The Storm Breaks: Britain Alone, Part Two

Early July 1940. A terrible order at Mers el Kébir, and the first shots of the Battle of Britain.

Last time, we watched France fall. The armistice was signed in Hitler’s railway carriage at Compiègne, Churchill promised the nation its finest hour, and German boots landed on the Channel Islands. Britain now stood alone. But before the great air battle could begin, Churchill had to make one of the darkest decisions of his life, and the enemy was not Germany. It was France.

The Hardest Order

Here was the problem that kept the War Cabinet awake through the last week of June 1940. The French Navy was the fourth largest in the world, and it was largely intact. Its finest squadron, including the modern battlecruisers Dunkerque and Strasbourg, lay at anchor at Mers el Kébir, a naval base near Oran on the Algerian coast. Article 8 of the armistice required the French fleet to gather in designated ports, where it would be demobilised and disarmed under German or Italian control, and Berlin solemnly declared it had no intention of using the ships. Churchill did not believe a word of it. If that fleet passed into German or Italian hands, Britain could lose command of the sea, and with it the war.

So the Admiralty drew up Operation Catapult. A new squadron, Force H under Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville, sailed from Gibraltar with the battlecruiser Hood, the battleships Valiant and Resolution, and the aircraft carrier Ark Royal. On the morning of 3 July 1940, Force H arrived off Mers el Kébir and presented the French commander, Admiral Marcel Gensoul, with an ultimatum. Sail with us and fight. Sail to a British port. Sail to the French West Indies and sit out the war. Or scuttle your ships where they lie.

Somerville hated every part of it. These were men who had been allies ten days earlier. The Admiralty’s signal to him acknowledged as much, calling it one of the most disagreeable and difficult tasks a British admiral had ever faced. Gensoul, proud and cornered, refused every option and signalled that force would be met with force.

The negotiations dragged through the heat of the day. They failed. Shortly before six in the evening, the fifteen inch guns of Force H opened fire on the anchored French fleet. In roughly ten minutes of bombardment the battleship Bretagne blew up and capsized, other ships were crippled, and 1,297 French sailors were dead. Strasbourg fought her way out of the harbour and escaped to Toulon. British losses in the action were five aircraft and two men.

The Message It Sent

When Churchill reported the action to the House of Commons on 4 July, he spoke of the measures with sincere sorrow. By his own later account, it was this speech, not the famous ones, that finally won over the Conservative MPs who had regarded him with reserve since May. Not because anyone celebrated dead French sailors, but because of what the act proved.

Understand what the world believed in early July 1940. Most neutral observers, and plenty of people in Washington, assumed Britain would negotiate within weeks. Mers el Kébir ended that conversation. A nation preparing to seek terms does not open fire on the fleet of its oldest ally to keep those ships out of enemy hands. President Roosevelt, told of the attack, said he would have done the same thing. In the brutal arithmetic of 1940, that American reaction may have been worth more to Britain’s survival than the ships themselves.

The price was real. Vichy France broke off relations and bombed Gibraltar in reprisal, and the bitterness at Mers el Kébir poisoned Anglo French relations for years. Churchill carried it for the rest of his life. But nobody, anywhere, doubted any longer that Britain meant to fight.

The Channel Becomes a Battlefield

While Force H was steaming back to Gibraltar, the Luftwaffe was moving onto the airfields of northern France, some of its fighters now based within sight of the Dover cliffs. Hermann Göring, who had assured Hitler his air force could bring Britain to its knees, gave orders at the end of June to begin drawing the RAF into battle.

The Germans called this opening phase the Kanalkampf, the Channel battle. The targets were the coastal convoys, the small, slow, unglamorous colliers and coasters carrying coal and supplies along the south coast. The logic was simple and cold. Attack the convoys, and the RAF must come up to defend them. Every fighter destroyed over the Channel in July was one that could not defend the airfields in August.

Systematic attacks on shipping began on 4 July, when Stuka dive bombers struck at Portland. But it is 10 July 1940 that British history records as the opening day of the Battle of Britain. That morning a convoy codenamed Bread was rounding the North Foreland when the Luftwaffe found it. By mid afternoon roughly 70 German aircraft were battling around 30 RAF fighters over the Dover Straits. Vapour trails snaked across the summer sky while people watched from the cliffs. When it was over, the convoy sailed on with the loss of a single small ship.

The battle Churchill had named three weeks earlier had begun.

The Machinery of Defence

One last thing before we leave July, because it explains everything that follows. The RAF that rose to meet the Luftwaffe was outnumbered. At the start of July, Fighter Command could field roughly 750 serviceable fighters against a German force of over 4,000 aircraft, including more than 1,100 single seat fighters and some 1,800 bombers and dive bombers.

But numbers were never the whole story. Britain possessed something no defender had ever possessed before: the Dowding System. A chain of radar stations along the coast, thousands of Observer Corps volunteers with binoculars and field telephones, and a filtering and plotting network that fed it all to Fighter Command headquarters at Bentley Priory and out to the group operations rooms. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, austere, awkward, and utterly unbending, had led Fighter Command since 1936 and had spent those years building it. It meant the RAF did not have to patrol and hope. It could see the enemy coming and meet him with exactly as much force as it chose to spend.

The Germans knew the radar masts existed. They never understood what stood behind them. That failure of imagination would cost them the battle.

Why This Matters

I want to sit with Mers el Kébir for a moment, because it is the uncomfortable heart of this story, and we do the past no favours by looking away.

We like our history clean. Dunkirk, the little ships, the Few. Mers el Kébir does not fit, and that is precisely why it matters. Churchill’s greatness in the summer of 1940 was not that he made noble speeches, though he did. It was that he was willing to do a genuinely dreadful thing, kill 1,297 sailors of a defeated ally, because the survival of everything else depended on it. War at this level is not a choice between good and bad. It is a choice between terrible and worse, made at speed, with the lights going out across a continent.

And the Kanalkampf matters because it reminds us who stood in the front line first. Before the fighter pilots became the Few, the merchant seamen of those Channel convoys, civilians on ships that could neither fight nor run, sailed under the Stukas because the coal had to get through. The Battle of Britain did not begin over Kentish orchards. It began over the grey water of the Dover Straits, above the heads of men earning a working wage.

The stage is now set. The radar chain is watching, the squadrons are waiting, and across the Channel the Luftwaffe is massing for the main assault. Next time, the battle begins in earnest.

Out!