Operation Catapult. The History of the Controversial British Campaign against the Vichy French Navy during World War II.pdf

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Operation Catapult: The History of the Controversial
British Campaign against the Vichy French Navy
during World War II
By Charles River Editors
A picture of the French battleship
Strasbourg
under fire
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Introduction
A picture of British planes preparing for an attack against the Vichy
French
Operation Catapult
“You are charged with one of the most difficult and disagreeable tasks that
a British admiral has ever been faced with. But we have complete confidence
in you and rely on you to carry it out relentlessly.” – Prime Minister Winston
Churchill
“90% of senior naval officers, including myself, thought [Operation
Catapult] a ghastly error and still do.” – Royal Navy Admiral Andrew
Cunningham, 1950
Emerging from France's catastrophic 1940 defeat like a bedraggled and
rather sinister phoenix, the French State – better known to history as “Vichy
France” or the “Vichy Regime” after its spa-town capital – stands in history
as a unique and bizarre creation of German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler's European
conquests. A patchwork of paradoxes and contradictions, the Vichy Regime
maintained a quasi-independent French nation for some time after the Third
Reich invasion until the Germans decided to include it in their occupation
zone.
Headed by a French war hero of World War I, Marshal Philippe Petain, and
his later Prime Minister Pierre Laval, Vichy France displayed strong right-
wing, conservative, and authoritarian tendencies. Nevertheless, it never
lapsed fully into fascism until the Germans arrived to reduce its role to little
more than a mask over their own dominion. Petain carried out several major
initiatives in an effort to counteract the alleged “decadence” of modern life
and to restore the strength and “virtues” of the French “race.” Accordingly,
he received willing support from more conservative elements of society, even
some factions within the Catholic Church. Following Case Anton – the
takeover of the unoccupied area by the Germans – native French fascist
elements also emerged.
While the French later disowned the Vichy government with considerable
vehemence, evidence such as fairly broad-based popular support prior to
Case Anton suggests a somewhat different story. The Petain government
expressed one facet of French culture and thought. Its conservative,
imperialistic nature did not represent the widespread love of “liberty,
fraternity, and equality” also deeply ingrained in French thinking, but neither
did it constitute a complete divergence from a national history that produced
such famous authoritarians as Louis XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte.
Of course, this precarious position left Britain in the unenviable position of
figuring out what to do with its once erstwhile ally. France is seldom deemed
a maritime power, yet during World War I and in the interwar period, the
French Navy developed into a relatively powerful fighting force. While it
could not rival the British, American, or Japanese forces, it represented one
of the medium-sized naval powers like Germany or Italy. As such, the French
Navy would have an interesting role to play in the development of the Vichy
state during World War II.
When the Germans conquered northern France and forced the French to
sign an armistice, the French fleet passed under the control of Vichy and its
leader, Petain. Another key figure in the events surrounding the fate of the
French fleet would be Admiral Francois Darlan, a complex man with both
patriotic and ruthless elements who would ultimately die under strange and

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