiser was still only partly recovered but undoubtedly beginning to bear a greater resemblance to the ship that had once starred at the Spithead review for King George VI’s coronation.

  Amiel demanded confirmation in writing to do the foul thing he was being asked. Then, at Laborde’s prompting, the captain of the cruiser La Galissonnière, which was berthed nearby, assured him he had seen written orders and a tight-lipped Amiel, as he probably always knew he would do, went ahead. Holes in the hull Somerville’s ships and aircraft had made, their temporary dressings ripped out, put the ship down quickly once her dry dock was flooded. The turrets and bridge of the battle cruiser were then destroyed by carefully plac
ed explosives. For good measure Dunkerque’s tomb was sealed by La Galissonnière scuttling herself across the entrance of the battle cruiser’s dock.

  Around the cruiser Foch there was an exchange of fire between tanks and some of the men manning the cruiser’s anti-aircraft guns who were trying to keep the Germans at bay long enough to complete demolitions. There were one or two other incidents like this and perhaps the sailors were mainly firing warning shots. Total German casualties were one man wounded. The French had twelve killed and twenty-six wounded though some of these might have been caught up in their own explosions.

  For the most part the Wehrmacht’s reaction was typified by the colonel who saluted Laborde through his interpreter while the Strasbourg sank at her moorings. In some instances the Germans stood at the end of a gangplank asking politely if they might come aboard and when told they might not remained where they were as the ships sank and fires took hold. Some burnt for several days and were well photographed by RAF reconnaissance. In all, counting tugs and auxilary supply vessels, in the region of 130 ships were put out of action including 3 battle cruisers (Strasbourg, Dunkerque, Provence), the old seaplane tender Commandant Teste, 4 heavy and 3 light cruisers, 16 destroyers, 13 torpedo boats and 15 submarines.

  In Algiers Darlan heard the news while he was in the middle of writing a letter of thanks to Admiral Leahy. Alain had just been flown in a US Air Force plane from Algiers to Rabat in Morocco on the first stage of his journey to the clinic President Roosevelt had founded for the treatment of poliomyelitis at Warm Springs Spa in Georgia. ‘I am just told that part of the French fleet in Toulon has been scuttled,’ he wrote. ‘But fortunately the French Empire still stands.’

  Later that day Darlan made a broadcast that blamed Laborde for failing to save the fleet and called upon Frenchmen to ‘crush Germany and Italy’. It was a most extraordinary volte-face from a man who not so long ago had been assuring Hitler that Britain was always his traditional enemy.

  Germany’s aim is now clear. That is to wipe out France. We shall have no mercy for all those who, deliberately or not, serve the designs of our eternal enemy. No one of us must any longer hesitate to do his duty which is to crush Germany and Italy and liberate the country. French Africa is the only place in the world where our flag flies freely, where the army has its weapons, the navy flies its ensign and the air force uses its wings. We are the sole hope of France, let us show ourselves worthy of her.

  It was a blatant attempt to put himself on at least an equal footing to de Gaulle and possibly supplant him altogether. In his letter to Leahy Darlan had emphasized that only he could have brought North and West Africa over to the Allies. ‘I certainly could not have done it had I been a “dissident”. I think that, when time has passed, all those differences between Frenchmen will be smoothed down, but for the time being the dissidents and ourselves must follow parallel roads, ignoring each other. Besides, many Frenchmen were Gaullists only from hatred of the Germans and not because they felt sympathetic to that movement’s leader.’

  In London de Gaulle bided his time, predicting: ‘Soon the retching will begin.’ He was right. Before the month was out Darlan’s usefulness was coming towards an end and he knew it. ‘People are saying I am but a lemon which the Americans will drop after it is crushed,’ he protested to Mark Clark on 23 November. Clark showed the letter to Eisenhower who had just moved his headquarters to Algiers from Gibraltar. Ike told the amiral it would help if he had ‘an enlightened liberal government in action’. But enlightened liberals were about as likely to join a Darlan-led government as dance the hokey cokey with him.

  Once Darlan had arranged the ceasefire that had allowed the Allies to consolidate their presence in French North Africa there was little else he had to offer. He had failed to deliver the fleet or keep the Axis out of Tunisia’s ports until Anderson’s British spearhead had reached them with the result that a gruelling campaign had now begun there. Instead ‘the Little Fellow’, as Clark had taken to calling him, had become an enormous embarrassment, a political hot potato.

  Initially, realpolitik dictated that Churchill and Roosevelt greet Darlan’s presence in French North Africa with open arms, a welcome alternative to the disappointing Giraud. But from the beginning there was considerable indignation over this in both Britain and America where an almost unanimous press made sure it stayed that way. Why, they asked, were the Allies making deals with a man who for the last two years had been vilified as a Nazi stooge? Especially one who was still surrounded by all the trappings of a Fascist state including anti-Semitic by-laws and strutting militias such as Service d’Ordre de la Légion. The New Yorker’s A.J. Liebling, a Francophile, took a look at Oran’s café society.

  Members of uniformed fascist organisations had left the city or at least hidden their sturm duds when the Americans marched in. They had sniped at our people all through the battle and might have legitimately expected to have been backed against a wall and shot. But in a couple of weeks they had reappeared in the cafés wearing their capes, monocles and high boots and talking loudly about the day of revenge, not against the Germans but us … They had not really collaborated with the Nazis: the Nazis had come along belatedly and collaborated with them.

  Churchill, as he readily admitted, had been ‘somewhat contemptuous’ of this criticism of the Darlan deal, finding it small-minded considering the Allied lives it had saved and the gains a successful Operation Torch had brought so close on the heels of the victory at El Alamein. Then he changed his mind. ‘I understood what was troubling them and felt it myself.’ He wrote to Roosevelt about it.

  We must not overlook the serious political injury which may be done to our cause, not only in France, by the feeling that we are ready to make terms with local Quislings. Darlan has an odious record. It is he who has inculcated in the French Navy its malignant disposition by promoting his creatures to command. It is but yesterday that French sailors were sent to their death against your line of battle at Casablanca and now, for the sake of power and office, Darlan plays the turncoat.

  The President was of the same opinion and included in his reply a statement he had just made at a press conference emphasizing that ‘the present arrangement in North and West Africa is only a temporary expedient justified by the stress of battle’.

  It seems that other stresses now dictated that the Anglo-Americans dump Darlan.

  But as Christmas 1942 approached Darlan was still in place though, thanks to mild Allied pressure, some improvements had been made. The bully boys in the high boots were not quite as blatant, a few of the more prominent leftists and Gaullists picked up after the coup for which the Americans had arrived too late had at last been released from detention. Others had not. ‘Jews and Frenchmen who had publicly expressed satisfaction at our landing were now serving jail sentences for their bad taste,’ reported Liebling. L’Oran Républicain, voice of the Popular Front, had kept going through two years of Pétainist censorship with intriguing white spaces bleached in its pages. Now its editor was incensed to find that, while the Allies got on with their war in Tunisia, the same censor was still able to remove a pro-American editorial with impunity.

  Nonetheless, the old certainties were crumbling. Algiers, its economy improved by a large army’s rear echelons, had become a febrile place, gently smouldering on rekindled French politics, a dormant volcano coming back to life. There were four main factions. These were the Darlanists, the Gaullists, the Communists and the Monarchists plotting to restore the Orléanist dynasty by putting Henri, Count of Paris, on the throne. In Algeria the Gaullists and the Monarchists, the latter being well financed though without popular support, had a fragile alliance. Despite this the Communists were making headway by exploiting fears that the Anglo-American accommodation with Darlan meant there was little point in supporting the Gaullists who were obviously being sidelined. This was also happening in France itself where the Communists were vying for control of the Resistance and, exactly as Churchill had feared, winning recru
its with the argument that London and Washington had gone to bed with a Quisling.

  The European quarters of Algiers and Oran were awash with small arms and there were plenty of young men willing to use them. All the parties had their own gunmen. Some of them were becoming well trained too. Both the Special Operations Executive and America’s Office of Strategic Services were recruiting French speakers for operations in Tunisia, the south of France and Corsica. Several training schools had been set up. The OSS had established one on the coast east of Algiers at the village of Ain Taya run by Carleton S. Coon, a portly Harvard anthropologist who was good with guns and explosives.

  Among Coon’s pupils was Fernand Bonnier who had been born in Algiers where his father was a well-known colon journalist who wrote for the Oran Républicain. Bonnier, who was now 20, had been at the Lycée Stanislas in Paris when France surrendered. In 1940 he demonstrated at the first 11 November remembrance day of the occupation when, to indicate their sympathies, students turned up at the Arc de Triomphe carrying fishing rods which in French are called gaulles. The following year he smuggled himself across the demarcation line and into Vichy France where in Marseilles he was eventually able to find passage on a boat home to Algiers.

  But once there it was not the Gaullists he fell in with but the Monarchists who had sponsored several young men to attend OSS and SOE ‘finishing schools’ such as the one at Ain Taya. Bonnier always appears to have been something of a loner. A fellow pupil at the Normandy boarding school he attended before he went to Paris recalled that he was an unpopular boy with attention-seeking ways including suicide attempts of dubious authenticity. At some point, perhaps when he fell in with the Monarchists, Bonnier began to use the suffixation ‘de la Chapelle’, an aristocratic affectation indicating his father’s birthplace in the south of France.