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Inside Operation Catapult – Winston Churchill's "most unnatural and painful" decision
It was a tactical, brutal manoeuvre by Winston Churchill – and a significant turning point in the Second World War.
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- Ed Grenby
Published: Monday, 29 June 2026 at 5:00 pm
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This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
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“This was a hateful decision,” said Churchill, “the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned.” He was talking about Operation Catapult – the summer’s day in 1940 when he ordered a devastating attack on the French navy and the slaughter of 1,300 French sailors. And if you haven’t heard of it, that’s exactly how lots of people would have liked things to remain.
Unfortunately for them, it’s the subject of a new book by Edward Abel Smith, who’s already penned tomes on Nicholas Winton (the “British Oskar Schindler” who inspired the Anthony Hopkins movie One Life) and Ian Fleming’s spying career, as well as working on a couple of historical documentaries for Sky.
“I like to write the kind of history that makes you go, ‘Wow, did this really happen?’ because it sounds like fiction,” says Abel Smith – and, sure enough, A Hateful Decision, his account of Catapult, has all the colourful characters, plot twists, ratcheting tension and explosive denouement of a first-rate thriller.
The story starts, in a sense, at Dunkirk, where “Britain lost its ability to fight on land”, says Abel Smith, “because of all the equipment left behind – 80,000 vehicles, for instance”. The RAF was only a quarter of the size of the Luftwaffe, “so with the Battle of Britain looming, the only strength Britain had over Germany was the Royal Navy.”
As France “crumbled” before the Nazi onslaught, she was offered generous armistice terms – but there was a problem with Article 8. “That stated that Germany would take control of the French fleet, albeit the Germans made a ‘solemn promise’ – that was the expression used – not to use the ships for combat. To trust their word after everything that had happened up to that point would be very foolish; I don’t think anyone, including the French, truly believed the German assurances.
“So to stop the French ships falling into German hands, Churchill presented the French with an ultimatum: voluntarily hand over their ships [to the Allies], take them out of the reach of Germany – or Churchill would order the Royal Navy to do it for them.”
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With France showing little inclination to comply (for fear of angering the Germans and thus receiving less lenient armistice terms), Churchill ordered Operations Catapult and Grasp – the latter a seizure of French ships and submarines that happened to be in UK ports already.
“In the early hours of 3 July 1940, members of the Royal Marines and Navy donned carpet slippers to muffle the sound of their feet, and entered those UK-located vessels, with guns drawn, and presented a letter to the commanders of each ship requisitioning it.
“There was a small firefight on one sub, with three British sailors killed and one French – the first combat between Britain and France since Waterloo – but the operation was deemed a huge success. The ease of it made Churchill even more anxious about the rest of the French fleet, though: ‘If we can do it,’ he thought, ‘so can the Germans.’ They may, after all, have carpet slippers, too.”
The main body of the French fleet, meanwhile, was at Mers-el-Kébir, in Algeria, and, on the same day, Force H, a naval group led by the battle cruiser HMS Hood, arrived there to enforce Churchill’s ultimatum – and in rather more difficult circumstances.
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What followed had elements of farce (“the French admiral was insulted that the British sent a captain, three ranks his junior, to negotiate with him and refused to do so, so an intermediary had to shuttle between the two”), but ultimately ended in tragedy and horror. “Rescuers had to pull barely alive men from the sea by their hair because they were so covered in oil they couldn’t get any purchase on them, then fill up fish barrels with human remains.”
Militarily, it was a mixed success for the British, with some damage sustained, some of their men traumatised, some French ships escaping – and, of course, 1,300 of their erstwhile allies killed. But, insists Abel Smith, “the consequences of not having done it would have changed the entire course of the war”. France’s navy, he explains, was the world’s fourth largest, behind Britain, the US and Japan, with Italy’s the fifth. Add the French one to those other Axis powers, and you have a terrifying global force.
And then there’s another factor: it was Mers-el-Kébir, Abel Smith’s research shows, that finally convinced US President Roosevelt that Churchill would fight to the end and not surrender. That was “a huge turning point” in the support that America gave to the war, he says.
As so often, in fact, Churchill himself perhaps put it best. Operation Catapult, he wrote, “was Greek tragedy. But no act was ever more necessary for the life of Britain and for all that depended upon it.”
A Hateful Decision: Churchill's Darkest Hour and the British Attack on the French Navy by Edward Abel Smith is available to buy now.
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Authors
Ed GrenbyAssociate Editor, Radio Times
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