All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [52]
The prospect of an imminent invasion was less plausible than Britain’s chiefs of staff supposed and Churchill publicly asserted, because the Germans lacked amphibious shipping and escorts to convoy an army across the Channel in the face of an immensely powerful British fleet. Hitler’s heart was never in it. But intelligence about his means and intentions was fragmentary: decryption of enemy cipher traffic at Bletchley Park* lacked anything like the comprehensive coverage achieved later in the war. Much German activity, or absence of it, on the Continent was shrouded from London’s knowledge. British service chiefs, traumatised by the disaster in France, attributed almost mystical powers to the Wehrmacht.
Privately, Churchill was always sceptical about the invasion threat, but he emphasised it in his rhetoric and strategy-making throughout 1940–41, as a means of promoting purposeful activity among both his people and the armed forces. He judged, surely rightly, that inertia and an understanding of their own impotence would be fatal to the spirit necessary to sustain morale, and to his hopes of inducing the United States to enter the conflict. There must be no return to phoney war: since defence against prospective invasion was the utmost the home army could encompass, he projected this as its principal task for many months after it became plain that the danger had passed.
Following the fall of France, the prime minister’s ruthlessness was first displayed against his recent allies. One morning in July 1940, armed Royal Navy parties boarded French warships in British harbours to demand their surrender. At Devonport, officers of the submarine Surcouf resisted, starting a gun battle in the control room during which one French and three British sailors were killed. Three-quarters of French servicemen in Britain, including most of those rescued from Dunkirk, insisted on repatriation, a choice in which the British indulged them. French alienation increased after a British ultimatum to their battle squadron at Mers-el-Kébir was rejected on 3 July. Churchill was determined that Pétain’s fleet should not support a German invasion of Britain. Admiral Marcel-Bruno Gensoul refused either to renew the war alongside the Royal Navy, or to accept neutrality under British guard. Admiral Somerville thereupon sank or shelled into wreckage three of Gensoul’s ships, killing 1,300 sailors. Churchill feared the assault might cause the Pétain regime actively to ally itself with the Nazis, though this did not dissuade him from giving the fire order. Vichy did not become a formal belligerent, and a few remote African colonies ‘rallied’ to Brigadier-General Charles de Gaulle’s ‘Free France’ in London. But French forces vigorously resisted every British encroachment on their territories until the end of 1942.
It seems mistaken to suppose that the policies of Pétain, and the widespread support they commanded, represented mere fallout from French defeat. The Vichy government welcomed the opportunity to impose what Michael Burleigh has called ‘a regressive moral, political and social agenda in which authority and duty would trump liberty and rights’. Pathological hatred and fear of the left – and of Jews – caused almost all of aristocratic, commercial and bourgeois France to back Pétain until German oppression became intolerable and Allied victory plainly inevitable.
The Luftwaffe air assault on Britain which began in July 1940 offered Churchill’s people