In his The Second World War, Volume II: Their Finest Hour (1949), Winston Churchill wrote:

After the collapse of France the question which arose in the minds of all our friends and foes was: ‘Will Britain surrender too?’ So far as public statements count in the teeth of events, I had in the name of His Majesty’s Government repeatedly declared our resolve to fight on alone.

British determination to face down the Nazi juggernaut after the Allied collapse in Western Europe in the early summer of 1940 has to some extent become the stuff of legend, propagated early on by Churchill himself. There is no doubt that Churchill was a bold and dynamic wartime leader, perhaps best exhibited in his 18 June 1940 speech to the House of Commons, in which he rallied his government in the face of the French collapse:

What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization… Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, ‘This was their finest hour.’

In the months following this speech, Great Britain had its ‘finest hour’ in blunting the assault of the vaunted Luftwaffe in the skies over southeastern England in the Battle of Britain. Reading popular narratives of World War II, particularly those about the British experience in the critical year of 1940, one typically gets the idea that Churchill’s ‘Finest Hour’ speech was prophecy, and that his decision to ‘go it alone’ was a calculated and predestined path eventually culminating in final victory. It certainly makes for a modern saga.

The Battle of Britain was not the first test in which Churchill led the British along their ‘go it alone’ trajectory, however. That battle took place in the small Algerian port of Mers el-Kébir in the sweltering heat of early July 1940, and it would not be fought against the Nazis but the French. The Battle of Mers el-Kébir on 3 July 1940 – the British Royal Navy attack against a powerful battle squadron of the French Marine Nationale in the wake of the French armistice with the Axis powers – usually receives a mere brief mention in general histories of World War II. The justification for the sudden and shocking British attack against its former ally is usually assessed as the following: the destruction of the French fleet served as a necessary statement (and evil) to the world that was needed by Great Britain to demonstrate its resolve to fight on, alone if necessary, against the tyranny of Nazi Germany. This assessment places the Battle of Mers el-Kébir as a fitting prelude to the Battle of Britain in the epic ‘Finest Hour’ narratives of the Battle of Britain. The primary author of this interpretation of the events of Mers el-Kébir was arguably Winston Churchill himself.


In his The Second World War, Volume II: Their Finest Hour (1949), Churchill wrote the following of his and his War Cabinet’s decision to attack the French:

The War Cabinet never hesitated. Those Ministers who, the week before, had given their whole hearts to France and offered common nationhood resolved that all necessary measures should be taken. This was a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned. It recalled the episode of the seizure of the Royal Navy of the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1807; but now the French had been only yesterday our dear Allies, and our sympathy for the misery of France was sincere. On the other hand, the life of the State and the salvation of our cause were at stake. It was Greek tragedy. But no act was ever more necessary for the life of Britain and for all that depended upon it. It thought of Danton in 1793: ‘The coalesced Kings threaten us, and we hurl at their feet as a gage of battle the head of a King.’ The whole event was in this order of ideas.

In epic prose, Churchill seems to suggest that Great Britain was almost predestined to make such a dramatic move against its former ally in order to ensure British survival. One also has to wonder if his invocation of Danton was a deliberate poke at the seeming lack of French resolve in 1940 to defend the republican ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité. In concluding his summary of the events of Mers el-Kébir, Churchill wrote:

Immense relief spread through the high Government circles in the United States. The Atlantic Ocean seemed to regain its sheltering power, and a long vista of time opened out for the necessary preparations for the safety of the great Republic. Henceforth there was no more talk about Britain giving in…

In short, the end clearly justified the means in Churchill’s mind. But was this end the inevitable conclusion in the minds of British and French decision makers in the hectic last two weeks of June 1940? Were the events of Mers el-Kébir such a straightforward and predestined affair?

While Churchill made plain his reasoning for the attack at Mers el-Kébir in The Second World War, Volume II: Their Finest Hour, he also made no effort to conceal from his readers who he thought the villain of the affair was: Amiral François Darlan, the commander of the Marine Nationale and one of the most important power brokers in France in the summer of 1940. Churchill wrote the following assessment of Darlan after the latter decided to side with the pro-armistice faction in the French government:

How vain are human calculations of self-interest! Rarely has there been a more convincing example. Admiral Darlan had but to sail in any one of his ships to any port outside France to become the master of all French interests beyond German control. He would not have come, like General de Gaulle, with only an unconquerable heart and a few kindred spirits. He would have carried with him outside the German reach the fourth Navy in the world, whose officers and men were personally devoted to him. Acting thus, Darlan would have become the chief of the French Resistance with a mighty weapon in his hand. British and American dockyards and arsenals would have been at this disposal for the maintenance of his fleet. The French gold reserve in the United States would have assured him, once recognized, of ample resources. The whole French Empire would have rallied to him. Nothing could have prevented him from being the Liberator of France. The fame and power which he so ardently desired were in his grasp. Instead, he went forward through two years of worrying and ignominious office to a violent death, a dishonoured grave, and a name long to be execrated by the French Navy and the nation he had hitherto served so well.

Did Darlan’s decision not to send the vessels of the Marine Nationale to continue the fight alongside the British Royal Navy immediately make the admiral the self-interested collaborator that Churchill suggested? Could Churchill have neglected to consider a French worldview in which anti-German sentiment and motives did not necessarily equate to pro-British?

These questions and those in the paragraph before are some of the issues I discuss in my new book Mers el-Kébir 1940: Operation Catapult. I should state that the purpose of this book is not to deconstruct Churchill’s narrative, however; rather to place it and explain it among a broader retelling and analysis of this campaign – one campaign among a series in 1940–42 that were waged between the British and the French. I first became interested in the events of Mers el-Kébir back in 2018 when I was writing my Osprey New Vanguard title French Battleships 1914–1945 (NVG 266). I was struck that there was relatively little detailed secondary source material about the battle available… in the English language that is. As I turned to several French sources, I became aware of additional events that took place beyond the bombardment of Amiral Marcel Gensoul’s battleships in Mers el-Kébir harbour on the late afternoon of 3 July 1940 – particularly air engagements between British and French aircraft during the battle and in the days after. I ended up summarizing these latter events in a January 2019 article for the Osprey blog, entitled ‘The Aerial Dimension of Operation Catapult’ 

After further reading, I became fascinated with the degree of chaos among British and French decision makers and communications, caused by the rapid collapse of the Western Front and the fall of Paul Reynaud’s government in France in June 1940. The dramatic scale and rapidity of events in France during those weeks created a maelstrom in the circles of British and French leadership – as well as among the German and Italian leadership – which neither group was prepared for. Courses of action and decisions made were more impulsive than calculated, and it would be impossible to argue that any of the belligerents had detailed contingency plans for the events as they came. The degree of suspicion and hyperbole – fueled by broken lines of communication – festering among British and French leadership as the armistice was negotiated further added to the overall chaos. It eventually dawned on me that a more nuanced and detailed overview of the Mers el-Kébir campaign – one that took better into account French perspectives, as well as the multiple paths in both British and French historiography of World War II – was much needed in the English language.
After a year and a half of pouring through Royal Navy and Marine Nationale records and action reports, and particularly French accounts of the campaign, this Osprey Campaign title is the result of those labors. If you find this book interesting, I hope you will patiently wait for my next Osprey Campaign title – Operation Menace – in which I continue my retelling and analysis of the tragic British–French conflict in the early years of World War II.