The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean 1935–1949. Simon Ball

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СКАЧАТЬ refused to attack the French in Alexandria. The French at Oran were in the French empire; any damage caused would be to French or Algerian lives and property. The French at Alexandria were deep within British ground; any damage caused would be to British or Egyptian lives. The Force de Raid was much more powerful than Force X. At its core lay two of the most impressive vessels in any navy, the fast battleships Dunkerque and Strasbourg. These modern, rakish vessels, completed only in the late 1930s, had claim to be the most powerful warships in the Mediterranean. The key variable, however, was that Cunningham was in a position to say no, whereas Somerville had little choice.

      It would have been hard to find a more reluctant warrior than Somerville. Upon reaching Gibraltar, all the senior officers on the Rock convened to agree that they did not wish to engage the French. Somerville was forced to admit, however, that no such sentiments existed on the lower decks of his ships, the killing didn’t worry the sailors in the least, ‘as “they never ’ad no use for them French bastards” ’. ²⁷ The gloom of the senior officers was lightened only by their firm conviction that ‘the French collapse was so complete and the will to fight so entirely extinguished, that it seems highly improbable that the French would, in the last resort, resist by force’. In this ideal world the French would agree, if not to hand the ships over to Britain, then at least to flee to the West Indies or scuttle the things and have done with the whole affair. All that would be needed would be a British show of force off the coast of Algeria. The naval officers had seriously misread their new enemies. When Captain ‘Hooky’ Holland entered Mers el-Kébir harbour with British terms, he was barely able to persuade Amiral Atlantique to see him. His desperate pleas to avoid bloodshed were to no avail. His motorboat pulled away from the French flagship Dunkerque less than half an hour before the British opened fire and only thirty-two minutes before the old French battleship Bretagne exploded, killing nearly all the crew. Holland’s small boat was picked up bobbing outside the harbour after the battle. ²⁸

      As Somerville himself admitted, his assumption that he would not have to fight–that the French would abandon their vessels if he opened fire–led him to botch the battle. Although the British gunfire hit the Dunkerque, it missed the Strasbourg entirely. She was able to cast off from the middle of the harbour, escape from the anchorage and head off east before Somerville could react. By the time Force H swung around and gave chase, one of the fastest battleships in the world had a 25-mile head start and was beyond recall. Strasbourg made her way, unmolested, across the Mediterranean to berth with the rest of the French fleet in Toulon. ‘I’m somewhat appalled by my apparent lack of foresight,’ Somerville confided in his wife,‘I never expected for one single moment that they would attempt to take their ships out of harbour under such conditions.’ ²⁹

      The situation in Alexandria was very different. Cunningham had no intention of attacking his erstwhile allies. He and René Godfroy, the officer commanding Force X, had most cordial relations, Cunningham went so far as to describe them as ‘exceptionally friendly’. The French had accepted Cunninghams refusal to allow Force X to sail for Beirut with good grace. ³⁰ Cunningham even believed that he would be able to talk Godfroy away from his allegiance to Darlan. ³¹ That hope soon faded but Godfroy had enough trust in Cunningham that, on the same day as Somerville was sinking his compatriots in Algeria, he was willing to pinnace across the harbour to the British flagship, Warspite, to continue their conversation. ³² Their talks went on long into the night, as Cunningham tried to talk Godfroy into handing over his ships. Just past midnight on the day of Mers el-Kébir he conceded: ‘I have failed.’ Despite London’s demands for action, however, he stuck to the view that a battle should be avoided, ‘at almost any cost’. ³³ If Godfroy discharged all his fuel into the harbour, thus rendering his ships unable to leave, Cunningham gave his word that his ships would remain unmolested. ³⁴ Knowing that he could do no better, Godfroy accepted. It was a strange situation. The French squadron lay alongside the British, entirely reliant on them for water and provisions, but simmering with hostility. The officers adopted an attitude of super-patriotism. Each day the chaplains prayed for Pétain, equating him with the hammer of the English, Saint Joan. Officers prefaced all their remarks with reference to the Marshal’s sayings, as if that ended any argument. Only one senior member of Force X defected to the British. ³⁵

      The battle in the west, and the non-battle in the east, cast a pall over the Mediterranean for the rest of the year. Somerville’s judgement that ‘it was the biggest political blunder of modern times and I imagine will rouse the world against us’ was too tinged with emotion to be entirely convincing. ³⁶ The British action did, after all, win many admirers: Ciano and Cavagnari, for instance, were ‘disturbed’ at such proof that ‘the fighting spirit of the Royal Navy is quite alive, and still has the aggressive ruthlessness of the captains and pirates of the seventeenth century’. ³⁷

      The naval commanders in the Mediterranean had to be alive to the possibility that France could turn on them at any minute. In particular they feared that whilst they were engaged with the Italians, the French would run the Straits of Gibraltar. On 11 September 1940 their fears were realized when a French cruiser force sailed through the Straits heading for Casablanca. ³⁸ French aircraft bombed Gibraltar from their North African airfields. Darlan assembled naval officers in their newly established capital at Vichy to assure them that ‘a state of war exists with Britain’ and ‘this is not finished’. ³⁹ The Mediterranean cruiser force turned an Anglo-Gaullist attempt to seize Dakar in West Africa into a fiasco. The air raids continued in response to each new British ‘outrage’. In September 1940 French bombers gave Force H ‘an absolute plastering’ in Gibraltar harbour. ⁴⁰ The result, Somerville recorded, was that British warships were steaming around the Mediterranean in ‘a ghastly muddle’. ‘We simply don’t know where we are or who we are supposed to be fighting.’ The Germans and Italians, he feared, ‘must be chuckling with joy. ⁴¹

      The Germans were chuckling rather harder than the Italians. Mussolini had proved a master of twitting the British in peace time, but his skills were wasted in war. He had declared war on France expecting easy gains. None had been won on the battlefield–embarrassingly French troops had to maintain their supposed conquerors in the small area the Italians had occupied before the Armistice. The victorious Germans appeared to have a cosier relationship with their defeated enemies than their allies. If the French managed to slip into the ‘anti-British camp’, Italy might be ‘defrauded of our booty’. Four days after Mers el-Kébir, with the crisis still smouldering, Ciano hung up his bomber boots and headed for Berlin. It was not a successful visit. There was an odd atmosphere, jovial to the point of edginess, not least because Ciano knew that the Germans had captured documents from the French in which he personally had described them most unflatteringly Ciano spoke to Hitler, ‘as if the war was already definitively won’. The Italian press was full of officially planted stories of his expected success. This was the meeting in which Italy would finally claim absolute dominance in the Mediterranean basin, its rightful ‘living space’. ⁴² Ciano’s demands tumbled out: ‘Nice, Corsica and Malta would be annexed to Italy, which would also have assumed a protectorate over Tunisia and the better part of Algeria’. The Germans around Hitler shifted between embarrassment and amusement СКАЧАТЬ