England's Last War Against France Read online

  Praise for England’s Last War Against France

  ‘Fills one of the few remaining gaps in Second World War historiography, an excellent account of the almost forgotten struggle between British and Vichy Forces’ Patrick Bishop, author of Bomber Boys

  ‘This well-documented and intriguing history unearths one of the least-known episodes of the Second World War … Smith’s writing is dispassionate [and] robust, his sources well chosen and well used and his talent for military history self-evident’ Good Book Guide

  ‘Smith describes unfamiliar battles with notable fluency and skill’

  Sir Max Hastings, Sunday Times

  ‘There is much of the flavour of Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy in Smith’s delight in arcane detail and rumbustious anecdote’

  Carmen Calil, Guardian

  ‘Battles [recorded] in dramatic detail, using not only official records and personal diaries, but eyewitness accounts from participants’ Charles Glass (author of Americans in Paris), London Review of Books

  Reading England’s Last War Against France, for the military history buff, is rather like finding an episode of a favourite TV show that you’ve never seen before’

  bookseller Henry Coningsby, Waterstone’s, Watford

  ‘Colin Smith’s light yet detailed touch superbly outlines a wasteful and depressing story … A quality read with many political and military twists and turns’ Soldier Magazine

  ‘Timely and thrillingly readable history … an important and informative book’ Nigel Jones, History Today

  ‘In this excellent account of a woefully understudied “war within a war”, Colin Smith has identified no fewer than 14 occasions when Britons and Frenchmen fought each other during the Second World War’ Andrew Roberts, Literary Review

  ‘Hidden gem! [A] quirky take on the well ploughed field of World War Two studies’ The Oldie

  ‘Grim revelations about the thousands of allies killed by troops loyal to Vichy’ Our Choice of the Best Recent books, Sunday Times

  ‘As Colin Smith reveals in this profoundly thought provoking book, from 1940 to 1942 Britain and France were bitter and very bloody enemies’ Robert Colbeck, Worcester News

  ‘Smith’s considerable achievement is to unmask the reality and make us understand this painful period far better than ever before’

  Catholic Herald

  ‘Absorbing … a fascinating and compelling read’

  Western Daily Press

  ‘A classic on the conflict with Hitler’s Vichy allies … a superb book on an astonishing array of long-buried incidents’ Oxford Times

  ‘Smith ranks with Antony Beevor and Max Hastings as a great war historian. But whereas Beevor and Hastings concentrate their efforts on the shortcomings, or otherwise, of politicians and military commanders in WWII, Smith forensically dissects the accounts of those who had to face life and death in the frontline of battles. He allows the voices of ordinary men and women to be heard in history. England’s Last War Against France is “history from below” at its best’

  C.J. Mitchell, Readers’ Reviews, amazon.co.uk

  Colin Smith, an award-winning foreign correspondent, worked for the Observer for twenty-six years. During that time he reported from many wars and trouble spots ranging from Saigon to Sarajevo. It was in long-suffering Lebanon that an elderly resident of the southern town of Merjeyoun pointed out the artillery scars that the British and the French had left behind and recalled the screams that went with a Senegalese bayonet charge. His books include The Last Crusade, a novel set in Allenby’s 1917 Palestine campaign and, most recently, the critically acclaimed Singapore Burning (2005). He lives in Nicosia.

  www.colin-smith.info

  By Colin Smith

  Carlos: Portrait of a Terrorist

  Cut-Out (novel)

  The Last Crusade (novel)

  Fire in the night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia and Zion

  (with John Bierman)

  Alamein: War Without Hate (with John Bierman)

  Singapore Burning

  ENGLAND’S LAST WAR

  AGAINST FRANCE

  Fighting Vichy

  1940–1942

  COLIN SMITH

  For Murray Wrobel, my friend and recent translator

  of arcane military documents, who last met the

  Vichy French in Syria as a member of the

  Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre.

  Vichy views its foes: 1942

  CONTENTS

  Praise for England’s Last War Against France

  list of illustrations

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE: The Fugitive Fleet

  PART ONE: The Making and the Breaking of the Entente Cordiale

  PART TWO: War on Land, Sea and Air

  PART THREE: The Island Campaign

  PART FOUR: Operation Torch and the end of Fighting Vichy

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  Source Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  p. vi Vichy propaganda poster (J. M. Steinlein / Keystone, France)

  Section One

  Commander Denis Sprague (Sprague family private collection)

  Graves of Sprague and Griffiths, Plymouth cemetery (Colin Smith)

  The Surcouf (Roger Viollet)

  Admiral James Somerville (Getty Images)

  British bombardment at Mers el-Kébir (La Marine Françhise)

  French dead on board the battle cruiser Dunkerque (La Marine Française)

  The Bretagne on fire (La Marine Françhise)

  Amiral Marcel Gensoul addresses survivors at the mass burial (La Marine Françhise)

  Royal Air Force training station at Habbaniya (Imperial War Museum)

  Burned out trucks in Iraq (Imperial War Museum)

  Circassian cavalry man (Imperial War Museum)

  Free French Marine in Syria (Imperial War Museum)

  Artillery observer using periscope in Lebanon (Imperial War Museum)

  Cheshire Yeomanry water their horses (Imperial War Museum)

  French Renault-35 two man tanks (Imperial War Museum)

  Wounded Australian lighting cigarette (Imperial War Museum)

  Pavement café in Sidon (Imperial War Museum)

  British infantry at Palmyra (Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images)

  Pilot officer Peter Turnbull (Australian War Memorial)

  Pierre Le Gloan (C-J. Ehrengardt)

  Vichy French refuel in Salonika (Bundesarchiv)

  Australian infantry in Lebanon (Imperial War Museum)

  Général Henri Dentz inspects his troops (Keystone, France)

  Section Two

  Daily Mirror cartoon (Mirrorpix)

  Pétain, Laval and Hitler at Montoire (Hulton / Getty Images)

  Laval after assassination attempt (Associated Press)

  Charles de Gaulle in 1940 (Getty Images)

  Royal Marines returning to the battleship Ramillies (Imperial War Museum)

  British and French officers discuss ceasefire terms at Antsirane (Imperial War Museum)

  British soldiers present arms to a Vichy naval contingent in Madagascar (Imperial War Museum)

  Diego Suarez Joffre line (Imperial War Museum)

  Commando officer points out French position (Imperial War Museum)

  Colonel Passerou (Imperial War Museum)

  British soldier with red umbrella (Imperial War Museum)

  Wrecked bridge in southern Madagascar (Imperial War Museum)

  Members of 2nd South Lancs regiment aboard a freight train (Imperial War Museum)

  Lt-Colonel Alston Robert West (Impe
rial War Museum)

  General Mark Clark (US Army Signal Corps)

  Clark being canoed ashore (US Army Signal Corps)

  Beach landing in Algeria (Imperial War Museum)

  Anti-aircraft barrage in Algiers harbour (Imperial War Museum)

  HMS Walney capsized in Oran harbour (Imperial War Museum)

  Leo ‘Bill’ Disher (Associated Press)

  Amiral Darlan and his wife Berthe Morgan (Associated Press / World Wide Photos)

  RAF reconnaissance pictures of Toulon (Imperial War Museum)

  Laval in October 1945 (Roger Viollet / Rex Features)

  Laval’s execution (Associated Press)

  p. 433 Extract from Victor comic by kind permission of DC Thomson Publishing, Dundee

  While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be happy to acknowledge them in future editions.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Readers may well wonder why this book is not called Britain’s Last War Against France. After all, large numbers of Scots, Welsh and Irish found themselves fighting the Vichy French. Its title does not reflect any animus against the Union on my part. Far from it. But for the French, perhaps because over the centuries they sometimes acquired Celtic allies, their old enemy is almost always ‘the English’. Sometimes – usually when they are very angry with us or we are allied to the Americans or both – we become ‘the Anglo-Saxons’. Only rarely, in their eyes, are we ‘the British’, a people with whom they tend to have a more neutral relationship. CS

  PROLOGUE

  The Fugitive Fleet

  Robert Surcouf was the most famous of France’s eighteenth-century privateers who, based on Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, grew rich on English plunder before retiring to his native St Malo. Renowned for his chivalry towards prisoners, in France he is perhaps best remembered for the reply he gave a captive officer who admonished him for fighting for money rather than, as the British did, for honour. ‘Each of us fights,’ admitted Surcouf, ‘for what he lacks most.’

  In the 1930s the huge submarine named after him was the largest submersible in the world and seemed a potent symbol of France’s growing sea power. Her main armament was the twin long-range guns housed in an enclosed turret of cylindrical design just forward of the conning tower. To spot her prey she even carried a small Marcel-Berson seaplane in a waterproof hangar. Once the aircraft had returned and been winched back aboard, Surcouf would stalk her targets submerged until they were within range of her formidable 8-inchers, a calibre not normally found on anything smaller than a cruiser. Her victims might then be finished off with torpedoes.

  At least, that was the theory. The reality was that the Surcouf was a white elephant, a prototype that had never grown out of her teething problems and spent more time under repair than under water. Towards the end of June 1940, when only the diehards of the French Army were still fighting and the bulk of Britain’s small contribution to the land war had been home two weeks from Dunkirk, the submarine was at Brest suffering with another bout of engine trouble and had yet to fire a shot in anger.

  As the panzers approached the coast, Surcouf’s delicate innards were gathered up and, with three broken connecting rods and powered only by her auxiliary electric motors, she left harbour at dusk on 18 June unable to dive or go any faster than 4 knots. The submarine was heading for England. From the conning tower Bernard Le Nistour, a big athletic man who was the Surcouf’s doctor, recalled looking back at the fires that were beginning behind them as the demolitions started. ‘All of us hoped to continue the fight,’ he said. ‘Morale was high; the physical fitness of the crew excellent.’

  Shortly after dawn on the 19th an inquisitive Sunderland flying boat, RAF Coastal Command’s main anti-submarine aircraft, took a good look at it. Aldis lamps blinked the agreed recognition signals between allies and, satisfied, the big four-engined aircraft flew away. Landfall was in late afternoon: first the hazy outline of the Lizard then Penzance. Here the Surcouf dropped anchor while her engineers made some adjustments that enabled the submarine to make 10 knots as she followed the Cornish coast up to Plymouth Sound. On arrival two launches came out and circled slowly around them but kept out of hailing distance. They made Le Nistour feel uneasy. ‘Are we prisoners?’ he asked himself.

  The next day the crew were told to move a couple of miles up the coast to Devonport. En route, holidaymakers who had spotted Surcouf’s tricolour rose from their deckchairs waving their hats, towels and what looked like miniature entrenching tools. For those French sailors allowed on deck it was a depressing sight. The Boche were in Paris and, despite Dunkirk, the English were still on the beach.

  At Devonport the submarine berthed alongside the Paris, a distressed French dreadnought launched in 1912 which made the Surcouf look frisky. Bombed in Le Havre, she had been towed to Brest, then tried to get to England under her own power but her engines were not up to it and British tugs pulled her into Plymouth where her crew had now been long enough to start getting irritated with their hosts. They were quick to tell the newcomers that what infuriated them most about the English was the number of young men of military age still in civilian clothes, some of them carrying tennis racquets. You didn’t have to look far to see why a fully mobilized France, despite its smaller population, had fielded eighty divisions compared with the British Expeditionary Force’s ten. At the end of 1918 there had been almost sixty khaki-clad divisions in France and the English were claiming to have won the war. There was no sign yet of conscription on that scale.

  Two days after the Surcouf’s arrival in Devonport, at the Compiègne forest some 35 miles north of Paris, history was repeating itself in, as far as the French were concerned, a nightmare mirror image reversing all that was good. It had taken just six weeks of blitzkrieg to reverse the punch-drunk decision reached after four years of fighting and over a million French dead. Now, in the same railway dining car where Maréchal Foch had received Imperial Germany’s war-weary emissaries in November 1918, a French delegation under Général Charles Huntziger had come to hear what price this new Germany would put on an armistice following its amazing victory.

  To seal their triumph German engineers had liberated the sacred rolling stock with its polished wood interior by demolishing one side of the little museum where it had been immured since 1927 when France decided to preserve in perpetuity the best known symbol of Germany’s humiliation. By the time Huntzinger and his delegation turned up the stage had been set. Hitler, Hess, Goering, Feldmarschal Wilhelm Keitel and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister, were already seated in the carriage. Outside, a big swastika flag draped over an imposing granite block hid its inscription: ‘Here on the 11th November 1918 succumbed the criminal pride of the German people.’

  Huntziger, who had had no idea where the Germans were leading his delegation for the surrender ceremony, was mortified at this gloating tit for tat. ‘The historic forest of Compiègne has been chosen in order to efface once and for all by an act of reparative justice a memory resented by the German people as the greatest shame of all time,’ lectured Feldmarschal Keitel in a lengthy preamble.

  But at least the French could console themselves with the thought that they were not quite offering unconditional surrender. Leading the new government, which had decided to seek an armistice with Germany while it still had something left to bargain with, was the octogenarian national icon Maréchal Philippe Pétain who in 1916 had inspired the sacrifice that had stopped the Germans at Verdun. Pétain had given Huntziger firm instructions to break off talks if the Germans demanded either of two things: any French colonial territory or the surrender of their fleet. This had not proved necessary.

  Hitler, who shared the general astonishment over the French collapse, had decided it would pay to be magnanimous in victory. He did not want France to follow Poland, Norway and Holland (and soon Belgium) who all had governments-in-exile in London from where they could wage a propaganda war, if little el
se. ‘It would be better to permit the existence of a French government in France which would be the sole responsible one,’ he told Mussolini when he explained why he was unable to meet Il Duce’s demands for an Italian occupation zone east of the Rhône plus Corsica, Tunisia and French Somaliland. All this was to be a reward for Fascist Italy’s ten days of fighting following its long-awaited declaration of war against France and Britain on 10 June, the day the French government left Paris.

  While Anglo-German hostilities continued, France was to be offered peace on condition that the Wehrmacht occupied about three-fifths of its territory including all its Channel and Atlantic coasts and Paris. If it wished, the French government could operate from its occupied capital or choose a city in the south-eastern unoccupied zone as a temporary seat of government until Churchill gave in and there were proper peace treaties. A spa town like Vichy was an obvious choice, its season curtailed and with lots of empty hotels that could be requisitioned to accommodate government departments and provide living quarters for civil servants.

  Unlike the Italians, Hitler had little interest in France’s colonial possessions. But he was determined that the French fleet must not fall into British hands. When he met Mussolini in Munich, three days before the armistice talks began, he made it plain that he thought the best option would be to have the French scuttle their ships. The worst, he said, would be to have the world’s fourth most powerful fleet amalgamating with the Royal Navy, thereby giving the British the chance of moving large forces ‘to all sorts of places’ and thus prolonging the war because Germany would find it impossible to deliver a decisive blow.

  Hitler’s answer to the problem of France’s fugitive fleet – by now most of it was either in its African colonies or in Britain – was typical. Without, it seems, a trace of irony the Führer laid on the table a solemn promise of the kind that, one after the other, had been broken so often during all the crises that had led to war. Article Eight of the terms being offered to Huntziger’s delegation at Compiègne – which Hitler had made clear were not negotiable – pledged: ‘The German government solemnly declares to the French government that it does not intend to use for its own purposes in the war the French fleet which is in ports under German supervision. Furthermore, they solemnly and expressly declare that they have no intention of raising any claim to the French navy at the conclusion of peace.’