The time was September, 1940, the early part of September. Six French warships slipped out of the port of Toulon and passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. No effort was made by the British at Gibraltar to stop them. The rank and file at the garrison assumed that the voyage had been arranged by the Admiralty and the six French ships were fleeing to North African ports to keep them from falling into German hands.
No assumption could have been more in error. After passing through the straits, the six vessels headed south and skirted the North African coast. True, they were headed for a North African port, but they weren’t fleeing from the Germans. Instead, their mission was to insure that French West Africa remained loyal to the Vichy Government. The force consisted of three cruisers and three destroyers. They arrived at Dakar, French West Africa, on schedule, after an uninterrupted passage and disembarked a number of Vichy partisans who secured once and for all the loyalty of French West Africa to Vichy. One of the six cruisers, the George Leygues, also brought ammunition, spare parts, and propellers for the battleship Richelieu, which had been immobilized in Dakar.
In the words of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, “The whole situation at Dakar was transformed in a most unfavorable manner by the arrival there of three French Cruisers which carried with them. . . .”
Quick action had to be taken. It came in the form of an expedition to take Dakar. On the 23rd of September, 1940, two British battleships, H.M.S. Barham and H.M.S. Resolution, four cruisers, six destroyers and a number of transports, in which there was almost a division of Free French and British troops under the command of General Charles de Gaulle, arrived off Dakar for the express purpose of seizing the port. They failed.
The battle itself is unimportant as far as the tactical outcome. The important thing is the strategical lesson which can be learned from the events which brought about the battle.
Whether intentionally or not, the British Navy from the Admiralty on down had assumed that there was little chance of units of the French Fleet being used against them. Before France fell, there was probably not one officer in a thousand in the Royal Navy who would ever have predicted that ships of the French Navy would be used against the British. Such pre-conceived ideas, resulted in the above fiasco.*
We often hear the words, “You can’t build up a navy overnight.” But time has a habit of passing quickly and large navies seem to crop out of history books without warning. There are few allusions to the French Navy during the French Revolution and yet any school boy can tell you Nelson’s great victories of the Nile and Trafalgar were fought against Napoleon’s large fleets. Nor was Japan taken seriously as a naval power before Tsushima Straits. Victorious naval powers seem to spring into being, but very little thought is given to the reason before hand.
In the next few years, the balance of naval power might well shift. It depends largely on the now precarious political situation. In Italy and France, we find large Communist Parties which take their orders direct from Moscow. Both countries are adept at producing good fighting ships. Should the Communist Parties ever take over these two countries, the shipbuilding facilities would be at the disposal of Russia. In the Far East, the strides of Communism have been more rapid. Unless the war in Korea is fought to a successful conclusion, Japan could possibly fall under the Communist yoke. We all know what the efficiency of the Japanese ship building yards was in the last war. Nor did the war diminish the potentialities of her vast ship building industry. Already, her merchant marine is coming back. Lines like the O.S.K. which ended the war with little or no shipping are now operating 54 ships. What the potentialities of the Japanese ship building industry would be with the unlimited resources of all Asia at its disposal is anybody’s guess. Thus, it is apparent that any pre-conceived notions in regard to the balance of sea power along conventional lines, at the end of the next ten years, are exceedingly dangerous. The answer to this on our part is a balanced fleet, capable of rapid expansion, and backed up by an intelligence system which will keep our planners informed at all times as to the naval potentialities existing throughout the world.
There is also another danger not readily so apparent. This danger is the tendency towards unbalancing our fleet. There is the general feeling in the United .States today that the greatest naval menace we will have to face will be from the Russian submarine fleet. While the latent danger of the modern high speed submarine is enormous, we should not unbalance our naval thinking along these lines. Granted our anti-submarine forces have to be strong, but they should be strong on research and the organization of a nucleus from which a tremendous anti-submarine force may rapidly be built, should the war move in such a direction. They should not be built, at the present time, at the expense of the rest of the Navy. The anti-submarine forces in this case are used purely as an example. The same applies to any expansion which tends to unbalance the fleet. New naval weapons appear in every war and will appear in the next one. Witness the Monitor and the Merrimac in the Civil War and the carrier airplane in the last one.
It would seem, then, that to avoid the danger of a pre-conceived naval strategy three things are essential as a foundation upon which to build for victory at sea. These are a balanced fleet, an open naval mind, and a sound system of naval intelligence which will insure the collection of information regarding the naval potentialities of all countries.
* Editor’s Note: See, for a different approach, the review of Le Bataille de Casablanca in the August, 1952 issue of the Proceedings.