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Overview
After the forces of Nazi Germany launched their Blitzkrieg assault on Holland, Belgium, and Northern France, the tentative relationship between Great Britain and France was strained to the limit. For when the Vichy regime surrendered, the British had grave fears that the Germans would force the French naval fleet—the fourth largest in the world—to turn against their former ally, while in fact their orders were to scuttle should the Germans attempt to seize them.
‘Sink the French!’ examines the precursors to the fall of France and its consequences, most particularly the way the French Navy was dealt with. It examines the confused situation that France’s defeat created, including the rise of a relatively junior French general, Charles de Gaulle, who was smuggled out of France by the RAF.
Elsewhere French ships were boarded and seized by the British, and at Oran, Algeria, their fleet was bombarded by the Royal Navy—just as there were other incidents including French aircraft bombing Gibraltar.
This insightful exploration of a world sinking into chaos—and the mistrust war can breed between allies—is a must-read for anyone interested in this pivotal moment in history, when opposition to the Nazis was almost broken.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783460564 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pen & Sword Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Entente after Enmity
Anglo-French rivalry and enmity pre-dates the creation of the United Kingdom itself. The Norman conquest in 1066 was the result of the frustrated ambitions of William, Duke of Normandy, who was convinced that Edward I of England, more usually known as Edward the Confessor, had promised him the throne on his death, and that his successor, Harold, was a usurper. William's success in England created not so much Anglo-French tensions as a rift in society, with an overwhelmingly French-speaking aristocracy ruling over Anglo-Saxon peasants, while the church was reformed with a similar influx of French bishops.
The true tensions between England and France arose as a result of William's success, with the King of France and the Counts of both Anjou and Flanders alarmed by his growing power. By 1086, the King of France, and William of Normandy, King of England, were at war, with William finally dying the following year as a result of wounds received during the campaign. Just as the Normans, descendants of the Norsemen who had occupied the territory that became known as Normandy, had been fully assimilated into French society, so too did they eventually become assimilated into English society. The new English royal dynasty retained their French territories, leaving the French with the uneasy situation that a substantial and prosperous part of France owed allegiance not to the King of France, but the King of England. This was the situation that led to repeated wars between England and France over the centuries that followed, and it was not until the Hundred Years' War, which lasted from 1337 to 1453, that the English were finally expelled from France, retaining just one foothold, the port and town of Calais, eventually lost by that most unpopular of the Tudor monarchs, Mary I in 1558.
Nevertheless, the eviction of the English from French soil did not lead to any significant improvement in relations between the two countries. Wherever their interests clashed, conflict followed. The French provided a haven for the Stuarts during the period of the Commonwealth, and later supported Scottish attempts to re-establish the Stuart monarchy in Scotland against Hanoverian rule from London. The two powers clashed as a result of an aggressive French foreign policy that succeeded in uniting most of the rest of Europe against them, so that by 1763, France had lost its colonies in both Canada and India.
Revolution in France changed little, other than that many of the French nobility fled to England to escape the guillotine. The foreign wars that followed the revolution, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, the French emperor or dictator, saw some of the most famous British victories, including the great naval battles of the Glorious First of June, 1794, the Nile, 1798, and Trafalgar, 1805, between which the British evicted the French from Malta, and with their continental allies, won a decisive military victory in 1815 at Waterloo.
While it would be misleading to suggest that the end of the Napoleonic era and the restoration of the monarchy in France in 1815 marked a sea change in Anglo-French relations, the two countries did at least stop fighting. The absence of open hostilities between what was by this time the United Kingdom and France even survived the second revolution and overthrow of the French monarchy in 1848, and Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon I, becoming emperor in 1852. Napoleon III once again embarked on an expansionist foreign policy, provoking the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 and the siege of Paris.
French defeat at the hands of the Prussians resulted in the loss of Alsace and Lorraine to Prussia, as well as further change within France itself. The foundation of the Third Republic saw expansion once again, but this time through establishing much of North Africa as French colonial possessions, with further colonies established in the South Pacific and France taking over what became known as French Indo-China.
Prussia had emerged as one of the leading European powers and with the unification of Germany that followed, threatened to dominate the continent. Even so, it was not until 1904 that a formal alliance between the United Kingdom and France emerged with the signing of the 'Entente Cordiale' in 1904. The term perhaps says it all, in that this was not an alliance in the sense that it would be understood after the Second World War, but instead simply, as the French would have it in translation, a 'friendly understanding'. The specific benefits to both countries were that the British recognised and accepted French interests in Morocco and the French did the same for British interests in Egypt. With the exception of Spanish territory in Morocco, most of North Africa from the border between Tunisia and present-day Libya to the Moroccan shores of the Atlantic Ocean became French territory, with large scale settlement by French colonists especially significant in Algeria. Although never formally a British colony, Egypt effectively became subservient to British interests.
Nevertheless, the Entente did at least mean that two of the most powerful nations in Europe were at peace and a balance to the rising power of Germany in the years before the First World War. It also marked the basis for an alliance with France as the threat of war in Europe loomed. The Entente almost coincided with the start of an Anglo-German naval race. The laying down of the first all-big-gun battleship, HMS Dreadnought, in 1905, overnight made all other battleships obsolescent when she joined the fleet in 1906, having taken just a year to build. In one stride, the Royal Navy had left all other navies behind, but in doing so, it had, paradoxically, also thrown away its own overwhelming numerical superiority over its rivals. The race to build the largest fleet of Dreadnought battleships and battlecruisers was open to anyone with the necessary shipbuilding capacity, and the Royal Navy could be said to have been starting from scratch once again. On paper, the Royal Navy was still the equal of any two navies it was likely to engage in combat, but at sea, the gap had closed dramatically, especially when the Imperial German Navy received its first Dreadnought-type battleship as early as 1907. The United Kingdom still had a superior naval shipbuilding capacity compared to that of Germany, but the parsimony of the pre-war Liberal government meant that money rather than productive capacity was the limiting factor in re-equipping the Royal Navy, while for the Germans it was a simple matter of industrial capacity.
The spark that ignited the First World War was the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne at Sarajevo, Bosnia, on 28 June 1914. After recriminations had flown back and forth, Austria declared war on Serbia on 28 July, leading Russia to mobilise in support of their Slav cousins, while Germany declared war on both France and Russia, and demanded that Belgium allow 700,000 troops to cross its territory to attack France. This last move meant that British involvement was inevitable as the UK was the guarantor of Belgian sovereignty. In anticipation of war, a Triple Entente consisting of the United Kingdom, with its empire, France and Russia was in place, to which Italy and Japan later became allied. Germany and Austria-Hungary comprised the Central Powers, and also gained allies of their own, of which Turkey was possibly the most strategically significant. Both Austria-Hungary and Turkey were concerned to retain their empires, while a war aim of Russia was to free the Slavonic peoples from Austro-Hungarian dominance.
'Entente' rather 'alliance' meant that British and French cooperation was far from smooth. The British were unprepared for a major European land war, and had not experienced such for almost a hundred years. The French probably had not anticipated Germany moving through Belgium, even though this was a far easier route than attacking directly from Alsace and Lorraine. Neither country had exercised with the other, and it seems little short of a miracle that in due course they cooperated as well as they did. Pre-war exercises may well have been considered as being provocative, but it is unlikely that they were even considered. Even within the two nations, the armies were ill-prepared, although the French did at least have sufficient reservists ready to call up, while the British, with their history of small, professional armies, had fewer trained or partly-trained men amongst the civilian population, and it was to take a massive mobilisation to remedy the shortfall in numbers.
Cooperation was not confined to the Western Front. French troops and warships were present at Gallipoli, landing on the coast of Anatolia to create a diversion.
While the conflict devastated Belgium and much of France, and at one time Paris itself was threatened, total defeat never seemed likely with most of France still unoccupied; even a small part of Belgium around the port of Ostend never fell to the Germans. French forces were even able to join those of the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan, as the war ended in an attempt to influence the outcome of the Russian Civil War.
The First World War, or Great War as it was known at the time and for more than two decades afterwards, left both Britain and France financially exhausted and with a massive loss of manpower. Friendly relations remained, but neither had learnt the true lesson of combat: to be prepared.
CHAPTER 2Distant Wars
The end of the First World War was marked in the western democracies with a mixture of relief and anxiety. There was relief that this 'war to end all wars' was over and that the massive toll of casualties had come to an end. This was balanced by concern over events in Russia.
Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War that followed the revolution had been a failure, largely because the makeshift alliance that had been put in place had fallen apart. First, the Poles and other nationalities fighting for independence had given up as soon as their objectives had been attained. Second, this tendency was also reflected in the fact that many foreign forces, such as the Czechoslovaks, simply wanted to return home once their own country had been freed from Austro-Hungarian domination. Third, the wartime allies themselves had different objectives, which meant that equipment was not always sent quickly towards the front, especially in Siberia, where the Americans had different objectives from the British and the French, and the Japanese were playing a different game altogether, with more than a hint of their future policy in the Far East. The Americans in particular saw no reason for the reinstatement of the Romanov dynasty, and later were to be slow to appreciate the threat posed by what was then known as Bolshevism, and only later became more usually known as Communism.
Even the White Russian anti-Bolshevik forces suffered from fragmentation and indecision, while the leaders played power games with no single undisputed leader to rally behind.
The shock waves that passed through the European democracies in particular surpassed those that had followed the French Revolution. As earlier, the fear was that revolution could be exported. This concern dissipated fairly quickly after the French Revolution, but persisted following the Bolshevik Revolution. Coming at the end of an exhausting war, society itself lacked the cohesiveness that would have enabled the democracies to shrug off events in Russia. In Germany, in particular, returning soldiers and others soon made their presence felt, and in several cities, but especially Munich, attempts were made at revolutionary activity.
Such nervousness should not be under estimated. The initial momentum behind the rise of National Socialism in Germany was inspired almost as much by anti-Soviet feeling as by anti-Semitism. Industrialists and others looked for signs of Bolshevik tendencies. One railway manager, appointed to a self-contained operating area of the Southern Railway, on the Isle of Wight, was warned that men in one workshop were suspected of harbouring 'Bolshevik tendencies'. The deteriorating industrial situation in the United Kingdom, which culminated in the General Strike of 1926, only fuelled these fears. In the United States, the Wall Street Crash was seen as a very real crisis of capitalism.
In the United States, initially the Russian Revolution was taken less seriously than in Europe. After all, the new Soviet Union was to be a republic, and wasn't the United States also a republic? This went beyond naivety. Parts of Soviet industry were rescued, even created, with the assistance of American industrialists, especially the motor industry. Given subsequent events, it is also strange that the Soviet aircraft industry benefited to some extent from German involvement, as the Treaty of Versailles forbade German aircraft manufacture, amongst other activities, and Soviet Russia was one of the 'offshore' locations where German designers could continue to develop their ideas.
American attitudes also had their counterparts in Western Europe, where apologists for the Soviet regime soon appeared.
The negotiations that led to the Treaty of Versailles were not only attempts to redraw European boundaries and create a better post-war world, they were also an attempt to seek full retribution from Germany for the damage inflicted by the war. British and, especially, French demands for reparations seriously undermined the Germany economy, creating resentment and hardship. On the other hand, American insistence that aid given to the United Kingdom and France during the war years be repaid in full, meant that neither country could afford to be overcome with concern for their former foe. To some extent, reparations offset the debt to the United States.
Nevertheless, the situation became so acute with the German economy suffering first from hyperinflation and then massive unemployment, that action was necessary. In 1931, the American president, Hoover, imposed an emergency moratorium on British and French war debts, which gave both countries the freedom to ease the burden of reparations on Germany. In 1932, both countries finally ended reparations from Germany. Hoover, meanwhile, turned to the difficult task of persuading Congress to cancel the British and French war debts.
The truth was that the state of the world economy in the aftermath of the First World War had been such that generosity was in short supply. Governments could not afford welfare reform for their own people, let alone for their allies, and certainly not for a former foe. Yet, such problems were largely in the West. In the Far East, Japan had been remarkably unaffected by the war years, and indeed, despite being one of the allies, had contributed relatively little to the war effort. Mention has already been made of Japanese duplicity during the Russian Civil War, but Japan had already indicated its intentions as early as the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 — 05.
The Americans, for their part, did not want to see the cancellation of war debt as a means of releasing funds for British and French rearmament. The result was that, in 1932, the United States launched two conferences, one for disarmament in Geneva and the other in Lausanne for international debts. These followed on from earlier attempts to impose limitations on armaments, such as the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which imposed limits on the size of the major navies, including restricting the total tonnage of ships, the maximum size of warship in each category and limits for the total tonnage of each category of warship. For Germany, the Treaty of Versailles had banned aircraft manufacturing, an air force and even, at first, commercial aviation, while the Germany army was limited to 100,000 men and the navy became simply a coastal defence force. The treaty also imposed tight restrictions within Germany, so that the Rhineland was demilitarized.
From the German point of view, the outcome of the war had been one of constant injustice. Apart from the burden of reparations, the country had also lost its few colonies. Hitler, and others, were amongst those who saw colonial possessions as providing a captive market, and also space or Lebensraum into which expanding populations could move. Indeed, not only Germany but also both Italy and Japan were inspired by the need to establish empires, having missed their share of the colonial expansion of the nineteenth century, largely because Italy itself had been fragmented and because Japan had been isolationist. Another factor that all three countries had in common was a paucity of natural resources, with Germany having massive reserves of coal, but nothing else, while Italy and Japan didn't even have this to any appreciable extent.
So it was that markets were not the sole driving force behind German and Japanese expansionism. Both countries lacked natural resources, although Germany at least had coal. Nor were German intentions aimed mainly at securing the return of her colonies, such as South West Africa and German East Africa. Germany was looking east, but within Europe, but at first such intentions were kept from the world at large and simply mentioned within the National Socialist Party and the core of the future German armed forces.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Sink the French"
by .
Copyright © 2007 David Wragg.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
CHAPTER ONE - Entente after Enmity,
CHAPTER TWO - Distant Wars,
CHAPTER THREE - Germany Strikes East,
CHAPTER FOUR - The Marine Nationale in 1940,
CHAPTER FIVE - The Balance of Power at Sea,
CHAPTER SIX - Germany Strikes North,
CHAPTER SEVEN - The Battle of France,
CHAPTER EIGHT - Surrender and the French Forces,
CHAPTER NINE - Vichy France,
CHAPTER TEN - Stand Off at Alexandria,
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Conflict in North Africa,
CHAPTER TWELVE - The Cross of Lorraine,
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Madagascar,
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Syria,
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Operation Torch,
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Scuttle!,
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - The French Fleet at War,
APPENDIX I - The French Fleet in 1940,
APPENDIX II - Comparison of British and French Naval Officers' Ranks,
Bibliography,
Index,
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