An evening with Edward Abel Smith

‘This was a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned . . . But no act was ever more necessary for the life of Britain and for all that depended upon it.’

WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1949

Summer, 1940. Winston Churchill watches in horror as France falls to the Germans in just six weeks, completing the Nazi conquest of mainland Europe. He faces an urgent question: what will happen to France’s mighty navy? Under German control it presents a major threat to Great Britain, and could mark a point of no return.

With the Nazis closing in and time running out, Churchill ordered Operation Catapult. By the end of one of the most agonising but necessary military operations of the war, a large part of the French navy would be destroyed and nearly 1,300 French sailors would be dead, a number which would haunt all involved for the rest of their lives.

Based on extensive new archival research, rediscovered eyewitness accounts and reflections from the private papers of the key protagonists, A Hateful Decision tells for the first time the full story of the British attack on the French navy at Mers el Kébir, on 3 July 1940.