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Fairey Swordfish
3 July 1940: As swooping Fairey Swordfish provide British eyes in the sky, the distant guns of HMS Hood rain havoc on French battleships anchored near Oran on the Algerian coast. In mere weeks, the French naval force had gone from valued ally to potential adversary.
“Attack On Mers El-Kebir (Operation Catapult),” Courtesy Deviantart.Com

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Force H to Mers-el-Kébir

After the 1940 fall of France, Britain’s erstwhile ally was now under Axis control. The mighty French fleet suddenly had to
be neutralized—by any means possible.
By Ian Sebire
August 2022
Naval History Magazine
Featured Article
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On 1 July 1940, Vice Admiral James Somerville, the recently appointed commander of the Royal Navy’s Force H, received his first orders from the Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Dudley Pound. Somerville later reflected that the task he had been assigned was “the biggest political blunder of modern times and [it] will rouse the whole world against us . . . we all feel thoroughly ashamed.”

The Allies were in a state of shock in the early summer of 1940. After the hiatus of the so-called Phony War, Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and finally France had been systematically and swiftly overrun by German forces. Britain and its empire now stood largely alone, saved by the English Channel and the Expeditionary Force’s desperate evacuation from Dunkirk.

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Sources:

Charles River Editors, Operation Catapult: The History of the Controversial British Campaign Against the Vichy French Navy During World War II (Amazon: CreateSpace, 2018).

John Jordan and Robert Dumas, French Battleships, 1922–1956 (Barnsley, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2009).

Allen Packwood, How Churchill Waged War: The Most Challenging Decisions of the Second World War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Mark Simner, “Operation Catapult: A Most Disagreeable Task,” marksimner.me.uk/operation-catapult-a-most-disagreeable-task/.

Brooke C. Stoddard, “Operation Catapult: The Attack on Mers-el-Kébir,” Warfare History Network.

Ian Sebire

Mr. Sebire, an English artist and writer, is a regular contributor to Shipping Today and Yesterday magazine and the author of Masters of the Italian Line: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raffaello (Amberley Publishing, 2018). While specializing in merchant-maritime subjects, his broader interests include naval topics as well.

More Stories From This Author View Biography

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