Operation Catapult: The History of the Controversial British Campaign against the Vichy French Navy during World War II
ISBN: 9781986387804
$9.99
*Includes pictures
*Includes accounts
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
“You are charged with one of the most difficult and disagreeable tasks that a British admiral has ever been faced with. But we have complete confidence in you and rely on you to carry it out relentlessly.” – Prime Minister Winston Churchill
“90% of senior naval officers, including myself, thought [Operation Catapult] a ghastly error and still do.” – Royal Navy Admiral Andrew Cunningham, 1950
Emerging from France's catastrophic 1940 defeat like a bedraggled and rather sinister phoenix, the French State – better known to history as “Vichy France” or the “Vichy Regime” after its spa-town capital – stands in history as a unique and bizarre creation of German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler's European conquests. A patchwork of paradoxes and contradictions, the Vichy Regime maintained a quasi-independent French nation for some time after the Third Reich invasion until the Germans decided to include it in their occupation zone.
*Includes accounts
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
“You are charged with one of the most difficult and disagreeable tasks that a British admiral has ever been faced with. But we have complete confidence in you and rely on you to carry it out relentlessly.” – Prime Minister Winston Churchill
“90% of senior naval officers, including myself, thought [Operation Catapult] a ghastly error and still do.” – Royal Navy Admiral Andrew Cunningham, 1950
Emerging from France's catastrophic 1940 defeat like a bedraggled and rather sinister phoenix, the French State – better known to history as “Vichy France” or the “Vichy Regime” after its spa-town capital – stands in history as a unique and bizarre creation of German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler's European conquests. A patchwork of paradoxes and contradictions, the Vichy Regime maintained a quasi-independent French nation for some time after the Third Reich invasion until the Germans decided to include it in their occupation zone.