When Churchill bombed France.

• Author: Parker, Thomas

On June 22, 1940, the French signed an armistice that left Germany largely in charge of the northern half of France with Vichy in charge of the southern half and the French colonial empire. No one, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, knew whether Britain would fight on alone or seek its own armistice with Germany, as Hitler and many other European leaders anticipated. Winston Churchill believed that to continue the war he had to prevent France's naval fleet, the second largest in Europe, from falling under German or Italian control. The fleet, which had seen little fighting, was intact; about 40 percent of its tonnage was in Toulon near Marseilles, another 40 percent in North Africa and about 20 percent in the United Kingdom, Alexandria and the French West Indies.

The Franco-German armistice had left the fleet in the hands of Vichy France, though under German and Italian "administrative supervision." Churchill's nightmare was that the Axis would take possession of much of the fleet through pressure on the French government or with a quick armored thrust to Toulon. A combined Franco-Italian-German fleet could dominate the Mediterranean.

While the German navy and Mussolini lobbied to make Churchill's nightmare real, Hitler had a more sophisticated calculus. He feared the French fleet would sail for the United Kingdom if Germany tried to take it over. Hitler therefore turned down Mussolini's request to assume control of the fleet in a June 18 meeting in Munich, explaining that French destroyers under British control would tilt the military balance against German submarines in the Atlantic. Thus, both Churchill and Hitler saw the French fleet more as a threat than potential asset.

Vichy France had its own calculus. Senior French officials led by Head of State Philippe Petain believed correctly that the threat of the French fleet joining the United Kingdom provided a certain leverage over the Germans, including keeping them out of the unoccupied French zone and perhaps out of the French North African colonies as well. The French in fact had made the armistice contingent on their right to man their own naval vessels. Their naval chief of staff Francois Darlan, for his part, sailed the Atlantic fleet to Toulon and destroyed the Atlantic naval bases to thwart German designs as France collapsed. He gave orders to his admirals to scuttle their ships if the Germans tried to take them--something he told Britain's First Sea Lord Dudley Pound on June 18. Gen. Charles de Gaulle assured the British that the French naval commander was serious. "The fleet is Darlan's fief. A feudal lord does not surrender his fleet."

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Despite these assurances, the British began to pepper the French with questions about the fleet's future as the fighting drew to an end. Darlan compared those polite but insistent interrogations to "heirs visiting a dying man." Since the British could do little about the fleet in Toulon, which was well guarded by shore artillery, they turned to the fleet in North Africa. Churchill was particularly concerned about two modern battle cruisers at Mers el-Kebir, three miles west of Oran, the Dunkerque and the Strasbourg, and two modern battleships, the Richelieu at Dakar in Senegal, and the Jean Bart at Casablanca. All were superior to their German equivalents.

Initially, Britain's naval officials were strongly opposed to attacking the North African fleet even if the French navy refused the British ultimatum to France: sail the fleet to the UK or the French Caribbean, or scuttle it. The naval officials had two concerns: Militarily, an attack might not sink the most modern French vessels and would probably result in British losses. After the attack, France would likely retaliate; at worst, the UK could find itself in a naval war with France, including with its submarine fleet. Politically, the French colonial empire, whose loyalties were still uncertain, would be more likely to side with Vichy than with de Gaulle's Free French Forces.

However, the British cabinet and senior naval officials (though not mid-level ones) soon came around to Churchill's view as French officials turned aside British appeals. The British felt they could not risk having the North African fleet pick up anchor one night and arrive the next morning in Toulon, a glittering potential prize for Germany. Nor could the British spare...