Vichy aircraft bomb Gibraltar

At around two o’clock on the night of 17–18 July 1940, unidentified aircraft appeared over Gibraltar and dropped bombs on the slopes of the Rock. The British concluded that they had come from Morocco and belonged to the air force of the French government at Vichy, which was taking revenge in this way for the sinking of French warships at Mers-el-Kébir two weeks earlier. The material damage was slight, but one of the bombs hit a convent and killed three civilians. They were the first people to be killed by bombing in Gibraltar. A week later, on 25 July, the fortress authorities ordered all women and children to leave Gibraltar. Many of them had only just returned from exile in French Morocco, from which the French had expelled them in July.

A fortress at the gates of the Mediterranean

Gibraltar had been in British hands since 1704. On a scrap of land of less than seven square kilometres stood a naval base with a dockyard and docks, depots, barracks and, on the isthmus linking the Rock to Spain, an airstrip built on the site of a former racecourse. Around 20,000 civilians lived there, most of them Catholics of Spanish, Genoese, Maltese and British descent, along with a sizeable Jewish community. The governor and commander of the fortress was General Sir Clive Liddell.

In the summer of 1940 Gibraltar’s importance grew sharply. Once Italy had entered the war and France had signed an armistice with Germany, the Royal Navy lost its French ally in the western Mediterranean. At the end of June, therefore, Force H was formed at Gibraltar under Vice-Admiral James Somerville: the battlecruiser Hood, battleships, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, cruisers and destroyers. Its task was to guard the exit from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, cover convoys and support besieged Malta. It was this force that on 3 July had opened fire on the French fleet near Oran.

But the threat also came from the land. On 12 June General Francisco Franco’s Spain exchanged neutrality for “non-belligerence”; two days later it occupied the international zone of Tangier on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar, and on 19 June it offered to enter the war on Hitler’s side in exchange for Gibraltar, French Morocco and Oran, together with deliveries of arms and food. The Spanish press and the Falangists loudly demanded the return of the Rock. The British had to reckon with the possibility that the fortress might be attacked from three directions at once: by the Germans and Spaniards from the land, by the Italians from the air and the sea, and by the French from their bases in North Africa, only a few hundred kilometres to the south.

Exiles from Casablanca

That was why, as early as the spring, the British government had decided to remove the civilian population from Gibraltar, since in a siege it would only be extra mouths to feed and an easy target. Between 21 May and 24 June 1940 some 13,500 people, mainly women, children and the elderly, were shipped to French Morocco. It was chosen because it was close and belonged to France, then an ally. The evacuees were placed in Casablanca, Rabat, Fez, Marrakesh and several smaller towns, often in makeshift conditions: in dance halls, in camps and on straw mattresses.

Two days before the last transports arrived, France capitulated. The new authorities, who soon settled at Vichy, regarded the presence of British subjects in the protectorate as a nuisance and, after the attack on Mers-el-Kébir, as a provocation. The mood in Casablanca, where part of the fleet was based and where many people had known the sailors killed near Oran, was hostile. On 6 July the protectorate authorities demanded that all Gibraltarians leave Morocco immediately. The opportunity came on 10 July, when fifteen British merchant ships under Commodore Kenelm Creighton arrived in Casablanca. They were bringing French soldiers home from Britain, a large proportion of them men evacuated earlier from Dunkirk (sources give between 15,000 and 18,000). Once the soldiers had disembarked, the French held the ships in port and agreed to release them only if they took the evacuees. They allowed them neither to be cleaned nor to be provisioned. Families were herded on board under military supervision – according to eyewitnesses, sometimes at bayonet point – with only what they could carry.

Creighton had Admiralty orders not to take civilians, and his freighters had neither galleys nor sanitary facilities for the thousand passengers each was now to carry. He nevertheless lowered the gangways and, instead of sailing for England, headed for Gibraltar, eleven hours away. By 13 July all the ships had entered harbour. Governor Liddell at first refused to allow the evacuees ashore, fearing that once landed they could not be evacuated a second time. A crowd gathered in John Mackintosh Square, shops closed, and city councillors went to the governor with a petition. In the end London allowed the people to be landed while the ships were cleaned and provisioned, on condition that they would leave as soon as transport could be found for them.

Revenge for Mers-el-Kébir

The attack on the fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, in which almost 1,300 French sailors were killed, provoked fury at Vichy. Admiral François Darlan ordered British warships to be treated as hostile, and Marshal Philippe Pétain’s government broke off diplomatic relations with London and considered retaliation. Open war, however, did not follow. It came down to a few symbolic air operations. According to French publications on naval aviation, as early as the night of 4–5 July several Martin 167 bombers and naval seaplanes from bases in Morocco attempted to attack the ships of Force H, which had just returned to Gibraltar. The attack had no effect, and many chronologies record it as a raid on 4 July.

The raid of 18 July had more serious consequences, though its circumstances remain unclear. British anti-aircraft reports speak of two unidentified aircraft that bombed the slopes of the Rock at around two in the morning. They were assumed to be French machines from Morocco, and this is how most later accounts present it. On the unit, type and number of aircraft the sources are either silent or contradictory. According to Gibraltar’s Ministry of Heritage, one of the bombs hit the convent of the Irish Loreto Sisters (Loreto Convent). Sister Lorcan was killed, as were the convent gardener, Dalia, and his wife, and two other nuns were injured and taken to hospital. Some accounts speak of five dead, including one soldier. Many bombs fell far from military targets or into the sea, which some authors attribute to the reluctance of French airmen to bomb their recent allies.

Gibraltar’s anti-aircraft defences were weak at the time. Throughout the “Phoney War” the fortress had been protected by a handful of guns, and in June a heavy anti-aircraft regiment arrived from England with a dozen or so 3.7-inch (94 mm) guns and the first gun-laying radar. There were no night fighters that could intercept bombers in the dark. The raid showed that the Rock lay within range of enemy aircraft and that its inhabitants would not be safe there. The next day, 19 July, Governor Liddell replied to London officials who were haggling over the number of refugees that Gibraltar was “a fortress liable to heavy and immediate attack, and there should be no civilians here, whereas there are 22,000”.

The order of 25 July

Nobody wanted the evacuees. The Minister of Home Security, John Anderson, told a meeting of the War Cabinet that it would be best not to let them into Britain at all, since there was nowhere for them but internment camps. The British government looked for refuge in Jamaica, Mauritius and other possessions, but everywhere camps would first have to be built. Portugal, Britain’s oldest ally, agreed to take some two thousand people on Madeira. The first evacuees reached Funchal on 21 July, the last in mid-August. In the end it was decided that most would sail to London.

On 25 July the Gibraltar authorities ordered all women and children to leave. Those allowed to stay were chiefly men employed in the dockyard, the municipal services and other work needed by the garrison. The order legalised what was happening anyway, since transports to Madeira were already sailing. According to surviving embarkation lists, the first families boarded the Athlone Castle on 26 July, and others in the following days. On 30 July a convoy of twelve ships under Creighton’s command left Gibraltar, escorted by just one warship. To avoid German U-boats it took a wide arc across the Atlantic and reached Britain after sixteen days. Food and water ran short, babies were born on board, and several elderly people died and were buried at sea.

In the summer of 1940 nearly 12,000 Gibraltarians in all were brought to London. The Ministry of Health housed them in hotels and hostels, mainly in Kensington. They had fled from bombs from Morocco, only to find themselves in a city over which the air battle for Britain was already under way and which from September would be the target of German raids.

Place in the war

The July bombs did not change Gibraltar’s position, but they foreshadowed what was to come in the autumn. When the British and the Free French attacked Dakar on 23 September, Vichy’s air force retaliated on 24 and 25 September with two large raids on Gibraltar, this time officially and, according to some sources, with the consent of the German and Italian armistice commissions. Several dozen bombers from bases in Morocco and Algeria took part. The damage to the harbour and the town was considerable, there were dead and wounded among the civilians, and the bombs sank the armed trawler Stella Sirius. These were the last French raids on the Rock. From August 1940 Gibraltar was also bombed by the Italian air force, and from the autumn Italian frogmen tried to attack it, later operating covertly from neighbouring Spanish Algeciras. The Germans prepared a plan to capture the fortress via Spain, Operation Felix, but Franco, despite meeting Hitler at Hendaye in October 1940, refused to enter the war, and the plan was abandoned.

Stripped of its civilians, Gibraltar became a fortress pure and simple. Kilometres of tunnels were driven through the Rock, the runway was extended, and the harbour became a base for convoys to Malta and a starting point for operations against the Axis. In November 1942 General Dwight Eisenhower directed the Allied landings in French North Africa from here. Only then did the undeclared war between the British and Vichy France, of which the July raid was one episode, come to an end.

The evacuation lasted far longer than the danger. On 9 October 1940 a first group of 1,093 people sailed from Gibraltar to Jamaica, where a camp had been built for the refugees near Kingston. By the end of the year around 10,000 Gibraltarians were living in London, around two thousand in Jamaica and slightly fewer on Madeira. Those in London lived through the Blitz and the V-1 flying-bomb attacks. Repatriation began only in the spring of 1944, and in the meantime some families were moved to camps in Northern Ireland. The last exiles did not see the Rock again until 1951. The shared experience of exile strengthened among Gibraltarians a sense of separateness from Spain and an attachment to a British identity, traces of which can be seen in Gibraltar’s politics to this day.