George E. Melton. From Versailles to Mers el-Kébir: The Promise of Anglo-French Naval Cooperation, 1919-40. Washington, DC: Naval Institute Press, 2015. 288 pp. $42.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-61251-879-4.
Reviewed by Bradley Cesario (Texas A&M University)
Published on H-War (June, 2018)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)
Histories of the French navy between the world wars often focus on the immediate prewar and early World War II era, portraying the French fleet as inevitably slipping towards dissolution and defeat. George E. Melton’s From Versailles to Mers-el-Kébir takes a broader view, one that is openly sympathetic toward French efforts to establish a useful professional relationship with the British Royal Navy throughout the interwar years. As Melton notes in his introduction, this work “does not pretend to be a history of either the Royal Navy or the French fleet between the wars. It is instead a study of naval relations, of connections between naval power and diplomacy, and of connections between naval and military power” (p. x). What Melton unearths in his study of these relations is that “there were two main trends framing Anglo-French naval relations between the wars, one local and the other global” (p. 208). The local trend was a continued maintenance of French naval power throughout the interwar period, as opposed to a British fleet that grew only in fits and starts. The global trend was the rise of the Axis powers, which—as Melton claims—could best be defended against in the 1936-7 period by an effective combination of British and French naval power, a combination blocked by British diplomatic intransigence on multiple occasions.
From Versailles to Mers-el-Kébir is divided into thirteen chronological chapters. The first briefly covers the global context of naval treaties and technological developments through the mid-1930s. Next are two chapters on the rise of fascist, particularly Italian, provocation in the Mediterranean and its role in the developing Spanish Civil War. Chapters 4 through 6 deal more specifically with the Nyon Conference, a multinational forum held in 1937 to deal with the issue of Italian submarine warfare on Mediterranean shipping. Melton views Nyon, which created a system of antisubmarine maritime patrols carried out by various Mediterranean naval powers, as a useful opportunity to establish a joint Anglo-French position against the Italians that was somewhat squandered by overzealous diplomatic cooperation with the latter. The following chapter contextualizes Nyon as representative of one of the major sticking points between British and French naval relations: the French wanted a permanent Anglo-French naval accord, while the British preferred diplomatic solutions wherever possible, though it required cooperation with unsavory regimes.
Chapters 8 through 10 examine the high-water mark of Anglo-French naval cooperation, from naval staff talks beginning in late 1938 through the French surrender in June 1940. The next two chapters discuss French attempts to maintain some sort of naval independence after defeat and the related British fears that the French navy might fall into German or Italian hands. These British concerns resulted in the attempted destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in July 1940, which Melton sees as an unmitigated betrayal by the British of their former naval ally. The final chapter is a brief conclusion.
The archival foundation underlying Melton’s work is strong, with heavy use made of both French and British naval records. This is especially true for the chapters on the Nyon Conference, which has received less prior attention from historians than other naval events of the period. At certain points in the later chapters, archival sources are used so frequently that the text reads very much like a document collection; this is certainly useful for the scholar, though more editorial commentary would be appreciated at points. Some minor factual inaccuracies appear with regard to names, but the overall organization of the work is superb: each chapter is divided into multiple subheadings, which is particularly helpful when tracing the convoluted history of international naval treaties during the 1920s and 1930s.
Melton does not include a great deal of historiography in the text, which is unfortunate considering the recent work undertaken by other scholars on similar topics. In particular, From Versailles to Mers-el-Kébir engages directly with David Brown’s The Road to Oran: Anglo-French Naval Relations, September 1939–July 1940 (2003). Melton mentions Brown’s work, but as this monograph takes an opposite position to Brown’s conclusions on Anglo-French naval relations, particularly the attack on Mers-el-Kébir, it would have been helpful for Melton to state his historiographical position at the outset rather than confining it to later chapters. Other recent and useful works by Vincent P. O’Hara, Reynolds M. Salerno, and Martin S. Alexander / William J. Philpott are mentioned only in passing, and one feels Melton’s own Darlan: Admiral and Statesman of France, 1881-1942 (1998) merits inclusion, considering the subject-material overlap between the two studies.
Melton does not shy away from his major contention throughout, which is that the French navy sought direct planning and operational ties with the British as early as the mid-1930s, that the Royal Navy and in particular the British diplomatic establishment preferred instead to focus on piecemeal diplomatic solutions as issues arose, and that the result was a series of missed opportunities to box in and deter fascist, particularly Italian, aggression in the Mediterranean long before it was turned against the Anglo-French alliance during the war. This argument is strongly defended during the earlier chapters, which cover a chronological period often overlooked by authors focusing more on events after the outbreak of war—sections on the Nyon Conference and the Spanish Civil War are of notable interest here. Later chapters on Mers-el-Kébir and its aftermath tend to overemphasize Churchill-bashing and general condemnations of the British government.
From Versailles to Mers-el-Kébir does not settle all historiographic debate as to the effectiveness and broader strategic goals of Anglo-French naval cooperation between 1919 and 1940. What it does is provide a valuable overview of that cooperation from a French perspective. Melton’s work should be read alongside monographs such as those by David Brown and Reynolds Salerno that draw from British and Italian sources. Melton adds a strongly pro-French interpretation to the extant literature, and a necessary interpretive framework to any discussion of naval relations in the interwar era.
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Citation:
Bradley Cesario. Review of Melton, George E., From Versailles to Mers el-Kébir: The Promise of Anglo-French Naval Cooperation, 1919-40.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=50307
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