In the shadow of Somerset’s Mendip Hills, just north of the
A371 between Wells and Shepton Mallet, is the little village of Dinder. Within the village is Dinder House, formerly
a manor house dating from the twelfth century, rebuilt by the
Somervilles in 1801. It remained their
family home up until the death of Admiral of the Fleet Sir James Somerville on
this day in 1949.
Sir James Fownes Somerville was born in Weybridge, Surrey,
on 17 July 1882, the second son of Arthur Fownes Somerville of Dinder and his wife
Ellen, daughter of William Stanley Sharland, of North Norfolk, Tasmania. The Somervilles were related to that great
naval family, the Hoods.
Somerville joined the RN in 1897 and became a lieutenant in
1904. He qualified in the vital new field of wireless telegraphy in 1907.
He was fleet wireless officer during the Gallipoli campaign
where his outstanding work in ship to shore communications brought him the
award of the DSO.
In 1921 Somerville was promoted to captain and commanded the
battleships HMS BENBOW, HMS BARHAM and HMS WARSPITE. Following the mutiny by seamen in ships of
the Atlantic Fleet at Invergordon on 15 and 16 September 1931, Somerville and
Captain James Tovey, another future admiral, undertook an enquiry to establish
its causes.
During the Spanish Civil War Somerville spent two years as
senior British naval officer off the Spanish Mediterranean Coast. In 1937 he was promoted to vice-admiral and
subsequently became Commander-in-Chief East Indies in October 1938. However, in July 1939 he was forced to retire
with suspected pulmonary tuberculosis, a diagnosis he contested.
The outbreak of World War Two soon saw Somerville back in
the service of his country. After
overseeing the development of naval radar and its rapid installation aboard
ships he gave valuable assistance to Admiral Ramsay who oversaw the Dunkirk
Evacuation.
After the defeat of France Somerville took command of Force
H, a squadron based at Gibraltar to act as gatekeeper to the Mediterranean and
operate in the Central Atlantic as necessary.
He then commanded what was, in my opinion, one of the most inglorious
and mistaken actions ever undertaken by the Royal Navy. Somerville was tasked with arranging, either
by negotiation or force, the demobilisation of major units of the French Fleet
at Mers-el-Kebir near Oran in French Algeria.
When talks failed Somerville, with the insistence of Churchill, ordered
his ships to open fire on the anchored French warships. The bombardment resulted in the deaths of
1,297 French servicemen, the sinking of one capital ship and heavy damage to
another. Somerville himself described it
as a “filthy job”.
Many senior officers in the Royal Navy thought at the time,
and after the war, that the order from Churchill and the War Cabinet to open
fire on erstwhile allies was wrong.
Stephen Roskill in his Churchill
and the Admirals (Pen & Sword Books Ltd. 2013) writes:
“While working on my
war history I had many interviews and much correspondence with Cunningham,
Somerville and North, the three admirals concerned in the attack on Oran and
related plans. None of them ever budged
from the view that, given more time for negotiation, the tragedy could have
been averted. On 9 January 1950
Cunningham wrote to Admiral Lord Fraser, then First Sea Lord, that 90 per cent
of senior naval officers, including myself, thought Oran a ghastly error and
still do.”
In May 1941 Force H was called on to help the Home Fleet in
the hunt for the BISMARCK. Somerville’s
masterly handling of his squadron led to HMS ARK ROYAL’s Swordfish aircraft
crippling the BISMARCK with torpedoes thus allowing Admiral Sir John Tovey’s
battleships to catch and sink her.
In 1940 and 1941 Somerville’s ships regularly and
successfully supported vital convoys to Malta, but after flying off
reinforcements of aircraft to that besieged island HMS ARK ROYAL was torpedoed
and sunk by the German submarine U81 on
13 November 1941.
Following Japan’s entry into the war Somerville was sent to
the Far East in February 1942 to command a reformed Eastern Fleet. Many of his ships were obsolete and his fleet
was in no condition to confront the powerful Japanese carrier group which
forayed into the Indian Ocean in the spring of 1942. All Somerville could do was to retreat out of
range of the Japanese until they withdrew to the Pacific for their next
confrontation with the American Navy.
It was not until the spring of 1944 that Somerville was able
to undertake offensive operations. By
this time his fleet had been reinforced by more modern units including the
aircraft carrier HMS ILLUSTRIOUS and, operating alongside the American carrier
USS SARATOGA, air strikes were launched against Japanese oil installations on
Sumatra and Java.
In August 1944 Somerville left the Eastern Fleet to take up
the post of Head of the British Admiralty delegation in Washington, a position
he held from October 1944 to December 1945.
He made a great success of this mission and even became friends with the
blunt and short-tempered Admiral Ernest J. King, the anglophobic American chief
of naval operations.
On leaving the Royal Navy in 1946 he retired to Dinder House
becoming Lord Lieutenant of Somerset. He
died in Dinder on 19 March 1949 of a coronary thrombosis and is buried there in
the village churchyard of St. Michael and All Angels. His wife Mary, whom he married in January
1913, predeceased him in August 1945.
Sources.
Churchill and the
Admirals, Stephen Roskill (Pen & Sword Books Ltd. 2013)
Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies.
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