Melton - From Versailles To Mers El-K{Acute}Ebir : The Promise Of Anglo-French Naval Cooperation, 1919-40

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

2015 by George E. Melton

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ISBN: 978-1-61251-880-0 (eBook)

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To the memory of Lieutenant Commander Jack Robert Melton, USNR, Southwest Pacific, 194345

CONTENTS

T oward the end of 1939 two fast battlecruisers made rendezvous north of Scotland and slipped unnoticed toward Iceland in search of enemy raiders. Their mission meshed neatly with a combined Anglo-French naval operation aimed at tracking down the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, prowling Atlantic waters south of the equator. The Dunkerque, a new French ship commanded by Vice-Admiral Marcel Gensoul was escorted by the light cruisers Montcalm and Georges Leygues and the destroyers Volta and Mogador. The HMS Hood, a handsome but older ship with capabilities similar to the Dunkerque, was in like manner supported by a spread of cruisers and destroyers. When the two squadrons merged, the combined force came under the orders of the highest officer on the scene, Admiral Gensoul, rather than his British opposite. The Hood therefore served under the orders of a French admiral for a full week until the operation ended uneventfully in early December, a few days before the Graf Spee was trapped off the coast of Uruguay and scuttled by her crew.

The combined operation of the Dunkerque and the Hood, unimportant and long since forgotten, stands nevertheless as an example of cordial Anglo-French naval cooperation at sea during the early months of World War II. That a British battlecruiser would come under the orders of a French admiral attests to the mutual confidence that the two naval commands shared early in the wartime alliance. At the same time, the French and British crews developed a special affection for each others ship, as British seamen fondly referred to the Dunkerque as the friend of the Hood.

The forging of an Anglo-French naval alliance just prior to World War II is but the happiest chapter in a disturbing history of British and French naval relations between 1919 and the collapse of the alliance in the summer of 1940. This study revisits an Anglo-French naval courtship still etched in European memories but largely forgotten among Americans. It is a study of the role of British and French naval power in early World War II and in the tangled diplomacy of the troubled prewar years when statesmen in London and Paris struggled with foreign threats at the far limits of their naval and military capabilities.

The study does not pretend to be a history of either the Royal Navy or the French fleet between the wars. It is instead a study of naval relations, of connections between naval power and diplomacy, and of connections between naval and military power. The romance between the Hood and the Dunkerque is but a brief incident in a larger pattern of diplomacy that found French and British statesmen struggling with the burdens of a swiftly changing global power balance. But the promises inherent in Anglo-French naval cooperation were not equally appreciated on both sides of the channel, as perspectives from London and Paris on the role of naval power were not identical.

Historians will remember that all of the great naval powers except Germany fought on the same side during World War I, forming what amounted to a British naval alliance with France, the United States, Italy, and Japan. The alliances with Japan and France had been concluded prior to 1914, so that London and Paris had few concerns about the security of their overseas empires during the Great War. But after the war all of these alliances collapsed, supplanted by collective arms control agreements binding the five leading naval powers to security systems that matched poorly new power relationships emerging in the 1930s.

By the mid-1930s the Royal Navy and the French fleet had become overextended in terms of their global defense commitments, owing mainly to the collapse of the world war alliances and to an ominous shift in the balance of world naval power. The French fleet had never been large enough to protect French colonies in Asia, and the Royal Navy, badly neglected since the Great War, drifted toward obsolescence and inefficiency. At the same time, Italy and Japan moved toward an alliance with Germany, whose Kriegsmarine had by 1935 grown strong enough to threaten British and French commercial interests in the Atlantic. Although the Kriegsmarine was too small to challenge the Royal Navy in a fleet action, neither the Royal Navy nor the French Marine Nationale were strong enough to wage a naval war simultaneously against Germany, Italy, and Japan, states emerging after 1936 as the Axis powers.

The obvious first step in addressing this imbalance was the forging of an Anglo-French naval alliance so that their combined assets might be distributed or combined in a manner to maximize their power. Key to that distribution was the Mediterranean Sea. In 1939, and indeed during the latter part of the decade of the 1930s, it was only in the Mediterranean that London and Paris might expect to support diplomacy with the threat of overwhelming coercive power. Afterward, when war broke out in the summer of 1939, entente naval strategy still centered upon the Mediterranean, where London and Paris could easily combine their assets against Italy, and where geography denied the Axis powers the advantage of combining their naval assets to defend Italy. In this context, relations between the Royal Navy and the French fleet assumed an importance greater than that of Anglo-French military relations, as the limited British military contribution to the defense of the continent was less relevant than the larger contribution of the French navy to British defense needs around the globe.

This study therefore focuses on relations between the two navies and on their forging an alliance to address the operational and strategic problems thrust upon them by the shifting balance of global naval power. British and French diplomatic initiatives on the continent are treated comparatively as they related to the Mediterranean, where the strategy of combined naval power accorded London and Paris a spread of useful options. Finally, the study concludes with the collapse of the alliance in a violent clash of arms entirely out of step with happier days when the Hood and the Dunkerque together had ruled Atlantic waters at the expense of the Kriegsmarine.

T his study is heavily indebted to St. Andrews University for its generosity in awarding the author several grants to visit archives in Paris, London, and Washington, D.C. In this connection, special thanks are due to deans Lawrence Schulz, Robert Hopkins, and William Loftus. Professor David Herr, chair of the department of history, warmly encouraged the project. Dean Loftus, with his superb language skills, rescued the author more than once from awkward French translations. And Mary Harvin McDonald, university librarian, was always able to obtain for the author even the most obscure articles and sources from off-campus collections.