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Seven: With Friends like These
- Indiana University Press
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Anglo-american historiography of the Second World War and the war at sea invariably traces the course and outcome of the two conflicts that together made up the Second World War in terms of the defeat of the German submarine offensive against shipping and the American advance across the southwest and central Pacific to the Japanese home islands. In the European conflict the focus of most historical attention has been on the British Navy, and specifically its escort forces, and the German U-boat service, and in the Pacific upon American carrier and amphibious formations. In a very obvious sense it is right and proper that this should be the case: at sea the European war was largely synonymous with the “Battle of the Atlantic,” whatever that phrase might mean, and in the Pacific the war was decided by fleet actions that ran in tandem with landing operations; the Imperial Japanese Navy and even the American submarine offensive against Japanese shipping have never been afforded consideration and recognition commensurate with that afforded American carrier operations. But the Second World War at sea involved seven major navies, and three of these have received no more Anglo-American attention than has been afforded the fact that in September 1945 the third largest navy in the world was that of Canada. Of the three navies that “make up the numbers,” the Soviet Navy has been given historical attention in accord with its contribution to victory . It had virtually no “blue-water” capability and role, and in the Great Patriotic War’s first weeks it took such losses that its importance was, at very best, chapter seven With Friends like These 224 The Second World War: The European Theater marginal, as the record of operations in the Baltic indicates. It had a very limited role in northern waters, and the Soviet merchant marine was important in the Pacific, specifically in the movement of U.S. lend-lease shipments across the northern ocean, but in terms of Soviet survival and victory in the Second World War the Soviet Navy was largely irrelevant. The second of these three navies, the Royal Italian Navy, suffered the ultimate humiliation—surrender without having been defeated in battle. The third of these three navies, and the navy that was the inter-war counterpart of the Royal Italian navy, was that of France. The author would plead guilty to any charge of Francophilia to which he was subjected, but one does not have to admit to such prejudice to see in the record of the French Navy in the Second World War a poignancy, a melancholy and sad languor that speaks of suffering synonymous with humiliation and destruction, a destruction at the hands not of enemies but of past and future friends and, worst of all, elle-même. * * * The story of the French Navy in the Second World War has two signposts, those marked Mers El Kébir and Toulon. In truth, though, even the most cursory treatment should properly consider French naval operations in the first ten months of war, when the French naval contribution to the Allied cause was perhaps more substantial than is often realized: the July 1940 episode and its immediate aftermath, the war with Thailand, the nemesis of November 1942, and then what might be defined as a very small “nice-to-have role” in the war’s last thirty-three months. The Thai episode is obviously the most esoteric and least known, and indeed it possessed no lasting importance; the French victory in the action off Koh Chang on 17 January 1941 was undone within a matter of days as a result of Japanese intervention, which, with the treaty of 11 March 1941, saw Thailand’s acquisition of various gains for which it had begun hostilities and which reversed the territorial losses that it had incurred at French hands in the treaties of 1984, 1904 and 1907. But the 17 January 1941 action is worthy of only en passant reference and proved small change in a series of events that were nothing short of disastrous for the French Navy.1 * * * The story of the war’s first ten months is invariably portrayed as a successful British clearing of the high seas of German shipping and an allegedly brilliant victory won in the Rio Plata, though in truth this was not so much a British victory as a German defeat: in the action of 13 December 1939 the panzerschiff Admiral Graf Spee should have prevailed...