Churchill’s people might have slept a little easier through that summer had they perceived that they were more happily placed to withstand the siege and bombardment of their island than any other conceivable strategic scenario. Their army had been delivered from the need to face the Wehrmacht on the battlefield, and indeed would not conduct major operations on the Continent for more than three years. The Royal Navy, despite its Norwegian and Dunkirk losses, remained an immensely powerful force. A German fleet of towed barges moving across the Channel at a speed of only three or four knots must remain within range of warship guns for many hours. On 1 July, the German navy possessed only one heavy and two light cruisers, together with four destroyers and some E-boats, available for duty as escorts. The Royal Air Force was better organised and equipped to defend Britain against bomber attack than for any other operation of war. If a German army secured a beachhead, Churchill’s land forces were unfit to expel it. But in the summer of 1940 England’s moat, those twenty-one miles of choppy sea between rival chalk cliffs, represented a formidable, probably decisive obstacle to Hitler’s landlubbing army.
Among the government’s first concerns was that of ensuring that the Vichy French fleet did not become available to Hitler. During days of cabinet argument on this issue, Churchill at one moment raised the possibility that the Americans might be persuaded to purchase the warships. In the event, however, a more direct and brutal option was adopted. Horace Walpole wrote two centuries earlier: ‘No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go to the lengths that may be necessary.’ At Mers-el-Kebir, Oran, on 3 July, French commanders rejected an ultimatum from Admiral Sir James Somerville, commanding the Royal Navy’s Force H offshore, either to scuttle their fleet or sail to join the British. The subsequent bombardment of France’s warships was one of the most ruthless acts by a democracy in the annals of war. It resulted from a decision such as only Churchill would plausibly have taken. Yet it commands the respect of posterity, as it did of Franklin Roosevelt, as an earnest of Britain’s iron determination to sustain the struggle. Churchill told the House of Commons next day: ‘We had hoped until the afternoon that our terms would be accepted without bloodshed.’ As to passing judgement on the action, he left this ‘with confidence to Parliament. I leave it also to the nation, and I leave it to the United States. I leave it to the world and to history.’
As MPs cheered and waved their order papers in a curiously tasteless display of enthusiasm for an action which, however necessary, had cost 1,250 French lives, Churchill resumed his seat with tears pouring down his face. He, the francophile, perceived the bitter fruits that had been plucked at Oran. He confided later: ‘It was a terrible decision, like taking the life of one’s own child to save the State.’ He feared that the immediate consequence would be to drive Vichy to join Germany in arms against Britain. But, at a moment when the Joint Intelligence Committee was warning that invasion seemed imminent, he absolutely declined to acquiesce in the risk that French capital ships might screen a German armada.
Pétain’s regime did not declare war, though French bitterness about Oran persisted for years to come. The bombardment was less decisive in its strategic achievement than Churchill claimed, because one French battle-cruiser escaped, and a powerful fleet still lay at Toulon under Vichy orders. But actions sometimes have consequences which remain unperceived for long afterwards. This was the case with the attack on Mers-el-Kebir, followed by the failure two months later of a Free French attempt to take over Dakar, the capital of France’s African colony Senegal. When General Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator, submitted to Hitler his shopping list for joining the Axis, it was headed by a demand that Hitler should transfer to Spain French colonies in Africa. Yet Vichy France’s rejection of both British diplomatic advances and military threats, together with the refusal of most of France’s African colonies to ‘rally’ to De Gaulle, persuaded Hitler to hope that Pétain’s nation would soon become his fighting ally. He therefore refused to satisfy Franco at French expense. The attack on Oran, a painful necessity, and Dakar, an apparent fiasco, contributed significantly to keeping Spain out of the war.
One part of the British Commonwealth offered no succour to the ‘mother country’: the Irish Free State, bitterly hostile to Britain since it gained independence in 1922, sustained nominal allegiance by a constitutional quirk under the terms of the island’s partition treaty. Churchill had heaped scorn upon Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 surrender of Britain’s Irish ‘Treaty Ports’ to the Dublin government. As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939 he contemplated military action against Eire, as the southern Irish dominion was known. Amid the desperate circumstances of June 1940, however, he responded cautiously to a suggestion by Chamberlain – of all people – that Ireland should be obliged by force to yield up its harbours, which might play a critical role in keeping open Britain’s Atlantic lifeline. Churchill was moved to oppose this by fear of a hostile reaction in the United States. Instead, the British government urged Lord Craigavon, prime minister of the Protestant north, which remained part of the United Kingdom, to seek a meeting with Irish prime minister Éamon de Valera to discuss the defence of their common island. Craigavon, like most of his fellow Ulstermen, loathed the Catholic southerners. He dismissed this notion out of hand.
Yet in late June, London presented a remarkable and radical secret proposal to Dublin: Britain would make a principled commitment to a post-war united Ireland in return for immediate access to Irish ports and bases. Britain’s ambassador in Dublin reported De Valera’s stony response. The Taoiseach would commit himself only to the neutrality of a united Ireland though he said unconvincingly that he ‘might’ enter the war after the British government made a public declaration of commitment to union.
The British government nonetheless urged Dublin to conduct talks with the Belfast regime about a prospective union endorsed by Britain, in return for Eire’s belligerence. Chamberlain told the cabinet: ‘I do not believe that the Ulster government would refuse to play their part to bring about so favourable a development.’ De Valera again declined to accept deferred payment. MacDonald cabled London, urging Churchill to offer personal assurances. The prime minister wrote in the margin of this message: ‘But all contingent upon Ulster agreeing & S. Ireland coming into the war.’
On 26 June Chamberlain belatedly reported these exchanges to Craigavon, saying: ‘You will observe that the document takes the form of an enquiry only, because we have not felt it right to approach you officially with a request for your assent unless we had first a binding assurance from Eire that they would, if the assent were given, come into the war…If therefore they refuse the plan you are in no way committed, and if they accept you are still free to make your own comments or objections as may think fit.’ The Ulsterman cabled back: ‘Am profoundly shocked and disgusted by your letter making suggestions so far-reaching behind my back and without any preconsultation with me. To such treachery to loyal Ulster I will never be a party.’ Chamberlain, in turn, responded equally angrily to what he perceived as Craigavon’s insufferable parochialism. He concluded: ‘Please remember the serious nature of the situation which requires that every effort be made to meet it.’
The war cabinet, evidently unimpressed by Craigavon’s anger, now strengthened its proposal to Dublin: ‘This declaration would take the form of a solemn undertaking that the Union is to become at an early date an accomplished fact from which there shall be no turning back.’ When Craigavon was informed, he responded: ‘Your telegram only confirms my confidential information and conviction De Valera is under German dictation and far past reasoning with. He may purposely protract negotiations till enemy has landed. Strongly advocate