CHAPTER 16

AN ICY RUTHLESSNESS










The French sailors had no time to get angry and barely a moment to prepare their souls for the end. When the bombardment began at 5.54 p.m. on 3 July 1940 the dominant feeling was surely one of total disbelief. Those were British ships—the very ones they had cheered when they arrived in the morning. They were British sailors; allies—the same people they had been out with on shore leave in Gibraltar, painting the town red.

They were meant to be friends, for God’s sake—and yet for ten minutes those friends sent down a rain of death: a shelling that is still recognised as one of the most concentrated big-gun naval barrages in history. Out of the 15-inch muzzles of HMS Hood—then the largest battleship ever built—came the first salvo, and at 2,500 mph those three-quarter-ton projectiles described their elegant arcs across the azure sky.

The light was ideal. The targets were motionless. The conditions were altogether perfect. Then the other British ships joined in, and the explosions became so loud that the Frenchmen who survived reported a bleeding from their ears. HMS Valiant fired her guns, along with HMS Resolution.

The gunners toiled in the heat, sweat running down their half-naked forms, firing and firing until the colossal steel tubes were red hot. Soon they were getting their range, starting to find the French ships nicely. Since the mouth of the harbour had just been mined by British planes, there was nothing the French could do. As one British sailor said many years later, it was like ‘shooting fish in a barrel’.

On the French side, witnesses spoke of sheets of flame, and balls of fire landing in the sea; of men with their heads missing, and men so badly burned or maimed that they called to their colleagues with the terrifying plea of ‘achève-moi!’: finish me off! Then a British shell hit the magazine of France’s most advanced warship, the Bretagne—and the noise was like the death of Krakatoa.

A mushroom cloud rose over the harbour and within minutes the Bretagne had capsized. Some of her crew leapt into the evil black sea, bubbling like chip fat, where they held their breath and swam underwater to escape the burning oil. Most of the complement was drowned.

Altogether the British shot 150 shells into the fortified harbour at Mers-el-Kébir, near the Algerian town of Oran, on that cloudless day in 1940. By the time their guns fell silent, five French ships were crippled and one destroyed; and 1,297 French seamen had been killed. A massacre had taken place; and there were plenty who were willing to call it a war crime.

Across France there was a sense of indignation, a hatred that the Nazi propaganda machine scarcely needed to fan. For the first time since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the British had fired on the French and with murderous intent. Posters were circulated everywhere of a French sailor drowning amid the inferno, or of the British war leader as a bloodthirsty Moloch. Relations between London and the new Vichy regime were ended, and to this day the memory of Mers-el-Kébir is so toxic as to be taboo in discussions between Britain and France.

If it had been left to him, said Admiral James Somerville, he would never have given the order. The British sailors were sick at heart as they saw what they had done; incredulous that these were really their instructions. Generations of French schoolchildren have been taught that there was one man who decreed that massacre and whose busy fingers wrote out that murderous ultimatum. Those teachers are right.

When Churchill rose to explain his actions the next day in the House of Commons, he expected to be assailed on every side. He had unleashed the most lethal modern weaponry on effectively defenceless targets—and on sailors with whom Britain was not at war.

As he later admitted, he felt ‘ashamed’ as he stood up to speak, before a packed Chamber. His typed notes trembled in his hands. He gave a full account of the events that led up to the disaster. He wound up by saying that he would leave the judgement of his actions to Parliament. ‘I leave it also to the nation, and to the United States. I leave it to the world and to history.’

With this he sat down; and something peculiar happened. To his surprise, there was no disapproving silence. On the contrary, they were cheering. They were on their feet and waving their Order Papers in scenes of jubilation such as the Commons had not seen for years. His cabinet colleagues were clustering around and clapping him on the back—in what seems to us a bizarre and tasteless response to the deaths of almost 1,300 Frenchmen.

Amid the rejoicing sat Churchill, a hunched figure in his black jacket and striped grey trousers, with his chin in his hands and tears flowing down his cheeks.

To understand this tragedy, you must appreciate how much Churchill loved France. As his doctor Charles Moran once observed, ‘France is civilization.’

He had grown up in France’s belle époque; Paris was the city where his parents chose to get married, the city of lights and infinite diversions, the place he went to spend his gambling winnings—on books and ‘in other directions’. Even for an Englishman as patriotic as Winston Churchill there was no shame in acknowledging the superiority of the French quality of life: the wine, the food, the cheese; the elegance of the chateaux; the fun and style of the casinos; the pleasure of bathing on the Côte d’Azur, and of trying to capture its outstanding natural beauty in paint. French was the only foreign language in which he even attempted to make himself understood. But it went deeper than that.

Churchill believed in the greatness of France, and it came as a terrible shock, in the opening weeks of his premiership, to see the humiliation of the army that had once been led by Napoleon, the man whose bust reposed on his desk. He had done everything in his power to keep France in the war, to put some lead in the pencil of the French politicians and generals. As the news got worse and worse, he flew out to France himself—on four occasions—where he tried to revivify the despondent French leadership with his manful Franglais. He risked his life just to get there.

On one occasion he was flying back in his Flamingo when the pilot had to dive suddenly to avoid two German planes that were strafing fishing boats near Le Havre. That was on 12 June—and thirty-six hours later the French telephoned again, this time to demand an urgent meeting at Tours. He turned up at Hendon to find that the weather was too bad for take-off.

‘To hell with that,’ said the sixty-five-year-old aviator. ‘I’m going, whatever happens. This is too serious a situation to bother about the weather.’ They duly arrived at Tours in a thunderstorm—a pretty hairy experience even today, and which must have been unnerving for Beaverbrook and Halifax, who had come with him on the mission.

The runway had been freshly cratered by the Germans, and there were some French ground crew lounging around who had no idea who they were. Churchill had to explain that he was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and that he needed a ‘voiture’.

When they got to the prefecture they found that there still didn’t seem to be a welcoming party; still no one recognised them. They wandered around the corridors until eventually the British delegation were taken to a nearby restaurant for cold chicken and cheese. Poor old Halifax: I don’t suppose it was his style of diplomacy.

At last the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, turned up, and asked miserably whether Britain would release France from her obligations, and allow her to surrender. Churchill tried one last time to apply his patent morale-boosting electro-convulsive Franglais therapy to the recumbent French. There was no response.

The patient had expired; and on 14 June the Germans were goose-stepping down the Champs-Élysées. Marshal Pétain—hollow eyed, snaggle toothed and utterly defeatist—was in charge. The capitulation was complete; the French had passed up the chance to fight on from North Africa, and the British were now alarmed about what they would do next, and in particular about what would happen to the French fleet.

This was the second biggest in Europe after the Royal Navy, bigger than the German Kriegsmarine. Some of the French ships were state-of-the-art, better equipped even than the British vessels. If they fell into German hands they could be lethal to British interests. And what, frankly, could stop them falling into German hands? Everyone had seen the speed with which the Germans had overwhelmed the Maginot Line. Nowhere was safe from the panzers.

If Britain was to fight on, Churchill had to eliminate the risk those French ships embodied. And there was a further consideration. If Britain was credibly to fight on he had to show to the world that the country he led was truly made of fighting stuff; that Britain would do whatever it took to win. This was crucial, because there were sceptics at home and abroad.

Remember how frail his position still was, how distrusted he was by the Tory Party. The Leader of the Labour Opposition, George Lansbury, had resigned because he objected to war, and there were plenty of others who took the same view on both sides of the House. The Lords was full of Stilton-eating surrender monkeys—arch-appeasers such as Lord Brocket, the Earl of Londonderry, Lord Ponsonby, the Earl of Danby, as well as Bendor, the Duke of Westminster, a flamboyant and charming personality who said that ‘the war was part of a Jewish and Masonic plot’. Those were the days when Tory prime ministers had to pay more attention to the views of dukes and earls.

These would-be quislings were not alone. Rab Butler, then a junior Foreign Office minister, was caught telling a Swedish diplomat that he thought Britain should do a deal—if Hitler offered the right terms. Even Churchill’s buddy and supposed ally Beaverbrook was in favour of a negotiated peace. The city was full—as it always is—of people who preferred to make money than go to war.

There were sceptics in the ranks of his own closest officials; perhaps not surprisingly, since they had all until recently been serving Neville Chamberlain. His Private Secretary, Eric Seal, muttered about his boss and his ‘blasted rhetoric’, and indeed he was among the few who remained immune to the new Prime Minister’s charm (‘fetch Seal from his ice floes’, Churchill would say).

Worse still, there were doubters among the most important audience of all—in the White House and on Capitol Hill. The American electorate opposed involvement in the war by a huge majority—thirteen to one, according to one poll. President Roosevelt had promised that he would not ‘entangle’ America in any European conflict, and he knew that if he broke that promise he would be punished at the presidential elections in November that year.

These days there are many conservative American politicians who ritually denounce Neville Chamberlain, and his spaghetti-like refusal to stand up to Hitler. The whole notion of appeasement has become a kind of cuss-word in American politics—and reasonably so. But it is worth remembering that in May and June of 1940, when Britain stood alone against what was by then well known to be a racist and anti-Semitic tyranny, there were some senators of the United States who did not exactly bust a gut to help; and certainly not immediately.

The US Secretary for War was an ardent isolationist called Harry Woodring, who spent the days between 23 May and 3 June deliberately delaying the shipment to Britain of war material that had already been condemned as surplus. He insisted that the goods must be properly advertised, so that anyone could buy them before they were sold to the British. This was while British soldiers were dying on the beaches of Dunkirk, in the biggest military disaster of the last 100 years.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee blocked the sale of ships and planes; the War Department refused to hand over some bombs the poor French had already paid for; and a senator called David Walsh managed to scupper a deal by which Britain was to buy twenty motor torpedo boats: useful things to have, you might have thought, if you were facing the prospect of a seaborne invasion by the Nazis.

Other Americans, of course, were far more sympathetic. They included much of the media and the President himself. But Roosevelt was limited in what he could do by the terms of the Neutrality Act, and by the general climate of the times. He also hesitated by reason of simple prudence. On 15 May—barely a week after taking the reins—Churchill sent him a letter in which he requested military help, in the form of some antiquated American destroyers.

This appeal was not perhaps phrased as judiciously as it might have been. He begged, he pleaded for the destroyers, and he concluded with a veiled threat: that if Britain fell, then there would be nothing to stop Hitler expropriating the entire British navy, and using those ships against the United States herself. In this first substantive exchange of that pivotal relationship, Churchill failed to imagine how his correspondent might react.

Roosevelt took one look at this communication, and concluded from its note of wheedling and blustering desperation that perhaps Britain might indeed be about to go the way of every other European country; in which case what on earth was the point of sending some destroyers, whose guns could simply be turned back on the USA?

Churchill had inadvertently made a point against himself; he had excited and not allayed the anxiety in Washington about a British collapse. Then there was one other international observer who was known to have his doubts about Britain, and her ability to fight on: and that was Admiral François Darlan of the French fleet.

This Darlan was a prickly customer, who had become so enraged at what he saw as the inadequacies of Britain’s assistance to France that he became positively Anglophobe. At one stage he had to be calmed down, and reminded that he was fighting the Boche and not the rosbifs. He had met Churchill during those ghastly funereal encounters in early June, and he had assured him that the French fleet would not fall into German hands. But what trust could possibly be placed in the word of Darlan?

He might well be an honourable man; he might believe it was unthinkable that his fleet should be used by the Germans—but then plenty of unthinkable things had already taken place. As long as the fleet was within German reach, there seemed little to stop those boats eventually flying a Nazi flag. That was not a risk that Churchill thought he could run.

Some historians have been strongly critical of Churchill’s behaviour. In a fascinating study, Richard Lamb has argued that he was far too brutal and impetuous; that more time should have been given to his admirals to sort it out with the French; that Churchill sanitised the official history after the war—exploiting the fact that he was Prime Minister again in 1951—and effectively stifled criticism of his ‘butchery’.

What is certainly true is that Churchill was in charge of the whole process, driving events like a bulldozer. As soon as France had fallen, he became obsessed with the risk posed by those sleek, fast, modern French ships. In the War Cabinet on 22 June he noted the qualities of the Richelieu and the Jean Bart and others. They should be bombed, he urged, or they must be penned in their harbours by British mines. Their captains should surrender or be treated as traitors.

Halifax led the rest of the cabinet in trying to cool him down. ‘All efforts must be made to make the parleys a success,’ he said; but two days later Churchill was at it again. The armistice had come into effect. France was out of the war. What were we going to do about those damn ships?

Now the naval chiefs joined the cabinet in opposing violence against the French. Even the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, normally a Churchill yes-man, said he could not recommend an operation against them.

On Churchill bashed and butted like a bull at a barn door. In Gibraltar the British admirals held a conference, at which every flag officer was invited to give an opinion, as well as all the naval liaison officers from the French ports in North Africa. Was it a good idea to prepare some kind of action against the French fleet?

No, said the experts, the men on the spot; the very threat of force would be ‘disastrous’ and more likely to turn the French against the British. They protested in vain. Churchill trampled their hesitations with autocratic indifference. Lamb argues that at this stage in the war he was virtually a military dictator.

By 1 July the chiefs of staff and the cabinet had been bludgeoned into seeing things the Churchill way. Operation Catapult was launched, to neutralise and if necessary to sink the French fleet. It didn’t matter to Churchill that the French were doing their best to honour what they thought were their commitments. They scuttled ships and submarines in French ports, and the remainder they indeed sailed away from German-occupied France. The Richelieu and twenty-four others sailed from Brest to Morocco; the Jean Bart sailed from St Nazaire; others left Lorient.

In fact the French left not a single vessel in the German-occupied zone—and yet Churchill still felt that ‘at all costs, at all risks, in one way or another we must make sure that the Navy of France did not fall into the wrong hands and then perhaps bring us and others to ruin.’

Before the armistice the British had assured the French that it would be satisfactory if the French fleet were taken to North Africa, or to Toulon, outside the German zone. Now perfidious Albion was again going back on her word.

On 3 July the British task force under James Somerville arrived outside Mers-el-Kébir, and the French sailors were thrilled—thinking they would shortly be together on the high seas, taking the fight to the Germans. Then the British planes appeared in the sky, dropping mines in the harbour mouth. French suspicions grew.

A British envoy was sent to negotiate with the French admiral Marcel Gensoul. At first Gensoul refused to see him, thinking it was beneath his dignity to parley with a mere captain—but Captain ‘Hookie’ Holland managed to hand over the ultimatum from Churchill.

The French were told to scuttle their ships, or sail them either to British ports or to the West Indies; or face the consequences. The day wore on. The tension grew. Hookie Holland bobbed up and down in his lighter, surrounded by French vessels. Finally at 14.42 Gensoul signalled that he was ready to receive the British delegate for ‘honourable discussions’. By 16.15 Holland was on board the French flagship, the Dunkerque, and they began to make progress.

Gensoul showed him orders from Darlan, making it clear that if Germany tried to seize the boats, he should sail to America or scuttle them. ‘If we had known all this before, it would have made all the difference,’ said Holland. Gensoul then went farther: he was willing to disarm all his ships, even though this meant exceeding his instructions. But by then it was too late.

Darlan had sent naval reinforcements; there was no saying when they would arrive. A full-scale battle between the British and the French fleet was in prospect. Churchill sent a short telegram: ‘Settle matters quickly’. The fate of the sailors was sealed. The bombardment began.

As he said later, ‘It was a terrible decision, like taking the life of one’s own child to save the state.’ In its icy logic, Churchill’s decision was also 100 per cent correct.

Whichever way you cut it, the French should have recognised that their ships were now effectively forfeit to the Germans, or at best they were bargaining counters in negotiations with the Nazis. Lamb argues that the Germans merely wanted to ‘control’ the French fleet in the sense of ‘check’ or ‘supervise’—‘control’ as in passport ‘kontrol’.

That is surely implausible. The Germans had captured Paris; they had their boot on the French neck. Ultimately they could have made the French do whatever they wanted with those ships. The French guarantees were worthless, and they should have recognised as much. Darlan and his admirals should have swallowed their pride and abandoned all pretence of autonomy and done what Churchill suggested: sailed to British ports, or to the Caribbean—and if he had done so, Darlan would have been a hero.

It was Churchill’s duty as Prime Minister to remove any threat to his country’s independence; and he was right to be ruthless at Mers-el-Kébir, because the following week there began the Battle of Britain.

THROUGHOUT THAT lovely summer the British craned their necks to watch one of the decisive battles of world history. They watched the destiny of the world written in the vapour trails of the planes that tussled in the skies above southern England. They saw blackened Germans tottering up their garden paths and they found bits of plane on suburban streets.

They watched their RAF protectors as they performed their astonishing aerobatics, sometimes bringing down the enemy, sometimes crashing in dreadful blazes or heaps of tangled metal. Week after week they had a clear sense of what was at stake: that this attack on the RAF was the prelude to a full-scale invasion of Britain. They had every reason to think that they were next on Hitler’s itinerary of conquest.

It is sometimes said that Churchill exaggerated the threat of invasion, to promote national cohesion and get the country behind him. I am not sure that is so. He believed the threat was so imminent in June 1940 that he took to the firing range at Chequers, and began practising with his revolver and his Mannlicher rifle. Every day he would study the tides to work out when the Germans might come.

The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung prophesied on 14 July that London would follow Warsaw, and be reduced to ashes. On 19 July Hitler spoke to the Reichstag and offered Britain a choice between peace and ‘unending suffering and misery’. He drew up the plans: Operation Sea Lion, he called it, a multi-pronged seaborne invasion of the south coast.

If Hitler had won control of the skies and the seas, there is little doubt that he would have gone for it. He had assembled 1,918 barges off the coast of Holland, and if he had been able to convey his force across the Channel, it is hard to see how Britain could have fought on for long. The army had been routed at Dunkirk; there were no fortifications or fall-back positions.

The country had not been successfully invaded for 900 years—and so London was not only the biggest and most sprawling city in Europe (a great fat cow, as Churchill called the capital). It was also the least defended: the only surviving walls and battlements were made by the Romans, and they weren’t in great shape.

Hitler had a giant strategic imperative in attacking Britain: he had to knock out Britain before he went east, and took on Russia. Even in July 1940, the whole shape and dynamics of the war were clear to Winston Churchill—just as he had foreseen the shape of the First World War as well.

‘Hitler must invade or fail. If he fails, he is bound to go east, and fail he will,’ he said at Chequers on 14 July. He saw, with his unerring and pellucid understanding of the big picture, that if Britain could survive, if Britain could hang on—then Hitler would lose, because not even the Nazi war machine could fight on two fronts at once.

It was thanks to Churchill—and at crucial moments, thanks to him alone—that Britain did hang on. It is clear that there was something utterly magical about his leadership that summer. With his poetic and sometimes Shakespearean diction he made people feel noble, exalted—that what they were doing was better and more important than anything they had done before.

He mentally elided ideas of Englishness and freedom, and it helped that the weather was fine, because there is nowhere lovelier than England in June; and perhaps that gentle beauty sharpened the general sentiment he encouraged: that the threat must be repelled, and that this was an island to fight and to die for. He gave the people an image of themselves: as a tiny band of heroes—analogous to the tiny band of RAF pilots—holding out against tyranny and against the odds, the story from Thermopylae to the Defence of Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu war—the eternal and uplifting story of the few against the many.

In this mood of adrenalin-fuelled exhilaration the British indeed accomplished extraordinary things. There is only one period that I can discover in the last 120 years when British manufacturing output overtook Germany’s—and that was the summer of 1940. Britain produced more planes than Germany; and by the autumn they had seen off the Luftwaffe. Goering made the fatal mistake of turning the attention of his fighters and bombers to the towns of Britain, and giving up on Dowding’s airfields.

The Germans might so easily have won. There were some evenings when every plane available to Britain was up in the sky, desperate to hold them off. And if Goering had controlled the skies, then that invasion fleet could have made an untroubled crossing of the Channel; and that armada would have been all the more frightening and lethal—and Hitler’s confidence would have been all the greater—for the addition of those French warships.

The German fleet had been badly knocked about in the Norwegian campaign; with the addition of the French, they might have been invincible. What Churchill did at Mers-el-Kébir was indeed butchery, but it was necessary. It was the chilling and calculated act of a skull-piling warlord from the steppes of central Asia.

But that is what he was: a warlord. He was leading and directing military action in a way that is unthinkable for a modern democratic politician. He had done his best for France, right up until the capitulation and beyond; he had made his generals commit men and material to the battle long after it was obvious that the game was up—indeed, he is blamed for needlessly throwing away the 51st Highland Division, many of whom were killed or captured, and for wasting time and energy by trying to create an Asterix-like redoubt against the Nazis in Brittany.

Now that France had fallen, he drew the only logical conclusion—and the real tragedy is surely that neither Admiral Gensoul nor Darlan could see how radically their world had changed. I think I can understand why the House of Commons was so elated by this depressing and in many ways disgusting massacre.

It was partly that Britain had finally done something warlike: after a year of dither, shambles and evacuations—from Norway to Dunkirk—the British armed forces had ‘won’ something, no matter how one-sided the contest or how hollow that victory.

More importantly the MPs could tell from the event that the man they had reluctantly commissioned to lead them had a streak of belligerent ruthlessness unlike anyone else. They knew that no other politician had the guts, the nerve, to do what he had just done. They could suddenly see how Britain might win.

That was why they waved their Order Papers. And that was the message that Churchill sent via Mers-el-Kébir to Washington, where they were still refusing to send the ancient destroyers: that Britain was not going to give in, but would do whatever it took.

Churchill ended that speech on Oran to the House of Commons by saying that he left the judgement of his actions ‘to the nation and the United States’; and the second audience was crucial. The son of Jennie Jerome knew that he had no hope of eventual victory unless and until he could also embroil his motherland.

Загрузка...