MICHAEL The boats that Capt Bailey could see were Cunningham’s emissaries frantically negotiating with the French Admiral, Gensoul. For Val Bailey and his fellow men, this was one of many actions in the Mediterranean that summer – but what was to follow was to have a profound impact on the rest of the war;

For the Cabinet, deciding that the French fleet should if necessary be sunk was repugnant. But it fell to the man on the spot to decide when all hope of an alternative had to be abandoned. Admiral Somerville was under pressure from the Admiralty, as Correlli Barnet explains …

CORRELLI Well in signalling final instructions to Somerville Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound said, you are charged with one of the most disagreeable and difficult tasks that a British Admiral has ever been faced with, but we have complete confidence in you and rely on you to carry it out relentlessly. Well I certainly have a feeling that Churchill was a bit behind that one too, because it, it has a Churchillian ring about it.

MICHAEL Negotiations had failed. In the harbour of Mers El Kabir were some of France’s most modern warships; tarpaulins covered their decks and their boilers were cold, but they were now designated an enemy of Britain. Val Bailey was part of what happened next.

BAILEY Suddenly at six we got the signal’open fire’. Shells and things were going overhead and bangs and booms were going on inside and finally there was one dirty big bang, which I think was the Bretagne or something going up, but the Hood, the mighty Hood overtook us in the gathering gloom, and as she went past us something came out, a frigate or something came out of Oran, and the mighty Hood turned its entire heavy armament on it and blew it clean out of the water, which we at that time genuinely thought was very unfair, which wasn’t necessary for a thing that size which just disappeared in a big splash.

People said, you know, didn’t you feel sad about it, I didn’t feel a bit sad about it. You know people say but surely you must have felt something, I felt absolutely nothing at all, I mean we’d had an exciting time, far too busy to bother about what the moral issue was, which wasn’t an issue to me.

FX Naval guns

MICHAEL News of the attack at Mers El Kabir arrived at Alexandria. Alfred Fishlock, on board HMS Orion, had been stood down from aiming his 8 inch gun at the French ships moored next to him, but his thoughts were with the men of Force H off the coast of Algeria.

FISHLOCK News came through that H Force had been in action. The mind boggles at the thought of what happened, because what were our friends were now our enemies and we were sinking them.

I hate to think what it would be like for the people taking part in it, knowing full well the people firing the guns, fifteen inch, sixteen inch, six inch, eight inch guns, shells, the casualties were terrific, and a sailor’s a sailor whether he’s French, English, German or whatever.

MICHAEL The casualties were heavy, three battleships had been destroyed, 1,350 French sailors had been killed.

The First Lord of the Admiralty AV Alexander broke the news to the British nation.

ADMIRAL AV ALEXANDER Only when all of the alternatives had been rejected did the Navy take the action which His Majesty’s Government had considered themselves compelled to order as a last resort. In the result to our great sorrow heavy loss has been inflicted on French seamen. It has been a bitter road from the glorious cooperation of the two navies at Dunkirk to the melancholy action at Oran.

MICHAEL No battle honours, no British memorials, little press coverage. But how did Parliament respond? Andrew Lambert

LAMBERT Even at the time it was contentious. Churchill was attacked in the House of Commons, it was said this was a, a really bad thing to have done and it shouldn’t have been allowed. Churchill I think very clearly got up and said I leave it to the judgement of history, and history has to say that right or wrong it wasn’t a mistake, it was necessary, it was unpleasant, but I think it was necessary, so Churchill clearly had an agenda, the French fleet had to be taken off the board, it had to be neutralised, and he was prepared to break the rules and to push his luck all the way.

MICHAEL In breaking the rules, Churchill had ensured that the Royal Navy retained numeric superiority over the German and Italian fleets. Had the French fleet not been sunk at Mers El Kabir, the war might have been lost.

So why then, if this battle was so crucial to keeping Britain in the war, have we forgotten to remember it?

LAMBERT The history that we like to remember is the history that fits everything together and explains how we got where we are now, and Mers El Kabir isn’t a necessary part of that story, we can explain our success in resisting German invasion in 1940 much more conveniently by stressing things we did face to face with the Germans. The Battle of Britain is the fighting at this period against the main enemy and therefore it must be the most important part of the story. The fact that it isn’t is really less important. We need to know how we got to the end of the War without being invaded, how did we stop the Germans? The Battle of Britain is perfect.

MICHAEL But can we attach so much significance to Mers El Kabir as to suggest that it contributed as much as, or more, than the Battle of Britain to keeping this country in the war? Andrew Lambert thinks so.

LAMBERT If we accept that the only way the Germans could have landed in Britain and invaded successfully was across the Channel by sea, then the removal of the French fleet from even the, the complicated position of being an active neutral certainly simplifies the task for the Royal Navy. It allows it to concentrate its forces on the key tasks, which in the Mediterranean remain the Italian fleet, but in home waters the defence of the United Kingdom against invasion. So more ships can be kept at home ready to deal with this threat. So the removal of the French Feet at Mers El Kabir I think plays a critical part in allowing the balance to be drawn and the right forces to be in the right place at the right time.

MICHAEL A view veteran Alfred Fishlock endorses.

FISHLOCK It is a concept that ought to be rectified by the historians inasmuch as they explain that the Battle of Britain, while it was for the RAF was a wonderful achievement for the amount of equipment they had, what must also be realised that the aircraft can only cover a certain area and can only remain in that position of a, as a fighting unit for a certain amount of time, whereas ships were there for days and days, and while we’ve got ammunition aboard we should be fighting that ship. There’s no danger of us ever packing in, we’d have been going in and while the ammunition there we should have been having a go.

MICHAEL But Air Commodore Peter Brothers, who fought in the Battle of Britain, dissents.

BROTHERS The Navy couldn’t have done it, dive bombers would have sunk them I’m afraid, narrow waters to operate, they’d have no room to manoeuvre in the Channel. The stoker boys, the dive bombers, they were good and they had overwhelming numbers, didn’t matter how many the enemy shot down there were still plenty more left. The Navy took a long time to learn the lesson and I think it finally struck home when the Japanese sunk the Prince of Wales in ... and they hadn’t got air cover and they were just decimated by Japanese air attack. That’s why the Navy were kept out of the way up at Scapa Flow, let’s face it. I’m afraid I know the Navy find this very disheartening, but, but they had their day at Trafalgar.

MICHAEL The Battle of the Channel never happened. But within a month of each other in 1940 two other battles did – we remember one, and the other is almost entirely forgotten. And yet both had an enormous influence on the outcome of the war. The Spitfires and Hurricanes of the air battle denied air supremacy to the Germans, whilst the Battle of Mers El Kabir ensured that the Royal Navy would retain the unchallenged superiority needed to repel any sea borne invasion.

Whatever the finer points of inter-service rivalry, one fact remains obvious, Mers El Kabir deserves to be remembered. Captain Val Bailey cannot overlook it because he was there – but the significance he attaches to it should prompt us to remember what has been forgotten.

BAILEY Yes I think if suddenly the Germans had appeared with the same number of ships taking the French Navy which was big, then we would have had a major bloody problem because we probably would have lost the fleet, I mean in a big battle and they could have damaged us so much we couldn’t have ensured that there wasn’t an invasion of England, so I think it was terribly important.

MICHAEL These two battles illustrate our selective national memory. How easily we remember the action that was close to home, costly of young British lives and heroic – and how easily we forget the messy, unglamorous and morally complicated action that occurred far from Britain and would do little to lift national moral. Yet to remember one event at the expense of another does disservice to both, and to their participants and to British history.

Further Reading
Richard Overy The Battle: Summer 1940 (Penguin 2000)

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