Traditional Enemies: Britain's War With Vichy France 1940-42 by John D Grainger

Author:John D Grainger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783830794
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2013-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Islands and Raids

In the year since the Franco-German armistice the undeclared war between the former allies Britain and France had ranged over Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific. It had necessarily been largely a naval war, though considerable military forces had been engaged in Syria. In the process the French overseas empire had begun to break up. The Pacific territories were under Free French rule in most cases, but it was Australian naval power which ensured that. In the Caribbean the United States Navy played the same role, though there it was to safeguard Vichy rule, not destroy it. The African territories were split between the two claimants. Syria and Lebanon had been handed to Free France after the British conquest, but it was clearly British policies which would prevail despite General de Gaulle’s protests.

So far, however, the metropolitan territory had been largely unaffected by the quarrel with Britain. Certain Channel ports, from Dunkirk to Brest, had been subject to sporadic British attacks in their campaign of defence against a possible German invasion. Since the autumn of 1940, however, it was clear that such an invasion was highly unlikely, and after 22 June 1941 it was beyond Germany’s capacity, so long as the German army was engaged in war with Russia. These ports, however, were still menaces to Britain, above all the great ports fronting the Atlantic, which had become major German naval bases. For it was, as ever, at sea that Britain was waging the greater war.

A month before the war in Syria began, while the argument about what to do about that country was still going on between London and Cairo, and between Vichy and Beirut, and while Rashid Ali in Iraq was feeling the pressure of a British force consolidating its landing at Basra, the German navy sent out its greatest ship, the battleship Bismarck, to raid the convoys crossing the Atlantic from the United States to Britain. For ten days the ship was searched for and hunted by every British warship which could be spared. The battle-cruiser Hood was sunk, but in the end, damaged and half crippled, Bismarck was caught and battered and destroyed by the assembled aircraft carriers and battleships of the Home Fleet and Admiral Somerville’s Force H. Sinking Hood was its only success, for it never found a single merchant ship. Nor did its companion, the cruiser Prinz Eugen, do any better, though it was at sea a good deal longer.1 The convoys had been well protected.

When its course was plotted, it became clear that the ship was heading for the port of Brest, or perhaps St Nazaire. Had it reached one of those French ports it could have been repaired, and, along with its original partner, Prinz Eugen and the two battle-cruisers already at Brest, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, it would have been a very potent threat to, once again, the Atlantic convoys – or even possibly a cover for a renewed attempt at invasion of the British Isles. It

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