‘Duty before honour’: HMS Hood at Oran, Wednesday 3 July 1940
We have seen from our evocative post on 5 September that one of HMS Hood’s
last assignments before her loss in May 1941 was to destroy the French Fleet at
Oran in French Algeria. Despite Admiral François Darlan’s assurances that the
Axis* powers would never seize the Fleet, the British government were certain
that it would be deployed against the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean.
On 2 July James Somerville, commander of Taskforce H, was ordered to sail from
Gibraltar to the port of Mers-el-Kébir, with the flagship Hood, the battleships
Resolution and Valiant, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, and an escort of cruisers
and destroyers.
The French commander Marcel-Bruno Gensoul refused to disarm or scuttle** the
Fleet, so Somerville opened fire at 5.55pm. Attacking from open water while the
French ships were trapped in the harbour, the taskforce fired 55 rounds; Hood
received two hits, causing minor shrapnel injuries.
The Swordfish*** aircraft launched from Ark Royal saw a ‘heavy and accurate’
French response, met with ‘steady and deliberate’ fire. The action ‘lasted for less
than 15 minutes, ... and the destruction ... was terrible’. The battleship Bretagne’s
magazine exploded, Gensoul’s flagship Dunkerque was hit four times, the
battleship Provence sank, and the destroyer Mogador had its stern blown off.
1297 French servicemen were killed and 350 injured; the taskforce lost two
crewmen and five aircraft. The battleship Strasbourg escaped to Toulon, but was
scuttled in November 1942.
An action against men and ships who were technically neutral and had worked
closely with Hood and her crew, though imperative, was felt to be contentious.
Somerville called it a ‘tragedy ... [of which] we all feel thoroughly ashamed’; he
wrote to his wife: ‘my heart wasn’t in it and you’re not allowed a heart in war.’
*The Axis powers allied against the UK were Germany, Italy and Japan.
**To scuttle a ship is to deliberately sink it.
***The Fairey Swordfish was a fabric-covered torpedo bomber biplane, looking
like a fragile dragon-fly but a key actor in the loss of Bismarck on 27 May 1941.
Thanks are due to The Daily Chronicles of World War II, ‘British Justify
Destruction of French Fleet at Mers-el-Kébir’, https://ww2days.com/royal-navy-
destroys-french-fleet.html; to the HMS Hood Association, for Sub-Lieutenant R.G.
Phillips’ account of the battle and Appendix No. 1 to Hood Report No. 0130, 5 July
1940, http://www.hmshood.org.uk/history/forceh/oran.htm; and to Thomas
Parker, ‘When Winston Churchill Bombed France: The Battle of Mers-el-Kébir’,
The National Interest 13 August 2016. Ronald Phillips was Paymaster on Hood
and died with Keith Peel when the ship was lost.
