Comments by "doveton sturdee" (@dovetonsturdee7033) on "Operation Catapult - When the Royal Navy Decimated the French Navy" video.

  1. Not just a captain who could speak French, but one who had been British Naval Attache in Paris, and who knew most of the French Naval High Command (though not Gensoul) personally.
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  2. Don't be so perverse. The British needed to make sure that the French navy would not be used to support a German invasion. No one at the time knew exactly how collaborationalist the incoming French government was likely to be.
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  3. Indeed. Younger sons of monarchs tended to be put on a horse, and sent off to France to die, supposedly heroically, in battle. Sadly, the practice has rather dropped out of favour in recent times. A waste of a good horse, I suppose.
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  4.  @delfinenteddyson9865  This would have left Somerville out of contact with the Admiralty at a time of fast moving events, and there was also the unspoken concern that he might have been 'detained.'
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  5. He had another choice, which was to sail to a French West Indian port where his fleet could remain neutral, under US supervision. Sadly, he chose not to mention this to his own government.
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  6. Try reading about the Miracle of the Marne, or about Verdun.
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  7. 'Like Pearl Harbor' Really? Did the Japanese fleet wait outside Pearl Harbor for several hours, offering the US Pacific Fleet a number of alternative courses of action which could avoid any action, and only threatening to open fire if all were refused? I didn't know that! You do know that FDR planned something similar against the Royal Navy if Britain had surrendered, I suppose? The circumstances were very similar. Just as Roosevelt could not risk the British fleet being used against the US, so Churchill could not risk the French navy appearing in the Channel in support of a German invasion.
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  8. Or even demand that the admiral explain his reasons behind his actions, something he adamantly, to his dying day, refused to do. He must have had some justification, in his own mind at least, for withholding the full text of the British ultimatum from his own government.
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  9.  @TheFjordflier  He is confusing Gensoul with Darlan.
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  10.  @bikeny  The irony is that Darlan was very much the 'father' of the French Navy of 1939, and it is quite possible that he would have considered the French West Indies option as a possibility. Sadly, no-one was ever given the chance to find out.
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