Sir Dudley North
Sir: I read Patrick Cosgrave's review ef Charlotte and Denis Plimmer's book A Mauer of Expediency (3 June) with interest and would only disagree when he writes that,
'it is plain nonsense to say, as [Admirall
North and his allies do, that six well-armed and provisioned ships made no difference at
all' to the fate of the Dakar expedition of September 1940. As Mr Cosgrave appears to include me among those who hold such an opinion, I would say that I have never
done so. At the time the Joint Planners, and Churchill himself, considered that the arri'
val of the ships had 'revolutionised' the it ation; and it was presumably in recollection of that contemporary view that Churchill
wrote (The Second World War, II, p.427)
about the French ships 'probably carrying reinforcements, good gunners, and bitter' minded Vichy officers, to decide the Goy ernor, to pervert the garrison, and man the batteries'.
The psychological effect of the arrival of the French ships can hardly be quantified,
but there is no evidence that it affected the
situation materially; and in fact they onlY carried 120 gunners of the French coast defence force, whose arrival enabled the authorities to send back to the battleshiP Richelieu the sailors borrowed to man the shore batteries (See Jacques Mordal, Bataille de Dakar, Paris 1956, p. 163). I als° think Mr Cosgrave unfair to North over his relations with the French. Admiral Sotner. ville, the Commander of Force H at Gib. raltar, certainly held that things had gone better under North than under his sue' .cessor.
So perhaps Churchill's stigma about North 'not having the root of the matter in him', which was actually written about the bombardment of Mers el Kebir in July and not about Dakar, could have been more justly applied to the latter.
S. W. Roskill
Churchill College, Cambridge
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