by David Wragg
The Kriegsmarine was barely involved in the invasion, and as the invasion started, several Polish warships escaped to British ports, including three destroyers and two submarines, a supply ship and a training vessel, working to a plan agreed earlier with the Royal Navy. Thirty-eight merchant vessels also escaped, including three passenger liners.
Traditionally, navies have seized warships from their enemies and adapted them to their own use. Indeed, the most distinguished Royal Navy warship of all, the Second World War aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, came from a line of warships to bear the name that had started with the captured French warship L’Illustre. There was little left by the Poles, or indeed by the Dutch and Belgians, with the former having its best ships in the East Indies, but the fall of France presented an opportunity.
Caught in a major war without sufficient warships of their own, the Germans must have considered seizing the French Marine Nationale, a substantial but even by the standards of the day, hardly well balanced fleet, with just one obsolescent aircraft carrier, the Bearn, and a marked absence of modern cruisers. Nevertheless, the French ships could have remedied the lack of progress on Plan Z. After all, the justification for building the battlecruiser Scharnhorst was to rival the French Dunkerque, an ominous warning of German intentions.
THE FRENCH FLEET IN 1940
Known officially as the ‘Marine Nationale’, in 1939, the French had the fourth largest navy in the world and once mobilised had 160,000 personnel. While the Marine Nationale had been limited to 175,000 tons of shipping by the Washington Naval Treaty, it had gone well beyond this by 1940, by which time it had a total tonnage well in excess of 600,000 tons, but many of the ships were old. It was strong in battleships and cruisers, and far stronger than Germany in 1939 and 1940 in terms of submarines and destroyers, but it was weak in aircraft carriers, with just one elderly ship, the converted battleship Bearn, 22,000 tons, and a seaplane tender, although two more aircraft carriers of modern design were under construction.
Between the two world wars, French defence planning had been based on the assumption that the country’s most likely adversary would be Italy. The Italians viewed the French in the same light, and a naval race had developed between the two countries.
As war approached, the French had launched a programme of naval expansion, but in 1939, the fleet included:
1 elderly aircraft carrier
3 modernised battleships
4 old battleships
2 battlecruisers
7 heavy cruisers
12 light cruisers
32 large contre-torpilleur destroyers
38 other destroyers
1 seaplane tender
77 submarines
Of these ships, in 1940 the best were the two battlecruisers, Dunkerque and Strasbourg, rivals to the German Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which had been built as Germany’s answer to the French ships. These battlecruisers were in fact heavier than the older French battleships, at 26,500 tons displacement, and had their main armament forward in two quadruple turrets, but here the comparison ended, as the guns were of 330-mm calibre, 13-in, and so compatible with neither the older nor the new French battleships. Nevertheless, both ships outgunned the German battlecruisers, and would have made light work of the German Panzerschiffe.
It was not until 1936, when Germany became an increasing threat and war in Europe became increasingly likely, that a new warship building programme was agreed. The Marine Nationale’s building programme included:
2 aircraft carriers
4 battleships
3 light cruisers
4 large contre-torpilleur destroyers
12 destroyers
40 submarines
Of these, the most interesting ships were the two 18,000 ton aircraft carriers, the Joffre and Painleve, which, while dated in outline with their hull not plated up to flight deck level, in plan view showed the flight deck and hangar offset to port to balance the large superstructure island. Some have suggested that this was an early version of the angled flight deck, but this was not so. Reputedly, a third ship was ordered on the eve of the German invasion.
Just as Plan Z was interrupted by the outbreak of war, so it was with the French. Just two of the four new battleships were completing in 1940. The first of these, Richelieu, was moved to Mers-el-Kebir as French surrender became inevitable. Her sister ship, Jean Bart, was not completed until the end of the war. These were ships worthy of their type, being much larger and faster than the three older ships, at 35,000 tons and capable of 30 knots. In some ways they were similar to the British battleships Rodney and Nelson, with their main armament all forward in ‘A’ and ‘B’ turrets, but unlike the three triple 16-in turrets of the British ships, for once the French chose a more conventional calibre, with two quadruple 15-in turrets. The secondary armament was also conventional, with 6-in guns in five triple turrets.
The French Navy in 1940 had twenty-two cruisers, but most of these were elderly vessels, and many had non-standard calibre guns, including some with 5-in which made their status as cruisers somewhat doubtful as the Washington Naval Treaty had stipulated 6-in guns for light cruisers and 8-in for heavy cruisers. Again, the more modern vessels did conform, with the Algerie, a heavy cruiser displacing 10,000 tons dating from 1933, having eight 8-in guns in four turrets arranged conventionally fore and aft. Six other cruisers, including the Emile Bertin, 5,886 tons, also dated from the later 1930s and had 6-in guns.
An unusual feature of the French Navy was the contre-torpilleur ‘super’ destroyers, developed in response to Italy’s light cruisers. These varied between 2,000 and almost 3,000 tons in size, and had 5.5-in guns as opposed to the 6-in of a light cruiser. The newest and largest were almost 3,000 tons, with eight 5.5-in guns in four turrets, and capable of up to 43 knots in the calmer waters of the Mediterranean. Another six contre-torpilleurs had been completed in 1934 and 1936, and were slightly smaller, at 2,600 tons, and slightly slower as well. There were another twenty-four contre-torpilleurs, of 2,000 tons and 2,300 tons, as well as thirty-eight standard destroyers.
By 1940, the French submarine fleet had risen to 84 boats. A complete novelty in the French Fleet was the Surcouf, a corsair submarine similar to the British M-class, and at 2,880 tons, the world’s largest submarine at the time. Surcouf was also referred to sometimes as a cruiser submarine, with two 8-in guns forward and a small aircraft hangar for a floatplane after of the conning tower. Given the tactics advocated by Dönitz for U-boat surface attack by night, this type of vessel would have been ideal for Germany’s warfare against merchant vessels: U-boat commanders preferred to use their deck armament rather than their limited number of more expensive torpedoes.
Yet the official tonnage figures provide an exaggerated impression of the size of the Marine Nationale, or at least of its wartime fighting potential. Four old battleships were counted in the official figures, but these were of pre-First World War vintage; one of them, the Courbet, started the war as an anti-aircraft battery and later simply became a breakwater. Three other battleships that had been completed in the years immediately following the earlier conflict had been extensively modernized, given new boilers and their armament increased, with additional emphasis on anti-aircraft protection, but their 22,000 tons displacement was insufficient for a capital ship of the day, as was their speed, at 21 knots.
Many French ships displayed a highly individualistic set of gun calibres, such as 330-mm calibre guns, which equated to 13-in, as well as the cruisers with 5-in guns already mentioned.
Another unusual feature, which the French had in common with the Kriegsmarine, was a number of torpedo boats that were almost of destroyer standard at 1,000 tons. In contrast to the Royal Navy, the French had not neglected motor torpedo boats and small gunboats.
With this fleet, the Marine Nationale had to wield a worldwide presence, as had the Royal Navy, but being considerably smaller it operated large squadrons rather than fleets. The Atlantic Squadron equated to the Britis
h Atlantic, later Home, Fleet, and the same relationship could be applied to the French Mediterranean Squadron and the British Mediterranean Fleet. The main bases in France were at Brest on the Atlantic coast of France and Toulon on the Mediterranean coast, but there were other smaller bases and just as the British had Gibraltar and Malta, the French had Oran and Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria, Bizerta in Tunisia, Casablanca in French Morocco and Dakar in West Africa. Dakar had the only dry dock between Gibraltar and Cape Town.
There were also ships stationed in the Caribbean, in the Indian Ocean at Madagascar, and in French Indo-China, as well as at Beirut in the Lebanon.
THE FATE OF THE FRENCH FLEET
The big difference between France and the other nations invaded by the Germans up to June 1940 was that the country was not entirely overrun. This was never the German intention. They wanted the Channel ports of Northern France and the industry of the area around Paris as well as the coalfields of the north. Another difference was that, in common with Luxembourg, the Germans had high hopes that at least some of the population would join them, as Alsace and Lorraine had long been disputed territories with both France and Germany regarding these provinces as theirs. They had come under German control during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, having become French territory during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and returned to France after German defeat in the First World War. In May 1940, they were back in German hands, known to the Germans as Elsass-Lothringen, with the majority of the local population German-speaking. It must have been a provocation for the Germans when the French named one of their First World War battleships Lorraine.
An armistice between France and Germany was a difficult political question as the British and French had concluded a treaty that didn’t simply commit themselves to an alliance, but went beyond forbidding either to conclude a separate negotiation with Germany or Italy. In complete contrast was the policy, advocated by Pierre Laval, another member of the government who had surrounded himself with a power base of senators and deputies. Laval wanted not simply surrender, but for France to change sides. His argument for the policy was that by allying herself with the victor and continuing the war against the United Kingdom, France would not only retain her sovereignty, but also all of her overseas possessions.
At the time, the Germans were looking for surrender, which with a substantial part of France unoccupied and with its own government, would make it much more difficult for France to continue in the war. In fact, Hitler’s appreciation of the threat posed if the French chose to continue the war from North Africa, and perhaps the Lebanon and Syria as well, was astute. There were those who, realising that the Battle of France was lost, intended to continue the war from Africa and the French Empire using the French fleet. After all, none of the other countries overrun by the Germans had actually stopped fighting, but had continued to do so using those of their citizens who had managed to escape, first to France and then to the United Kingdom. The French had the advantage of strategically placed territories around the world that gave them the room and the manpower to continue fighting. Overall, the French forces in the Mediterranean theatre had been stronger than those of the British. The only weakness in the French fighting the war from their colonies was the lack of a manufacturing base, for which the British and the Americans, and perhaps the Canadians who were rapidly industrialising, would have to provide a substitute.
On 21 June, the terms of the armistice were presented to the French delegation. To emphasise that the French had been defeated in the field, there were no negotiations. As a result, the leader of the French delegation, General Huntziger, was simply handed the armistice agreement with its twenty-four articles, and told that they were non-negotiable. The Armistice with Germany was signed the following day.
With the Anglo-French alliance effectively in tatters, the condition that applied to the French Navy was Article 8, which read:
The French fleet (with the exception of that part which is left at the disposition of the French government for the protection of French interests in the colonial empire) will be concentrated in ports to be determined and will be demobilised and disarmed under the supervision of Germany or, respectively, Italy. The peacetime bases of these vessels will be used to designate these ports.
The German government solemnly declares to the French government that it has no intention of using during the war for its own purposes the French fleet stationed in ports under German supervision, other than the units necessary for coastal patrol and minesweeping. It further declares solemnly and formally that it has no intention of making claims in respect of the French fleet after the conclusion of peace.
With the exception of that element of the French fleet to be determined which will be allocated to the defence of French interest in the colonial empire, all warships at present outside French territorial waters should be recalled to France.
The lack of interest in taking French warships was interesting as it was completely contrary to what was happening elsewhere to the French armed forces. The defeated French Army had been a treasure trove for the Germans, who grabbed the artillery and stocks of ammunition for their own use. They also started to strip the French railways of their best rolling stock. It would have been tempting to have taken as many French warships as possible and convert them to the use of the Kriegsmarine. After all, U-boat construction during the first year of war had been slow. Yet, because the south of France was not occupied until November 1942, most of the active fleet remained outside the grasp of the Germans either at Toulon or in North and East Africa.
In fact, fourteen U-boats were pressed into service from the navies of the countries overrun by Germany. There was also UA, for U-Ausland, meaning U-Foreign, a large U-boat under construction for Turkey, and which was retained and commissioned into the Kriegsmarine on 21 September 1939, and later the British submarine, Seal, captured early in the war, seeing service as UB. Two Norwegian submarines were also pressed into service with the Kriegsmarine, as well as five Dutch submarines. Three French submarines were seized when their ports were occupied, and after Italian surrender, four Italian submarines stationed in the north of the country also saw service with the Germans. These U-boats were given special designations, with the Norwegian boats becoming UC-1 and UC-2, the Dutch boats UD-1 to UD-5, the French boats UF-1 to UF-3, and the Italian boats becoming UIT-22 to UIT-25.
Nevertheless, the bulk of the French fleet eluded the Germans with Admiral Darlan, at Bordeaux, by this time the seat of government, maintaining that the French fleet would never be surrendered to the Germans or the Italians, and also refusing to send the fleet to the UK while French troops were still fighting and declaring that the fleet had to remain in French waters while the fighting continued.
At the time of the armistice, Darlan went to great lengths to assure the United Kingdom that the French fleet would not fall into German hands. He ordered commanding officers to scuttle their ships should the Germans attempt to take them. Unfortunately, the British didn’t trust Darlan, and seized or sank whatever ships they could, except at Alexandria.
Darlan harboured strong Anglophobe tendencies and attitudes. He also wanted a more equal relationship between France and Germany. In May 1941, Darlan offered Hitler the use of French bases in Syria, and after a visit to Berchtesdgaden he returned to France with plans for joint Franco-German operations in the Middle East. Petain refused to agree to these proposals, which were undoubtedly of great appeal to the Germans who had been unable to encourage their First World War ally, Turkey, to join them.
SUBSTITUTES FOR THE PLAN Z SHIPS?
Despite some incompatibility between the two fleets, many French warship types were available in far larger numbers than their German counterparts. In 1940, the French had more submarines than the Germans, with 84, of which 24 were lost between war breaking out and the French surrender. Manpower was one reason for the Germans not taking over the French ships, as German industry still needed skilled men and the army and air force had abs
orbed large numbers of men. Nevertheless, the Germans would have needed to seize Vichy France to be sure of seizing all of the ships actually in French home waters, with many of the large surface units at Toulon. At Toulon was the single largest element of the Marine Nationale, some eighty ships, more ships than most of the world’s navies. In major surface units alone, the fleet at Toulon was close to matching the Kriegsmarine. Yet, had the Germans seized these ships, it might have persuaded the French authorities in North Africa, although officially under Vichy control, to send ships in their ports to the Royal Navy.
Of course, the real prize could only have come if the Italian invasion of the South of France starting on 10 June 1940 had been more aggressive and successful. Had the Italians swept along the Mediterranean coastline of France, the ships at Toulon would have been a prize worth having and just conceivably could have been taken before scuttling charges could have been set. Nevertheless, the most useful naval vessels would have been the French submarines, with a limited manpower requirement.
Even with the French surface fleet, the Kriegsmarine would still not have a balance with the Royal Navy. It would also have been a fleet ‘in exile’ and difficult to concentrate in one war zone, unless it could be sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar to Brest and have access to the open sea.
Had the French warships been seized and used by the Germans in 1940–1941, it could have made a difference and the availability of the battlecruisers as surface raiders during the Battle of the Atlantic would have made the position of the convoys even more difficult. Even problems with different calibre guns would not have been insurmountable as French production facilities could have been used.
In particular, the French submarines would have been a useful addition and allowed the Kriegsmarine to put a hundred-plus U-boats to sea in 1940. But this was not done, and it certainly was not done out of any sense of honour or of meeting the conditions of the Franco-German armistice.
