The Royal Navy doesn’t attack the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir
On the 3rd of July 1940 the Royal Navy attacked the French fleet in port at Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria. Historians have generally regarded this as bold act by Churchill, a clean break from the indecisive policies of the previous Chamberlain government and, to friend and foe alike, signalled “that the British War Cabinet feared nothing and would stop at nothing.” It is accepted that way principally because that is how Churchill wrote it in his history of the Second World War. It was none of these things. It wasn’t quite “the biggest political blunder of modern times”, as Admiral Sir James Somerville, commander of the Royal Navy task force that carried out the attack, called it, but it was certainly closer to that than the claims Churchill made for it. (There was never any possibility of the French fleet peacefully complying with the British demands; to do so would have explicitly violated the terms of the Franco-German armistice signed only a week before and opened France up to further German attack.)
It wasn’t a break from the Chamberlain government’s strategy, it was a continuation of it; that strategy, of attacking anyone but the Germans in anywhere but Germany, had produced the disastrous Norwegian campaign and almost saw the RAF try to destroy the Soviet Union’s hundreds of miles of oil fields in the Caucasus with a handful of bombers based in Iraq. Nor should this be a surprise; those had both been plans that Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty in Chamberlain’s cabinet, had championed. It would result in the disastrous allied campaign in Greece in 1941 and the appallingly costly Italian campaign of ’43-45. It was a case of acting with Churchillian boldness and equally Churchillian lack of consideration of the consequences.
Nor was it necessary; the bulk of the French fleet was already in British hands; interned almost entirely peacefully. Following the collapse of the fighting front northern France in early June, the French fleet had fled to overseas ports. The Atlantic squadron had gone to the English Channel ports of Plymouth and Portsmouth, remained there after the armistice, and really had no choice but be interned, unless they wanted to try running the gauntlet of British coastal defences, including being fired on at point-blank range by coastal guns defending those very ports. The same was true of the French squadron that had been operating in the eastern Mediterranean; it had ended up in the British controlled port of Alexandria in Egypt, and would remain there for the duration of the war. That Britain would intern these ships was not a surprise to the new Petain government in France; they’d given ample warning that they would. Nor was it a cause for outrage; interning what were now neutral warships was consistent with maritime law and in the case of the ships in England the crews were swiftly repatriated to France; so without firing a shot and with no political repercussions, two thirds of the French fleet had been neutralised.
That then only left the threat posed by squadron at Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria. But the ‘threat’ existed more in the mind of Winston Churchill than it did in the French ships. Churchill and his war cabinet were concerned that once the ships returned to ports in metropolitan France they would either be seized by Hitler in defiance of the armistice that he’d just signed with the French, or that the French would voluntarily hand over the fleet to the Germans in an effort to seek more lenient terms in a peace treaty. Churchill argued that Hitler’s word meant nothing, and therefore the terms of the armistice, which left the fleet in French hands, were meaningless. But the British weren’t being asked to trust Hitler, they were being asked to trust their erstwhile former allies; that the French would scuttle their ships rather than let them fall into German hands. However, cabinet weren’t in a trusting mood, as demonstrated by their fear that the French would trade their fleet for better terms from the Germans. But even if either of those two scenarios had occurred, there still was no real threat; as the British Joint Intelligence Committee reported to the war cabinet; the French ships were of no use to the Germans because they simply did not have trained officers and seamen to crew them. The German Kriegsmarine of 1940 was still small and struggling to train enough men to crew the newly commissioned surface warships and U-boats that their own shipyards were turning out, let alone any more ships acquired elsewhere. And because their navy was so much smaller than the Royal Navy, training up new crews took considerably longer; sea trials and final crew training for the Kriegsmarine’s major surface warships took 7 to 11 months, as opposed to the RN’s 3-4 months. If the Germans had seized the French ships once they anchored in the south of France, the earliest that they could pose a threat to Britain would be early 1941 at the earliest, and more likely mid to late 1941; by that time, according to the secret Chiefs of Staff report, “British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality”, that Churchill’s war cabinet had accepted as their basis for continuing the war, the German war economy would be collapsing under the burden of its own successful conquest of Europe; the Kriegsmarine would be crippled through lack of fuel oil without a shot being fired. (If that sounds ludicrous it should. “British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality” is a document that is, quite simply, detached from reality; but in 1940 it was the basis of Britain’s strategic war planning.) Even if that scenario did turn out to be too rose-tinted and the Germans didn’t collapse under their own success, their newly acquired French ships would still be in the south of France; sea trials would have to take place in the Mediterranean, vulnerable to Royal Navy attack, not the secure confines of the Baltic.
The only way that the French fleet posed an immediate threat, or any threat at all within the timeframe that the Joint Chiefs envisaged Germany taking to collapse, as if the French crews went with the ships; in other words only if France went to war against Britain. But in late June 1940 no-one in either Britain or France thought that was even a remote possibility. The French were still reeling from the shock of their defeat and were sullenly complying with the terms of the armistice they’d been forced to sign in such a humiliating manner in the forest at Compiègne; many Frenchmen resented the way Britain had left them in the lurch, some even have blamed the British for France’s defeat, but that is a far cry from wanting to go to war against Britain.
So at dawn on the 3rd of July, the idea that the French would send their ships to fight alongside their German conquerors against their former allies was simply ridiculous; by dusk the same day it had become a very real possibility. That was what Churchill’s decision to attack at Mers-el-Kébir wrought. The attack roused the French from their shock and into a rage that strangely united them in a way that fighting the Germans hadn’t. The Pétain government abandoned its policy of sullen compliance and cautious pragmatism and enthusiastically embraced active and enthusiastic collaboration. Over the coming months the most aggressively anti-British members, Laval, Darlan and Huntziger, rose in power while more cautious, foreign minister Baudouin, fell. In the coming months Darlan would discuss alliance proposals with Hitler and for the next two and a half years Britain would waste men and resources desperately needed elsewhere on a futile colonial war with France.
So, for the attack not to take place, all that is needed is for the war cabinet to act with a little more caution and accept the Joint Intelligence Committee’s assessment that the French ships did not pose a latent threat. Alternatively, even if, despite JIC advice, the cabinet still considered them to be a threat, the more cautious members of the cabinet (i.e. everyone other than Churchill) are persuaded that the potential damage to the relationship with France far outweighed whatever benefits might be accrued from the sinking of four battleships. This is not entirely unlikely; in June 1940 four Swedish destroyers, newly purchased from Italy, were passing through the English Channel on their way to Stockholm when Churchill ordered them intercepted and seized, again because he thought the Germans might get their hands on the ships and the war cabinet decided that this was not the best course of action and ordered the ships released.
So what then of the consequences of no attack? Obviously the warships, including the battleship Bretagne, would sail for metropolitan France, and spend much of the war at anchor in Toulon harbour.
Without the attack the Pétain government would not have broken off diplomatic relations with Britain in July and would have continued to be discretely represented in London despite the awkward presence of Charles de Gaulle there claiming to be the legitimate head of Free France. Although none of the members of Pétain’s government were pro-British, the majority were initially merely resentful and a bitter of their former ally, not outright hostile, that was certainly the case for general Huntzinger (Minister of War) and Darlan (Minister of the Marine).
Without the attack de Gaulle’s prospects would have been markedly better; Mers-el-Kébir radically changed French sentiments and embittered them towards the British and anyone working with the British. The Pétain regime used the attack to rally Frenchmen to the regime, and their propaganda portrayed de Gaulle as a puppet, providing a fig leaf of respectability to perfidious English piratical designs on the French colonial empire; sans that propaganda French sentiments would have been much more divided, and more could be expected to rally to de Gaulle’s cause.
With a more honestly neutral Vichy regime, Operation Menace, the mission to take the French West African port of Dakar in September, if it took place at all, would have involved a significantly smaller force. The British cabinet decided to weaken Britain’s defences, in the face of imminent German invasion, by sending five desperately needed cruisers and ten destroyers, to say nothing of a brigade of royal marine commandos, then best trained and equipped infantry available, was because of the rumour that Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval had offered Dakar to the Germans as a U-boat base with which to attack British convoys in the South Atlantic – well beyond the range of Britain’s home defences. (Two battleships and an aircraft carrier were also part of the Dakar raid, but since Admiral Sir Charles Forbes had ruled out using his capital ships in the close confines of the English Channel after experiencing the devastating impact of Luftwaffe attacks during the Norway campaign, their presence on the mission did not weaken the anti-invasion defences.) While relations between Vichy and London would have inevitably declined over the course of 1940 as the Royal Navy imposed their blockade on all of Europe and intercepted French merchant ships, and Laval was predisposed to a pro-German outlook, it is unlikely that relations would have declined so badly by September that the rumour would be given enough credence by the British admiralty and cabinet for them to send such a large force. If Menace took place at all, it would likely have had a much smaller naval contingent, consisted entirely of Free French troops, and no commandos, and rely on general de Gaulle’s persuasive abilities rather than the naval force.
Projecting how events would have progressed in 1941 is more problematic. Relations between London and Vichy would undoubtedly have become worse as the British continued to impose their blockade of French ports, intercepting and seizing French merchant ships carrying oil, iron ore and rubber (while permitting ships carrying food to proceed). Just how quickly and badly the relationship deteriorated would depend heavily on who held primacy in Vichy, but it could well be that Vichy would not have become a de facto junior member of the Axis alliance, materially supporting German operations in North Africa and the Middle East.
That being the case there likely would not have been a Syrian campaign. The Vichy administration in Damascus had provided the Iraqi army with arms and ammunition out of their stockpiles at German request, but that request had followed Admiral Darlan’s offers of logistic and material support to the German war effort in North Africa. German aircraft flying to Iraq would have staged through the Italian island of Rhodes, as they’d originally planned to, rather than landing and refuelling in Syria. If that were the case general Wavell would have had no reason to stretch his already desperately overextended forces further by invading the Levant; the 7th A.I.F. would have been deployed directly to the Western Desert after their return from the debacle in Greece. Without the invasion French prestige in the Levant might have lasted a little while longer, delaying by several years Syrian and Lebanon’s independence after the war.
It would also have altered the public profile of the armed forces of the new state of Israel. Moshe Dayan, his trademark eye patch adding an element of piratical roughish charm and making him instantly recognisable the world over and synonymous with Israeli’s armed forces, lost his eye fighting the Vichy French; the Jewish Palmach provided scouts to the Australian 7th division for the invasion of Lebanon and Dayan was wounded defending a critical crossing point over the Latani river.
Beyond 1941 things become even more speculative. Would Vichy have agreed to Japanese submarines refuelling in Madagascar, prompting the British invasion of the island? Ultimately, would Anglo-American strategic planning still include an invasion of French North Africa?