Attack on Mers-el-Kébir
The attack on Mers-el-Kébir (Battle of Mers-el-Kébir) on 3 July 1940, during the Second World War, was a British naval attack on neutral[3][a] French Navy ships at the naval base at Mers El Kébir, near Oran, on the coast of French Algeria. The attack was the main part of Operation Catapult, a British plan to neutralise or destroy neutral French ships to prevent them from falling into German hands after the Allied defeat in the Battle of France. The British bombardment of the base killed 1,297 French servicemen, sank a battleship and damaged five other ships, for a British loss of five aircraft shot down and two crewmen killed. The attack by air and sea was conducted by the Royal Navy, after France had signed armistices with Germany and Italy, coming into effect on 25 June.
This article is about the WWII British naval raid. For other uses, see Battle of Mers El-Kebir (disambiguation).
Of particular significance to the British were the five battleships of the Bretagne and Richelieu classes and the two fast battleships of the Dunkerque class, the second largest force of capital ships in Europe after the Royal Navy. The British War Cabinet feared that the ships would fall into Axis hands. Admiral François Darlan, commander of the French Navy, assured the British, even after the French armistices with Germany and Italy, that the fleet would remain under French control, but Winston Churchill and the War Cabinet judged that the risk was too great. Darlan repeatedly refused British requests to place the fleet in British custody or move it to the French West Indies, out of German reach.
The British attack was condemned in France as an attack on a neutral nation and resentment festered for years over what was considered betrayal by a former ally.[8] The French thought that their assurances were honourable and should have been sufficient. Marshal Philippe Pétain, who was appointed the Prime Minister of France on 16 June, severed diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom on 8 July.
French aircraft retaliated by bombing Gibraltar and French ships exchanged fire several times with British ships, before a tacit truce was observed in the western Mediterranean. On 27 November 1942, after the beginning of Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa, the French Navy foiled Case Anton, a German and Italian operation to capture its ships at Toulon, by scuttling them. In 1997, Martin Thomas wrote that the British attack at Mers-el Kébir remains controversial but that other historians have written that it demonstrated to the world that Britain would fight on.[6]
Operation Catapult[edit]
Plymouth, Portsmouth and Alexandria[edit]
Along with French vessels in metropolitan ports, some had sailed to ports in Britain or to Alexandria in Egypt. Operation Catapult was an attempt to take these ships under British control or destroy them. The French ships berthed in Plymouth and Portsmouth were boarded without warning on the night of 3 July.[20][21] The submarine Surcouf, the largest in the world, had been at Plymouth for the last month.[22] The crew resisted a boarding party and three Royal Navy personnel, including two officers, were killed, along with a French sailor. Other ships captured included the old battleships Paris and Courbet, the destroyers Le Triomphant and Léopard, eight torpedo boats, five submarines and a number of lesser ships. The French squadron in Alexandria (Admiral René-Émile Godfroy) including the battleship Lorraine, the heavy cruiser Suffren and three modern light cruisers, was neutralised by local agreement.[23]