Inferno - Max Hastings [54]
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. Adm. Marcel-Bruno Gensoul refused either to renew the war alongside the Royal Navy or to accept neutrality under British guard. Adm. James Somerville thereupon sank or shelled into wreckage three of Gensoul’s ships, killing 1,300 sailors. Churchill feared that 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 Brig. Gen. 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 their best opportunity to engage the Germans on favourable terms. The only class of ground or aerial weapons system in which the British had near parity with their enemies in quality and quantity was the single-seat interceptor fighter. The RAF’s Hurricanes and Spitfires were handicapped by clumsy tactical doctrine and .303-calibre machine-gun armament with inadequate destructive power, but squadrons were controlled by the most sophisticated radar, ground-observer and voice-radio network in the world, created by an inspired group of civil servants, scientists and airmen. If the equipment and performance of Britain’s army remained unsatisfactory throughout the war, Churchill’s nation far surpassed Germany in the application of science and technology: mobilisation of the best civilian brains, and their integration into the war effort at the highest levels, was an outstanding British success story. The RAF had developed a remarkable system of defence, while their opponents had no credible system of attack.
The Luftwaffe’s commanders suffered from a confusion of objectives which persisted throughout the summer. Gen. Albert Kesselring opposed the assault on Britain, preferring instead to seize Gibraltar and gain dominance of the Mediterranean; Hitler initially vetoed bombing of British cities, while Göring rejected attacks on southern ports, which would be needed for the Wehrmacht’s landings. The Luftwaffe sought to gain dominance of the airspace over southeast England by destroying Fighter Command, and embarked on an incoherent campaign to achieve this by sending bombers to attack airfields and installations,