From Versailles To Mers El-K{Acute}Ebir : The Promise Of Anglo-French Naval Cooperation, 1919-40

241 Pages·2015·5.21 MB·English

by  Melton

Naval Institute Press
291 Wood Road
Annapolis, MD 21402
© 2015 by George E. Melton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-61251-880-0 (eBook)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Maps created by Charles Grear.
Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First printing
To the memory of Lieutenant Commander Jack Robert Melton, USNR, Southwest Pacific,
1943–45
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Toward a Global Imbalance
Chapter 2 Fascist Aggression in the Mediterranean
Chapter 3 Tensions in Spanish Waters
Chapter 4 The Road to Nyon
Chapter 5 Solving a Mediterranean Problem
Chapter 6 An Informal Naval Entente
Chapter 7 From Nyon to Munich
Chapter 8 An Anglo-French Naval Alliance
Chapter 9 War on the Periphery
Chapter 10 Twilight of the Anglo-French Naval Alliance
Chapter 11 Toward a Violent Solution
Chapter 12 Blunder at Mers el-Kébir
Chapter 13 The Cover-Up and After
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
Toward the end of 1939 two fast battlecruisers made rendezvous north of
Scotland and slipped unnoticed toward Iceland in search of enemy raiders. Their
mission meshed neatly with a combined Anglo-French naval operation aimed at
tracking down the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, prowling
Atlantic waters south of the equator. The Dunkerque, a new French ship commanded by
Vice-Admiral Marcel Gensoul was escorted by the light cruisers Montcalm and Georges
Leygues and the destroyers Volta and Mogador. The HMS Hood, a handsome but older
ship with capabilities similar to the Dunkerque, was in like manner supported by a spread
of cruisers and destroyers. When the two squadrons merged, the combined force came
under the orders of the highest officer on the scene, Admiral Gensoul, rather than his
British opposite. The Hood therefore served under the orders of a French admiral for a full
week until the operation ended uneventfully in early December, a few days before the
Graf Spee was trapped off the coast of Uruguay and scuttled by her crew.
The combined operation of the Dunkerque and the Hood, unimportant and long since
forgotten, stands nevertheless as an example of cordial Anglo-French naval cooperation at
sea during the early months of World War II. That a British battlecruiser would come
under the orders of a French admiral attests to the mutual confidence that the two naval
commands shared early in the wartime alliance. At the same time, the French and British
crews developed a special affection for each other’s ship, as British seamen fondly
referred to the Dunkerque as “the friend of the Hood.”
The forging of an Anglo-French naval alliance just prior to World War II is but the
happiest chapter in a disturbing history of British and French naval relations between 1919
and the collapse of the alliance in the summer of 1940. This study revisits an Anglo-
French naval courtship still etched in European memories but largely forgotten among
Americans. It is a study of the role of British and French naval power in early World War
II and in the tangled diplomacy of the troubled prewar years when statesmen in London
and Paris struggled with foreign threats at the far limits of their naval and military
capabilities.
The study does not pretend to be a history of either the Royal Navy or the French fleet
between the wars. It is instead a study of naval relations, of connections between naval
power and diplomacy, and of connections between naval and military power. The romance
between the Hood and the Dunkerque is but a brief incident in a larger pattern of
diplomacy that found French and British statesmen struggling with the burdens of a
swiftly changing global power balance. But the promises inherent in Anglo-French naval
cooperation were not equally appreciated on both sides of the channel, as perspectives
from London and Paris on the role of naval power were not identical.
Historians will remember that all of the great naval powers except Germany fought on
the same side during World War I, forming what amounted to a British naval alliance with
France, the United States, Italy, and Japan. The alliances with Japan and France had been
concluded prior to 1914, so that London and Paris had few concerns about the security of
their overseas empires during the Great War. But after the war all of these alliances
collapsed, supplanted by collective arms control agreements binding the five leading naval
powers to security systems that matched poorly new power relationships emerging in the
1930s.
By the mid-1930s the Royal Navy and the French fleet had become overextended in
terms of their global defense commitments, owing mainly to the collapse of the world war
alliances and to an ominous shift in the balance of world naval power. The French fleet
had never been large enough to protect French colonies in Asia, and the Royal Navy,
badly neglected since the Great War, drifted toward obsolescence and inefficiency. At the
same time, Italy and Japan moved toward an alliance with Germany, whose Kriegsmarine
had by 1935 grown strong enough to threaten British and French commercial interests in
the Atlantic. Although the Kriegsmarine was too small to challenge the Royal Navy in a
fleet action, neither the Royal Navy nor the French Marine Nationale were strong enough
to wage a naval war simultaneously against Germany, Italy, and Japan, states emerging
after 1936 as the Axis powers.
The obvious first step in addressing this imbalance was the forging of an Anglo-
French naval alliance so that their combined assets might be distributed or combined in a
manner to maximize their power. Key to that distribution was the Mediterranean Sea. In
1939, and indeed during the latter part of the decade of the 1930s, it was only in the
Mediterranean that London and Paris might expect to support diplomacy with the threat of
overwhelming coercive power. Afterward, when war broke out in the summer of 1939,
entente naval strategy still centered upon the Mediterranean, where London and Paris
could easily combine their assets against Italy, and where geography denied the Axis
powers the advantage of combining their naval assets to defend Italy. In this context,
relations between the Royal Navy and the French fleet assumed an importance greater
than that of Anglo-French military relations, as the limited British military contribution to
the defense of the continent was less relevant than the larger contribution of the French
navy to British defense needs around the globe.
This study therefore focuses on relations between the two navies and on their forging
an alliance to address the operational and strategic problems thrust upon them by the
shifting balance of global naval power. British and French diplomatic initiatives on the
continent are treated comparatively as they related to the Mediterranean, where the
strategy of combined naval power accorded London and Paris a spread of useful options.
Finally, the study concludes with the collapse of the alliance in a violent clash of arms
entirely out of step with happier days when the Hood and the Dunkerque together had
ruled Atlantic waters at the expense of the Kriegsmarine.