The fight was actually a rare British vs French engagement during World War II.
Key point: London made a tough and ruthless call. France had fallend and the British decided they would rather sink the French fleet rather than risk their surrender or cooperation with Berlin.
It was the night of July 2, 1940. In May Hitler had overrun the Low Countries and driven the British Army to the English Channel. In June German armies had completed the rout of the British, pressing them out to sea at Dunkirk, and then swept down to finish off the French. Winston Churchill, practically a lone voice in the 1930s against the danger of Hitlerism, had been appointed prime minister on May 10, yet had presided over little except disaster, and knew it. “Wars are not won with evacuations,” he had said of the Dunkirk retreat, but even in those dark hours believed the French armies would stiffen and halt the Wehrmacht short of Paris, or at least along some line to which the British could return. He saw this new war as a child of the one that ended in 1918, the French and the British again holding up short the German soldiers and slowly pressing them back to their borders. Indeed, France and Britain each had made a pledge to the other not to make a separate peace with Germany. During the disasters on the Continent Churchill made several flights to France—to assess the situation, to rally the flagging leaders, and to assure the French that Britain would stand by them for as long as it took to ensure victory for the freedom-loving democracies over Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.