Japan apologized for Pearl Harbor; did the UK ever apologize for Mers-el-kebir?

They hadn't taken any orders from Vichy yet, though. They were still trying to decide what to do, either to go along with their government or keep fighting Germany. It was like 9 days after the Armistice.

I've never seen anything indicating that the fleet at Mers was willing to throw off their ties with their government, or was 'Trying to decide what to do'. Can you provide any information?

I might have gotten that particular fleet confused with the French ships that escaped to British ports.

New user here, I don't have any specific information on the Fleet at Mers, but the Vichy regime, especially the week after the armistice, was in no position to actually control what went on in the colonies. Throughout the war, basically any time you dealt with 'vichy french' territory, you were dealing with essentially independent warlords.

For all those asserting that the french fleet had to be destroyed to immobilize from the start the threat of an nazi-sided cruising the seas, then fair, but know that the french fleet never formally allied themselves with the Vichy government.

Though while at Mers-el-Kebir, they did telegram the Vichy headquarters to know whether they could escape to the French Antilles, a response was never relayed back to them by Vichy, and it is never known whether the fleet would've full-heartedly followed suit to the Vichy orders.

For example: the Toulon, only french ship to have survived Mers-el-Kebir, sunk itself in 1942 rather than surrender itself to Vichy (so so much for "le french fleet was litterally Vichy).

Mers-el-Kebir was a massacre and we know it.

It's not even that part that angers the french usually.
It's that the french fleet was shelled into oblivion when they were still confounded into believing that peace talks were ongoing.

It's the equivalent of shooting your enemy at the peace table.

>For example: the Toulon, only french ship to have survived Mers-el-Kebir, sunk itself in 1942 rather than surrender itself to Vichy (so so much for "le french fleet was litterally Vichy).

You mean, they scuttled themselves rather than be seized by the Germans in direct violation of the armistice between Germany and France. That is way different from suggesting they would not follow orders from the legitimate Vichy government.

Toulon, by the way, is the name of the port where said scuttling happened, not the name of any of the ships. You had several vessels surviving, off the top of my head, both of the newer battleships, the Dunquerke and the Strasbourg among them.

Please get some idea what the fuck you're talking about before you write posts.

>It's the equivalent of shooting your enemy at the peace table.

This is also incidentally why people were so pissed at the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. Not so much that they opened the war with a surprise attack with no declaration of war, but that they committed the attack while there were still Japanese diplomats in Washington trying to avoid a war.

Those Japanese diplomats were one of the first people to learn about Pearl Harbor after the fact.
Just fucking imagine how that must have went.

Now, they were told to basically ice over relations with the US and just stall them with the talks, but they were given no indication that Japan was about to declare war AFTER they blew up an entire Naval Yard. They thought they were just trying to buy more time for Japan to grab more land.
And then suddenly you have very angry men demanding to know why your country just killed 3,000 of our men and sunk half a navy. That has got to be one big "Oh fuck" moment.
Like if I had been in their shoes, this is probably close to what my reaction would have been.

Oh, yeah. The diplomats went there with the full earnest intention to try and avoid a war. The Japanese even sent a retired Ameriphile admiral to try and make it look like they really wanted to avoid a war.

And then they did everything they could to deny them support and make sure they didn't succeed. The Japanese government just wanted them to be a smokescreen. I think they actually came close negotiating a peace a few times, but since their real job wasn't to actually avoid a war, the home office rejected everything out of hand.

Too risky to have them around, and in a pinch the Germans could have taken them, France showed willing to scuttle at Toulon later, but the British couldn't be sure, so took action.

>after the fact
Uh, no. The diplomat had read the cable, looked at his watch and waited in silence until he estimated the attack would take place and handed the DoW over.

Nope. He had no prior warning of the attack. The "Declaration of War" he had just spent hours decoding and having typed up wasn't. It was the Japanese cutting diplomatic ties. It was as good as announcing war was inevitable, but it was not a formal declaration of war, and he certainly did not know what his government had already carried out at Pearl Harbor.

Sorry about that.

Well memed
You're aware that there were like 9 ships (4 of them big) at Mers-El-Kebir, right?
Meanwhile, there were over 60 ones at Toulon

The flottilla at Mers-El-Kebir never posed any threath (unlike the one at Toulon that Brits were too pussy to attack)
It was nothing else than sending a message ("fugg u france :DDD we enemy now :DDD")

Yes, and of those 9, 4 of them were battleships and two of those were the most modern in the French inventory.

It's not like they went to bully destroyers or something.

But the ones at Mers-El-Kebir were much closer to Gibraltar.

In any case the French can be as salty about it as they want, but if they wanted to avoid the situation they either shouldn't have surrendered or actually grown a pair and steamed off and sought the protection of the British and positively contributed to defeat the enemy that occupied their country.

They attacked Vichy France.

>or actually grown a pair and steamed off and sought the protection of the British and positively contributed to defeat the enemy that occupied their country.

Except it isnt a disney movie, cretin
It was 1940, not one knew Germany would fall 4 years later
Your average husband and father in the navy won't take the risk to betray the current government and exile himself for an undetermined amount of time (which could be forever if Germany didnt lose, which meant never seeing their families in France ever again) because some Britcucks told them to

It's easy to look at history in hindsight like a video game, but try to put yourself in the head of a French sailor in 1940

>>Your average husband and father in the navy won't take the risk

>be French officer/sailor
>don't want to risk anything for sake of freeing own country
If it was that simple perhaps that's why France caved so fast.

They could have formed up with the nascent Free French Naval Force, and would have found a willing host in the British, rather than clinging to a collaborationist regime.

I'm sure much of the bitterness that the French feel over the Mers El Kebir incident comes from a sublimated sense of shame that they didn't even try to do the right thing.

Again, that was like 2 weeks after the armistice tops. Free France was basically considered traitors and deserters at that point, and the french of the time still remembered the previous world war where soldiers were summarily executed for even thinking about deserting