I saw Churchhills deadly decision a few weeks ago about how in 1940 after the French surrendered to the nazis, churchhill gave the French navy an ultimatum. Either join us, give us (or the US) your warships to hold until the end of the war, or we will attack them so the nazis can’t use them against us.
The French refused, and the Brits attacked. Why would the French not turn them over? They ended up scuttling them anyway. It makes no sense to me why they wouldn’t turn them over to the British, and instead sank them.
The French had surrendered to the nazis, they weren’t going to use them. Did the French navy think they would fight for Vichy France, or were they just sick of fighting and figured they would harbor the ships, hope the Germans were defeated, and after the war was over they could use them again?
Did the French fear the nazis would retaliate against the French?
True, but the nazis were not trustworthy and had just conquered France. Why would France rather scuttle war ships than give them to allies fighting against the nazis? That is like if the USSR invaded Canada and the US told Canada ‘hey, give us all your tanks and airplanes so we can fight against the country that just conquered you and wants to conquer us. If we win this war we will both be free. After the war we will give them back, and if they are destroyed by the war we will pay for new ones’ and Canada said ‘nah, we’d rather just blow them up’.
I am the captain of a military vessel. I have sworn my life to serve my country, vessel and every man on it. I don’t give a god damn if politicians in the capital surrendered. I will not allow the men in my command or my vessel to become a deterrent in the freedom of my nation. Give them up and I am a traitor.
Well, because they had just signed an armistice with the Nazis, and the Nazis would have regarded handing over large quantities of war materiel to the Allies as a hostile act and a breach of the armistice. And since the French presumably felt that the armistice was the least worst option for France, promptly and publicly tearing it up would not have looked like a good idea.
But why not sail to join an ally? Or sail to internment in a neutral port? IIRC that was offered, and the French refused.
Certainly, sink her before allowing her to be seized by an enemy. But who was the enemy in this case? The side that had fought to defend France against the Nazis…or the Nazis?
That is not the ultimatum given to the French fleet and they did not scuttle rather than turn themselves over to the British; they let the ultimatum expire and the British opened fire on their former allies. The reason the French fleet didn’t turn itself over to the British is that the French fleet answered to the French government, not the British one. The armistice the French had signed with Germany stipulated that the French fleet would remain under French control, largely demilitarized and confined to harbor. Churchill had also been personally promised by Admiral Darlan that “No French ship will ever come into the hands of the Germans”. The scuttling of the French fleet was an entirely separate event that occurred two years later when the Germans tried to seize them. The ultimatum as delivered read:
The question you’re asking is really ‘why didn’t the French fleet defect?’ The larger question is why Churchill felt the need to attack the fleet of his former allies rather than allow even the remotest possibility of them being used against the British.
So if a foreign nation conquered your country, your government capitulated and an allied nation said ‘give your ships to us so they don’t end up in the hands of the enemy that just conquered you’ you’d rather sink them?
I don’t see why I"m supposed to be impressed by that behavior.
Considering the behavior of the nazis, and the fact that the nazis eventually tried to take the ships a couple years later, why would the French trust them? This was 1940, after the nazis had renegged on several treaties and agreements. hindsight is 20/20, but even by 1940 it should’ve been apparent that the nazis couldn’t be trusted to follow treaties and agreements.
My impression was Churchill knew that the French fleet being under nazi control would potentially give the nazis the naval power they needed for a land invasion of Britain.
The answer is because they were French. This isn’t a slight or dig against the French, but you have to put yourself in their shoes. While it was humiliating for the French to have been forced to capitulate to the Germans, it wouldn’t have been their first choice to turn their fleet, one of the proudest forces in France over to the British (or the US for that matter). The French considered themselves (and still do) one of the preeminent super powers, and there was no way they would turn their fleet over to anyone. That, and as others noted, they couldn’t know what the Germans would do to the rest of France if they did turn over the fleet to the Brits (or the US)…the Germans basically were occupying France and had installed what for all intents and purposes was a puppet government, so gods know what the repercussions would be to the rest of the nation if that fleet was turned over, intact, to the Brits (I’m thinking ‘bad’ would cover it though). So, they took the least bad option as they saw it and from their perspective…no one got it in the end.
France has always kind of gone it’s own way and done it’s own thing. Look at their actions post war for more examples of this.
The Free French government was set up in London under de Gaulle by June 1940. The Free French had their own navy under the command of Emile Muselier (which included ships seized in British ports like the Triomphant, but also other ships that freely sailed to Britain to join the Navy, and some on loan from the RN to bolster their ranks). Ships scuttled in Algeria could have joined this Free French Navy and fought under a French flag, but didn’t. Further, many French citizens served with the British Army (including the SAS) and Royal Air Force, so “French pride” was obviously not some universal impediment to upping sticks and fighting with the rest of the free world.
So, yeah, I’m having a hard time squaring what else was going on at the time with “the French were too prideful to join with Britain” or “the French Navy was too loyal to France to sail with the British”.
The French and the British were not particularly friendly Allies in 1940. The French saw the British conduct in the Fall of France as shameful - they cut and run at Dunkirk, failed to offer air support, and left the heavy fighting to the French.
All utter bollocks, but the Germans and Petain exploited this resentment into official fact. Many soldiers and sailors did not trust the British, seeing German victory as no worse (in fact, given France’s divisions in the 1930s, perhaps even desirable), and simply could not conceive of Britain continuing the war without France.
So the idea of the French surrendering their fleet to a former, treacherous, perfidious ally which was surely going to submit in the short run anyway, was ludicrous.
They’re not an allied nation anymore, though, are they? You’ve ended the war, they’re still fighting it. It seems like, at this point, your interests have diverged.
This is essentially my take on it, although I’d go even further - that from the start there was an antipathy towards the war itself and hostility to the Allied cause. France had immolated herself in World War I and the idea that it could happen again, for Poland’s sake at Britain’s request - to “fight to the last Frenchman”, was a repulsive one. “Why die for Danzig?” was the question.
So the fact that they were able to get out of the conflict with an armistice with Petain at its head was seen as infinitely preferable to another Verdun style bloodletting, especially when nobody could see how exactly Britain was supposed to win against Germany. “Fusion with a corpse”, is how Petain described a proposed Franco-British union in 1940.
Quite so, and the argument I’ve heard is that the British felt they simply could not take the risk of this pledge being reneged, as doing so would essentially close off the Mediterranean to British shipping overnight. The Royal Navy was seriously stretched due to international commitments without the presence of the large French fleet going hostile.
It also made it abundantly clear to the world that Britain was determined to fight on.
I frankly fail to understand what appears so mysterious to some posters.
France just signed an armistice with Germany. Germany was at war with the UK. Handing over the fleet to the UK was obviously out of the question.
And even ignoring this, a country won’t hand over its fleet to a foreign power engaged in a war it’s not part of (anymore in this case). It will keep it for the day when it will have an use for it.
The only thing that conceivably could have happened is the fleet commanders deciding to defect from France to the UK, which seems an extremely unlikely decision.
France handing the fleet over to the UK would have been an act of war against a country France had just signed an armistice with. On some level it would have been very brave, but an act of war (and treason) it would have been all the same.
Allowing the possibility of Germany getting the ships would have been totally unacceptable to the UK.
Also, something to remember : in 1940, France wasn’t fighting the nazis. It was fighting the Germans who happened to be led by the Nazis. There was not much perceived as particularly remarkable about the Nazis. In Europe, dictatorships were the norm, and democracies the exception. Especially for decision makers who had grown up with a Russian absolute and oppressive monarchy turned without transition into a communist dictatorship, a Germany that went from authoritarian monarchy to fascism with a short failed attempt at democracy, Spain that just went through a civil war between fascists and communism, and so on… Poland was a dictatorship as well, like all central European countries.
Surely losing to Hitler was worst than losing to an hypothetical German democracy, but worst than losing to the Kaiser in WWI? Very unobvious to me. Especially for Petain and his ilk, who to begin with were distrustful of the republican system, believed to be the cause of French issues, including the defeat against Germany itself (and in this case were the ones in charge of deciding what to do with the fleet).
Perceptions of this era tends to be tainted by hindsight perception of the Nazis as evil incarnate. And of course by the knowledge that Germany could indeed be defeated, which would have seemed highly unlikely in 1940. The most likely scenario was the UK accepting defeat and, mostly unharmed, signing a lenient peace treaty with Germany. What actually happened (Germany attacking Russia, the USA joining the war) would have been an extremely far-fetched scenario. And if the UK could defend itself, even alone, there was no conceivable way it could win the war and liberate France.