Read Voices from the Dark Years Online
Authors: Douglas Boyd
At 6.25 p.m. local time – five minutes before the deadline – the three Royal Navy officers were shown off
Dunkerque
with all the usual honours. Not until they had passed the exit in the net was the first shot fired by
Hood.
Although the French warships had steam up and could return fire until their limited stock of shells ran out, little manoeuvring was possible in the confines of the harbour. They were thus sitting ducks for the Royal Navy’s bombardment, which killed a total of 1,297 French sailors, with several hundred wounded. Whilst shrouding the corpses, many other sailors were killed when three flights of Swordfish from
Ark Royal
flew in at deck level, machine-gunning them to add to the casualties.
As Gensoul had prophesied, the political result was the opposite of what Churchill may have hoped. François Mauriac summed it up: ‘Mr Winston Churchill had united France against England – perhaps for many years.’
10
One ancient cruiser was sunk and the admiral’s flagship put out of action for months, but the rest of the damaged fleet steamed at battle readiness to Toulon, where they were nearer by far to the Germans. There, sixteen months later, on 27 November 1942, they were scuttled by their crews when the Wehrmacht crossed the Demarcation Line, in compliance with Darlan’s instruction of 28 May 1940 to stop them falling into German hands.
Churchill had no regrets, seeing the action as strategically justified and showing his subjects and the world that Britain would stop at nothing, however repugnant, to win the war. That was arguable, but as far as France was concerned, Mers el-Kebir was the final straw that killed any sympathy for the British cause. It made of the furious and grieving Admiral Darlan an implacable enemy for Britain and provided a heaven-sent opportunity for Nazi propaganda to claim that France’s true enemy was perfidious Albion and not the Reich.
Even de Gaulle, whose only hope was to side with the British, called it ‘an odious tragedy’. In London, he deplored the British action. Obliged to submit the text of his broadcast for prior approval by Downing Street, he consented with the condition that, if asked to change a single word, he would never broadcast again. Privately, he admitted that the irregular trickle of volunteers to his banner dwindled to nothing after Mers el-Kebir.
Behind the major tragedy were several others which rarely make it into the history books. The previous night, Royal Navy prize crews had seized forty or so French warships in Portsmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth and Cowes harbours to forestall the natural reaction to the news from Mers el-Kebir among the thousands of armed French soldiers in Britain and the 500 armed marines and battalion of infantry under the command of a French admiral in Portsmouth, with double that number in Plymouth and Falmouth.
On board the submarine
Surcouf
, perfidy changed to tragedy. Moored alongside the submarine HMS
Thames
, her captain and crew had been entertained both aboard their neighbour and ashore. In the confusion of the midnight seizure by men they knew, three British sailors and one French serviceman were killed. In Alexandria, where the squadron of French naval vessels that had thought themselves safe were seized without bloodshed by Admiral Cunningham’s more subtle approach, who remarked that Catapult had been executed ‘with perfect perfidiousness’.
11
In Dakar, French West Africa, Royal Navy frogmen placed mines that immobilised the battleship
Richelieu.
Marcel Gensoul retired two years later, refusing for the rest of his life to discuss the tragedy of Mers el-Kebir. After returning to Gibraltar, Captain Holland showed his disgust at the illegal action in which he had been obliged to take part by resigning his commission to spend the rest of the war in the Home Guard.
N
OTES
1.
Quoted on
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWlaval.htm
.
2.
A. Nossiter,
France and the Nazis
(London: Methuen, 2001), p. 105.
3.
P. Bourget in
1940:
La Défaite
, p. 280.
4.
Boyd,
French Foreign Legion
, p. 346.
5.
Personal communication with the author.
6.
F. Boulet,
Histoire de Moissac
(privately published, St-Germain-en-Laye, 2005), p. 114.
7.
P. Bourget in
1940: La Défaite
, p. 326.
8.
P. Masson in
1940: La Défaite
, pp. 461–70.
9.
Ibid.
10.
Article in
Le Figaro
, 15 July 1940.
11.
A. Vulliez in
1940: La Défaite
, p. 458.
7
Pierre Laval had not always been anti-British. While prime minister, on 19 September 1931 he had been awakened at 1 a.m. by His Britannic Majesty’s Chargé d’Affaires in Paris, in the absence of the ambassador, with a request that the Banque de France support the Bank of England after a catastrophic run on its gold reserves that the US Federal Reserve Bank could not cover. In the interest of speed and to avoid consulting his cabinet – a member of which might leak news of this potentially disastrous situation for Britain – Laval personally granted London a credit of 3 trillion gold francs.
1
As Foreign Minister of the short-lived Doumergue administration, in February 1935 he had agreed with the Foreign Office in London that neither country would make unilateral deals with Hitler’s Germany. It is hardly surprising that Britain’s signature four months later of the Anglo-German agreement to rearm and expand the German fleet triggered in Laval a deep and abiding mistrust of British politics.
2
Physically, a greater contrast with the silver-haired marshal’s elegant and grandfatherly manner would be hard to find. Laval’s stocky build, swarthy complexion and heavy dark moustache made him look like Josef Stalin’s suntanned brother. Vincent Auriol, who emerged at the Liberation from three years of imprisonment for resisting Vichy’s collaborationist policies and went on to become first President of the Fourth Republic, knew Laval from long acquaintance and described him thus:
A cigarette permanently between his lips, slightly hunched posture and awkward manner … He approaches a group and stops, pretending to listen to one colleague while surveying everyone else. Of his piggy little Mongolian eyes, imprisoned in the folds of their heavy lids, one sees only two black dots.
3
Born on 28 June 1883 in the Auvergne village of Châteldon near Vichy to a hard-working butcher and café-owner, who doubled as the village carter conveying merchandise and passengers to the local railway station, Pierre Laval left school at 11, like his father. Studying in his spare time, with the help of the priest, the mayor and the local teacher, the boy prepared himself for his
baccalauréat
so well that his stubborn father was eventually persuaded to let him go back to school. As a boarder at the
lycée
in far distant Bayonne, where his older sister lived, Laval obtained his
bac
only a year later than middle-class coevals who had never interrupted their studies.
Earning a paltry salary as a
pion
or assistant master looking after boarders in a
lycée
, he next studied for and gained a degree in natural sciences, which entitled him to apply for a teaching post. This was only a step, for already Laval’s sights were set, not on the classroom, but the courtroom. A law student of 20, he joined the Socialist Party and was called to the bar in 1909 at the age of 26. That same year he married the daughter of Châteldon’s mayor. Among the contradictions of the man so many came to hate are that he was a fond husband to her and a loving father to their daughter Josée, who published an impassioned defence of him when he was on trial for his life after the war.
She grew up in Paris, where her parents set up home soon after the wedding. For eighteen years Laval worked in the Palais de Justice with the same application he had devoted to his studies, all the while sniffing the political winds and awaiting his moment. Most of his clients were union officials. Hailed in the left-wing press after gaining an acquittal for a
syndicaliste
accused of sabotage, Laval realised the power of the media – and never forgot it. Successfully campaigning for election with the same energy he had put into his legal work, he was in 1914 hailed by
L’Humanité
– then the official organ of the Socialist Party – as the youngest deputy of the left.
During the First World War, while Pétain was at the centre of the war effort, Laval was exempted from conscription on the grounds of varicose veins. As a socialist and pacifist, he made no secret of the fact that he deplored the war with Germany, and was for a time under police surveillance on this account. The exiled Leon Trotsky was among his friends until expelled from Paris in September 1916. Despite these question marks against him, Laval’s intellectual qualities were such that he was offered an under-secretariat of state in 1917, which he had to turn down on instructions from the party. To free himself from its discipline, he distanced himself from left-wing friends, making the final break at the 1920 annual Congress in Tours when the party split into communists and socialists. Accepting neither party machine, Laval stood as an independent socialist candidate in the elections of 1924, while in the process of building an empire of printing, press and broadcasting interests that made him a millionaire.
Elected senator with a large majority, he became Minister of Public Works within twelve months and soon afterwards under-secretary for Foreign Affairs. Of this stage of his career the ageing statesman Aristide Briand said, ‘Once he’s got teeth into something, that Auvergnat never lets go of it.’
4
A Nobel laureate known as ‘the poet of peace’, Briand advocated a federal Europe as early as 1930. Having a similar background in the law before taking up politics, he exercised a great influence over his much younger colleague. Seeing himself also being called to Stockholm one day to receive a Nobel, Laval pursued Briand’s unrelenting search for peace through various appointments in France’s troubled governments of the 1930s. In 1935 he strengthened the Entente Cordiale with Britain; at the Stresa Conference of First World War allies he spoke out against German rearmament in defiance of the Versailles Treaty; in Moscow he signed a treaty of mutual assistance in an endeavour to encircle Hitler’s infant Reich by alliances. He once declared, ‘In the whole world, there are five or six men on whom peace depends. I am one.’
5
By ‘peace’, he meant peace for France. Thus, the Hoare-Laval pact of 1935, which he concerted with British Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare, carved up Ethiopia, despite it being a member of the League of Nations. A vast swathe of the country was awarded to the Italian invader in a vain endeavour to entice Mussolini into the Franco-British camp. Hoare was forced to resign when details of the pact leaked to the press on 10 December 1935, while Laval’s penalty was to be deprived of further ministerial responsibilities until 1940 – a period during which he spoke out whenever his successors undid agreements he had set up as guarantees of peace.
After the Munich settlement in September 1938, he condemned Daladier’s and Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler on the grounds that one did not avoid war by humiliating oneself, but rather by dominating one’s adversary. And yet, almost exactly a year later, Laval was the only speaker at the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee to come out openly
against
French support for Poland after the Nazi invasion, telling Premier Daladier to look at a map and see who were France’s allies and what they could do for her before taking a step that would cost millions of her citizens’ lives. He never lets go, Aristide Briand had said. Six months later, Laval was still offering his services to Daladier, believing he could restrain Mussolini from taking the German side in the coming war. Daladier turned a deaf ear, as did his successor Paul Reynaud, when Laval repeated his offer at the beginning of June 1940 with the Italian army already massed on the border.