The Day Britain Attacked France — Mers-el-Kébir, 1940

🥇 On July third, 1940, at five fifty-four in the afternoon, the British battleship HMS Hood opened fire on the French battleship Bretagne in the harbor of Mers-el-Kébir, French Algeria. Eleven minutes later, Bretagne's forward magazine exploded. Nine hundred and seventy-seven French sailors died. France and Britain had been allies twelve days earlier.

📜 This is the story of the most morally agonizing attack the Royal Navy conducted in the entire Second World War — and of the British decision to destroy the fleet of a former ally to prevent it falling into German hands.

🕰️ France had signed an armistice with Adolf Hitler on June twenty-second, 1940. Winston Churchill, with no intelligence on Hitler's intentions, feared the French Mediterranean fleet — the fourth-largest in the world — would be added to the German Kriegsmarine. He ordered British Force H, under Vice Admiral James Somerville, to neutralize it by any necessary means.

🌍 What almost no one is taught: the French commander, Admiral Marcel Gensoul, had been given four options before the British opened fire. He could join the Royal Navy. He could sail to a British port under guard. He could sail to the West Indies. He could scuttle his ships in six hours. He rejected all four — and answered: 'French ships will reply to force with force.'

🔔 Watch all the way through for what Churchill told the House of Commons the next morning, what the French Navy did for the next two years, and what stands today at the Mers-el-Kébir harbor where Bretagne sank.

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