Dakar expedition

Dakar expedition. After the fall of France in June 1940 the possibility that the Germans might threaten British convoys routed via the Cape of Good Hope, by establishing themselves in this French West African port, alarmed the British. Various preventive measures were discussed, and an Anglo-French expedition was proposed which would first land Free French troops around the port, in the hope that they would not be opposed by the forces of the Vichy French government holding it. Maj-General N. Irwin was appointed the expedition's land commander and Vice-Admiral John Cunningham its sea commander.

Although intelligence—which was otherwise inaccurate or non-existent—indicated that de Gaulle, who accompanied the expedition, would not be welcome, 4,200 British and 2,700 Free French troops left Liverpool on 31 August 1940. While the expedition was at sea a Vichy French cruiser squadron slipped unopposed out of the Mediterranean (see North, Admiral). Its mission was to support Vichy forces in Gabon and to return the French Cameroons to the Vichy fold, but en route it put in to Dakar causing great consternation. Churchill wanted to cancel the operation, but was dissuaded from doing so by the commanders on the spot. The Vichy squadron tried to leave on 19 September, before the operation began, but was chased by Allied warships. Two cruisers managed to return to Dakar, two others were escorted to Casablanca.

Instead of the imposing armada that Churchill had imagined Dakar residents would wake to, fog blanketed the area when the operation was launched on the morning of 23 September. Free French officers were landed by air and boat to negotiate the port's peaceful transfer, but they received a hostile response as did an advance landing party. The battleship Richelieu and the port's batteries opened fire, badly damaging a British cruiser and an old battleship. Desultory firing continued for two days amid fog, smokescreens, and increasing confusion, before the operation was eventually abandoned.

Breaches of security in London by the Free French had alerted the Vichy government to the expedition, but its ultimate destination had remained unknown. However, a broadcast by de Gaulle as the Allied force arrived off the port gave Dakar's governor-general plenty of warning. There is no truth in the story that the governor, down to his last few rounds of ammunition, was drafting a surrender letter when the expedition withdrew. If it had been true, it would be difficult to know whether it would have completed, as the historian F. H. Hinsley has succinctly commented (in British Intelligence in the Second World War, Vol. 1, London, 1979, p. 158), ‘a tale of avoidable errors or closed a list of unavoidable misfortunes’.

Bibliography

Marder, A. , Operation ‘Menace’ and the Dudley North Affair (Oxford, 1976).