History
Until June 1940, the Force de Raid operated against the German Navy (Kriegsmarine) in the Atlantic and supported the Norwegian Campaign. In June, all the ships that could sail were moved to North Africa to avoid capture by the Germans.
The wartime British Government of Winston Churchill was greatly alarmed by the possibility that these ships might be acquired, with or without French agreement, by the Axis powers and, when agreement over their fate was not reached, they were bombarded by the Royal Navy.
Read more about this topic: Force De Raid
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)