It has nothing to do with “French pride”; as you yourself noted the Free French Navy consisted of French ships seized in British ports at the time of the French capitulation as well as ships ‘on loan’ from the RN. What Mers-el-Kébir was wasn’t the British showing up and asking the French Navy to sail with them or scuttle; it was a squadron of the Royal Navy showing up and informing the French fleet there that they had 6 hours to surrender their ships or the British were going to open fire. There were no ships scuttled in Algeria, the British opened fired on and sank some of them, killing 1,297 French sailors.
Scuttled schmuttled. The Brits blew them the fuck up. We’ll get even yet, just you wait.
Many French warships did pull in to British ports, mostly the desperately needed destroyers, and not on the command of their own Admirals either - the British seized those mostly without a fight.
Although the French had promised never to let them fall into Axis usage, the reality is that they had also agreed not to surrender to Germany without first telling Britain.
They actually surrendered without carrying out this promise, and this can as a huge shock both to Britain, but also the those parts of the French army still locked in combat.
If they could fail to keep that rather important promise, then other promises could also be broken - and this must have had some bearing on the decision to attack the French fleet
Maybe the French and Brits still disliked each other a lot back then.
See the Battle of Madagascar between the French and Japanese on one side and the British on the other…
Or for that matter Operation Torch, where US and British forces fought against Vichy French troops in North Africa. World War II was profoundly weird. After that operation, when Germany annexed the rest of Vichy France, Vichy did scuttle the remainder of their fleet rather than have it fall into German hands.
Which explains why they export Renaults.
It’s not so much that WW2 was weird, and more that there never really was such a thing as “the Free French” until, oh, 1946, thereabouts. At which point it became very expedient to have been one of them Free Frenches since circa. 1935.
I hyperbole.
But seriously, De Gaulle was a **nobody **in 1940, and he was a nobody in 1942 too. He, and his government, only became marginally relevant once the Allies needed an alternative to Vichy around the time the landings were locked in.
But 1940 ? No one in metropolitan France ever listened the now famous “call of June 18th”. Nobody. No one recognized him as the “proper” French government in France, and the Allies sure didn’t consult him re:French matters. And the few people who did go into hiding, who did opt to fight against the Germans from 40 onwards, they didn’t do so because De Gaulle told them to. Nor did they didn’t ask him for shit.
But that’s the providential, subtextual flipside to De Gaulle’s notorious assertion that “Vichy wasn’t France”. “But you, my listeners, of course you ARE France. So you’re against Vichy and always have been. So you’re with me, and always have been. Now shut the fuck up or we’ll look into what you were *actually *up to.”
No, the Renaults are for Joan of Arc. The R5 was for Agincourt specifically. Keep up with the grudges !
Admiral Darlan was a Nazi collaborator and a three-faced asshole. He switched allegiances as the wind changed.
Darlan expected Germany to win the war and decided that it was advantageous for France to collaborate with Germany. He distrusted the British, and after the armistice of June 1940 he seriously considered waging a naval war against Britain. As a top official in the Vichy government, Darlan repeatedly offered Hitler active military cooperation against Britain…But he was as much a collaborator as Pierre Laval, and Darlan promoted a political alliance between Vichy French forces and Germany through the Paris Protocols.
Mind you, it appears again, he was perhaps not sincere about being a Nazi collaborator, as he changed faces and sides several times. No one trusted him.
If it had been up to Roosevelt and Churchill, he’d have remained a nobody, too. But he had sufficient admirers in the British Cabinet and Moscow to get past that obstacle.
Not an invasion, but they could have seriously blockaded the UK and wreaked havoc with the convoys, sorta like the bismark x 60.
Declan
But why would you not want your allies who were fighting your enemy to have your war machines? Did the French really believe life under Germany wouldn’t be that bad? I know hindsight and all that, but weren’t people in 1940 already aware of some of the human rights abuses or treaty violations of the nazis?
Towards the end of the war in 1945 the Germans kept trying to surrender, but only to the US, UK and French. They didn’t want to surrender to the USSR. If rumors of the brutality of the USSR could get into German consciousness, why wouldn’t rumors of German brutality get into French consciousness?
If you felt the UK was going to surrender soon and you’d lose your warships anyway I guess I can see their point. But if the UK continued to fight and the Germans lost, that meant the French had regained self determination.
Those in charge of France after June 1940 had more in common with the regimes in Rome, Madrid and Berlin than they had with that in London. They weren’t Nazis, but they were authoritarian, conservative, and xenophobic. The British were former allies, distrustful ones, and needlessly prolonging a war they had clearly lost and which prolongation simply delayed a peace in which France could move on with life.
Hell, people had been aware of Nazi treaty violations and atrocities for years before, and yet they had sincerely believed Hitler could be reasoned with if he were treated with respect. There were many who still felt that way. There were many who admired his gall, and admired his impatience with civil liberties. These were in charge of France after June 1940.
Because the Soviets were communists. Never underestimate the human capacity for double standards. The Nazis may have been sons of bitches, but they were our sons of bitches, dammit.
But also, if they defected and the UK still lost, then they’ve defected for nothing and probably invited huge misery on their families, friends, and their national honour. In July 1940, it was considered overwhelmingly obvious Britain was simply making a show of fighting on to get better terms from Germany. Why on earth would they actually want to continue a senseless fight? Out of concern for Europe? When had Britain ever cared about anyone but themselves?
It’s almost as if the French were coming off the back of a huge defeat, a couple of decades after a war which bled them white, with full knowledge that British foreign policy for centuries had been to encourage the continental powers to fight among themselves and leave the seas alone! I’m British, and I wouldn’t trust us as far as I could throw the Isle of Wight.
And this was in 1940, before Barbarossa and before Pearl Harbor. While it was true that Nazi Germany would probably never have made it across the Channel in force, without the US and USSR, Britain would never have been able to return to the Continent by itself, and could never have defeated the Wehrmacht.
Vichy was still thinking of itself as a world power, and was still ostensibly in charge of maintaining the French overseas colonies and territorial holdings. I’m sure they knew that this ability would only last so long as they didn’t do anything that upset Berlin, but they were no longer allies with Britain, and it’s understandable that they would react badly to such an ultimatum.
Two separate events. They scuttled at Toulon, and were blown to hell at Mers el Kebir.
The German government was actively spreading word of Soviet crimes and atrocities to the German public, and had been since well before the war (the evilness of Soviet Russia was a key element of Nazi ideology) The French public however had not experienced that level of propaganda by 1940, and even if they had, they would have doubted it - because stories of German atrocities in WWI were known to have been exaggerated.
Plus, as of 1940 the Germans weren’t that brutal - at least, as an invading/occupying army. The invasion of Russia had not begun, the “Final Solution” had not begun or even been thought of. The Occupation of Poland was under way and it was fairly nasty, but I’m not sure how much was know about this. In any case, the French had good reason to think that the Germans would treat France (and Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, etc) as a very different case to Poland - which, for quite a while, they did.
You are, as usual, wrong; and as usual your own cites prove you wrong. He seriously considered naval war against Britain because the British had killed over a thousand French sailors and attacked the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir less than two weeks after the French armistice with Germany. It suddenly doesn’t seem so damning, now does it? Yes, he was loyal to the Vichy government in France, so were most of France and the French colonies. He also kept his word, no French vessel fell into German hands; the fleet scuttled when the Germans tried to seize it by coup de main at Toulon in November 1942. As for no one trusting him, you know who did? Well, you would if you read your own cites: FDR and Eisenhower, as well as all of the French troops under his command.