Читать книгу The French Navy in World War II - Paul Auphan - Страница 12
ОглавлениеGeographers compare France to a hexagon, three sides of which front on the land and three on the sea. All the drama in French history derives from this dualism.
Having harbors on four seaways—the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the English Channel, and the North Sea—France might have devoted greater effort to maritime development had she not found herself engaged in almost ceaseless struggles on the continent either to establish her sovereignty or to maintain it. Compelled to defend herself against hostile incursions on the line of the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, France perforce turned her attention from the sea to the land, and so developed as a military land power rather than a sea power. Her Navy, never the first concern of her kings, was too often neglected, despite its patriotic spirit and the invaluable logistic support it gave to the land campaigns of the Army.
To understand this martial spirit, it must be remembered that the first Admiral of France, Florent de Varenne, was appointed to command the Crusader’s Fleet by Saint Louis, the king, in 1270 to stem the tide of Moslem conquest which threatened to sweep over the entire Mediterranean. The spirit of the Crusade—that is to say, the disinterested devotion to an ideal for which one is willing to give his life—thus became an attribute of the mariners of France. The fleet of Saint Louis contained few ships that were really French. It was only at the beginning of the 17th century, after the Middle Ages and the wars of religion, that the French Navy truly began to exist as a national organization.
In France, at that period, only the nobility were granted the honor of wearing the sword, either on the land or on the sea. And the nobles of the day were distinguished more for their fighting qualities than for any administrative or organizational talents. On the other hand, the higher ranks of the clergy—men of peace rather than of war, though there were notable exceptions—possessed family connections and a general culture that fitted them well for administrative, political, or diplomatic positions. Thus it is understandable that Louis XIII had as prime minister a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church—the Cardinal de Richelieu.
To Richelieu the Navy seemed such an important factor in the destiny of the nation that he undertook its administration personally, and kept it under his immediate supervision from 1628 until his death in 1643. Richelieu breathed into the nascent naval establishment much of the realism and energy and solid commonsense that led him to write: “To command ships, I prefer the substantial seamen, brought up on the sea and the bottle, to the curled and perfumed cavaliers of the court.”
Richelieu had on his staff an intelligent and hard-working assistant named Jean Baptiste Colbert, who succeeded the great cardinal as Minister of the Navy. Colbert and his son, the Marquis de Seignelay, between them administered the powerful Navy of Louis XIV for twenty-nine years. (The Ministers, it can be seen, did not change as often then as they do today!) The first organic regulations of the French Navy—analogous to the King’s Regulations of Great Britain—date from Colbert. And certain expressions, certain customs on board ship, even certain installations still in existence in the dockyards of Brest and Toulon, are attributable to this great successor of Richelieu.
Thus the French Navy is inevitably an institution steeped in tradition—something which constitutes both a weakness and a strength. It is a weakness in that tradition has fostered in it a tendency to be conservative in technical progress; a strength in that it has inspired both officers and men to follow the precepts of an honorable past. Fidelity to traditional moral values is one of the characteristics of the French naval establishment—a fact which must never be forgotten in any study of the Navy of France during the Second World War.
Another characteristic of that navy is that, differently from many others, it was not created for mercenary gain or for the protection of private commercial interests. Genoa and Venice, for instance, were essentially merchant maritime republics. The northern powers, like the Dutch and the Hanseatic League, had as commanders men who were ship owners even before they were admirals. And the Royal Navy of Great Britain was built primarily to insure safe passage throughout the world of its merchant fleet as indispensable to the economic life of the nation.
Such was not the case—at least in the beginning—with the French Navy. In France, in the days of the monarchy, any nobleman who engaged in commerce acted beneath his station and forfeited his rank in the nobility. In the social framework of that period, the nobles were the heirs to the chivalry of the Middle Ages, with no function other than to bear arms for the defense of the nation. Therein lay their honor—and, in principle, their only occupation. No matter how often even Richelieu decreed that colonial commerce was an exception, the French nobles never quite acceded to his viewpoint.
Hence, in its inception the Navy of France was solely a political instrument, a disinterested weapon under the orders of the chief of state. Far from coming from commercial circles, many officers in the early days of the French Navy were Knights of Malta—that is, they belonged to an international order, semireligious, semimilitary, which since the days of the Crusades had had as its mission the checking of the Moslem corsairs in the Mediterranean. In an era when there were no naval schools, this order constituted an excellent training medium for the future officers of the Navy, who, from the age of thirteen or fourteen, fought on board the galleys of the order in the Mediterranean.
Throughout nearly all of its long history the French Navy had had one principal opponent—England. To conclude from this, however, that its present day officers are Anglophobes would be as erroneous as crediting them with still wearing the wigs and knee breeches of their forebears of the 18th century.
Excluding the so-called Hundred Years’ War, which France fought partly to eliminate English colonial enclaves in her home territory, Franco-British naval competition lasted just about two centuries. The rivalry began when the expansionist ideologies of Louis XIV collided with the equally imperialistic ideas of William III of England. Faced with the problem of fighting the armed forces of practically all Europe on land at the same time that she fought the combined British and Dutch navies on the sea, France lost the opening round in 1713 despite such outstanding victories as Beachy Head, Barfleur, and Vélez-Málaga. Moreover the conflict quickly spread to the distant possessions of both major powers, particularly the East and West Indies and the North American colonies.
The French colonies in those days were administered by the Navy Department, just as if they were distant ships permanently at anchor. In America the French had established a sort of protectorate the whole length of the Mississippi basin, from Acadia and Canada in the north to Louisiana in the south, thus setting up a barrier to the westward expansion of the British colonies along the Atlantic Coast. But even with a colonial population in North America ten times that of the French, the British perhaps would not have conquered Canada so quickly if the French Navy, which provided the sole link with the home country, had not been completely crushed by the end of the Seven Years’ War, in 1763. For in Europe the French Army, which had absorbed the lion’s share of the national manpower and the national budget, had fought its way to the heart of Europe—without ever realizing, perhaps, that at that very time France was losing an empire overseas.
A defeat, when correctly analyzed, is always productive of reform. Courageously the French Navy reformed, rebuilt, and refitted—and waited for a chance to retaliate. The opportunity came in 1775, when Britain’s North American colonies revolted and asked for French aid. Without the help of the French squadrons which were sent across, the colonies would have experienced a great deal more difficulty in winning their independence; in fact, as the American historian Samuel E. Morison wrote recently, it would not have been Lord Cornwallis but General George Washington who would have had to surrender at Yorktown.11
Samuel E. Morison, “The Battle That Set Us Free,” in the Saturday Evening Post, July 7, 1956.
In the War of American Independence, French diplomats for once avoided the pitfalls of European politics, and through fifty months of war the French fleets, though outnumbered everywhere, held the British at bay. Their single setback was at the Battle of Saints Passage in 1782, where the French with 2,300 guns faced the British fleet with 3,000 cannon.
In 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, the seaborne commerce of France nearly equaled that of England, and her Navy was at its peak. Not until 1939 would the French Navy again be so closely knit, so confident, and so comparable in strength to its opponents.
But the French Revolution began the downfall of the naval establishment. Confusion led to disorder, and disorder to mutinies. Many of its officers—le grand corps—were summarily dismissed; others went to the guillotine. Antirevolutionary political groups even assisted the English enemy to “peacefully” occupy the port and naval arsenal of Toulon, thereby confronting the French naval officers with the same problems of conscience that were to torment their counterparts in World War II.
True, Napoleon Bonaparte did try to rebuild the Navy to its former power, but he failed for lack of time. With what remained of ships and former commanders he attempted to gain control of the English Channel—“were it only for twenty-four hours,” in his words—in order to land his Boulogne army on the English coast. Such an amphibious landing, in the miscellaneous assortment of lighters and barges he had assembled, would have been as ambitious an undertaking for that day as the Anglo-American landings in Normandy in June 1944. But Napoleon tried to maneuver his squadrons as he would so many troops of cavalry, without ever taking into account the ocean spaces, the contrary winds, the lack of properly trained crews, and all the other factors which enter into naval tactics and strategy.
Against the brave but untrained crews of the French fleets the British threw superbly manned ships of overwhelming firepower, and crushed the French, first at Aboukir and then at Trafalgar.
At Trafalgar, furthermore, the French and Spanish combined fleet fought more to satisfy honor than with any sound tactical plan in mind. Having had his courage questioned by Napoleon, the French commander in chief, Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve, was resolved to prove that the officers of the Navy could fight, even against a Nelson. And when he failed in his effort to die in battle, he later committed suicide to wipe out what he felt was the shame of defeat.
The course of the French Navy, as has been aptly said, has often been more dolorous than glorious.
After Trafalgar the Napoleonic hegemony eventually crumbled—not because of the failure of Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy to arrive on the field of Waterloo, as claimed by some, but because seapower little by little strangled “Fortress Europe,” as Hitler’s similar creation was to be called some hundred years later.
Unfortunately the mass of the French people, dazzled with the victories won by their armies on the continent, failed to appreciate the significance of the operations at sea. This difference in the nation’s impressions of the contributions of the two services is one of the reasons why, in France, the Navy has a different outlook from the rest of the country.
In addition to marking the end of the Napoleonic empire, 1815 marked the end of Franco-British naval competition as well—and to the advantage of England. Because the sea makes one a realist, however, and because its past exploits were sufficiently glorious to inspire its corps of officers, the French Navy harbored no feeling of bitterness. Instead, it devoted itself during the 19th century to winning for France a new colonial empire overseas—an accomplishment of which the public, however, was at times completely unaware. Rivaling in élan the officers of the British Navy, the French often cooperated with them in maintaining world peace in a spirit already “European.” In such manner French and British squadrons fought side by side against the Egyptian Fleet at Navarino, against the Russians in the Crimea, and against the Boxers, the Chinese Nationalists of the 19th Century. Notwithstanding several political crises stemming from colonial disagreements—at Tahiti, at Fashoda, and elsewhere—the two navies came to appreciate each other in a way that prepared them for the Grand Alliance of 1914.
Before that time, however, the French Navy had to undergo the frustrating experiences of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The drama of that period strikingly forecast the events of 1940. In both cases all-out hostilities between the two regular armies lasted only a few weeks. In each case the French homeland was deeply invaded. If in 1870 the seaports such as Cherbourg and Brest were not taken by the enemy, it was because the armies of those days still marched on foot and not by mechanized transport. Finally, in both cases the fighting was followed by a prolonged occupation of a part of France by the German enemy.
At sea, the French Navy of 1870 was actually the second most powerful fleet in the world, not far behind the British, while the German Navy was almost insignificant. But except for blockading the enemy’s coast—a blockade too short to have any effect—the French Navy had no opportunity to exploit its supremacy once the frontier defenses had been breached and the Germans were besieging Paris. A number of ships were demobilized in order to rush 10,000 sailors to help man the defenses of the capital, but this could not alter the course of events. With striking similarity, in 1940 the French Navy was again obliged to look on almost helplessly as the fate of the nation was settled by the battling of the armies ashore.
And in 1871, after the return of peace, the French people remembered only that their Navy had been of no help to them in the disastrous conflict. With habitual shortsightedness they believed the Navy had functioned poorly. Consequently, after the war naval budgets were reduced by the politicians. And since the Navy had to use much of its funds for meeting the colonial responsibilities with which it was entrusted, construction of new combatant ships was sadly neglected. Relegated to a little world all its own, the Navy vegetated. It required the extraordinary growth of the German Navy at the beginning of the 20th century, with its threat of a new conflict, to restore the French Navy to a point where the Entente Cordiale (France and Great Britain) could equal the seapower of the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Italy.)
The First World War found the French Navy ready and eager to fulfill its obligations in the Entente by engaging the combined Austrian and Italian Mediterranean squadrons in a classical fleet action. But Italy declared her neutrality, and later became an ally, and the Austrian Fleet never came out of its harbors at all. All the French Fleet could do was to maintain a tedious watch at the entrance of the Adriatic for an Austrian sortie that never took place, and join the British in the ill-fated Dardanelles operation.
During this time France was again invaded by land. One of the authors of this book, at that time a young ensign, remembers a night in August 1914, when the landing party of his cruiser was rushed posthaste to Paris with its two machineguns—strong firepower for those days. Unlike the outcome in 1870, however, this time the capital was saved, by the victory on the Marne. The sailors rushed to the capital’s defense stayed on to constitute the famous marine brigade (Brigade des Fusiliers Marins) which distinguished itself for four years in some of the most hard-fought engagements of the entire land campaign. The same was true of a regiment of naval gunners which had been formed to man the 305-mm. (12-inch) naval guns mounted on railway carriages. One of the moving spirits in that naval railway battery was Lieutenant François Darlan—later to be Admiral of the Fleet.
At sea the war took on an entirely unanticipated aspect. The appearance of German submarines off the Pas-de-Calais, a hundred miles from their bases, seemed quite an event to the sailors of 1914. And at the beginning there was no effective weapon to combat these surprising undersea menaces. The man-of-war which saw a periscope—or thought it saw one—had no choice but to try to ram, or to grapple for the submerged U-boat with its anchors!
Despite the land armament again getting the lion’s share of the military budget, the French Navy, like the other allied navies, put forth an enormous effort in the manning and arming of more than a thousand patrol vessels and minesweepers, in addition to the regular men-of-war already in commission at the beginning of hostilities. Starting from zero, her naval air arm grew to a force of more than 2,000 planes by the end of the war—a war in which the French Navy lost 500 officers and 11,000 seamen killed or missing.
But escorting convoys and patrolling the sealanes, although arduous work, is not glamorous in the eyes of the civilians ashore. When peace returned, the Navy had the uncomfortable impression that its role in the national defense was again misunderstood and unappreciated by the general public.
It is true that had it not been for the heroic stand of the Army, the frontlines would have been broken—just as was to happen in 1940—and the war would soon have ended disastrously for France. But it is equally true that without the support of the innumerable men and the invaluable supplies safely transported from overseas to the European battleground, Germany could not have been checked, and ultimately defeated.
Displaying an understandable partiality, our allies from across the seas—England and the United States—were particularly concerned with the effective employment of the naval forces; to the French, the armies protecting their frontiers were of first importance. French naval officers accorded equal weight to land and sea—but for that very reason, their countrymen ashore saw them as a caste apart.
With the conclusion of hostilities, public opinion moved toward international limitation of arms. A conference was convened in Washington for the purpose of implementing Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, which had partially disarmed Germany as precursor to parallel disarmament by the victors.
The French Government was successful in obtaining a decision that land and air armaments would not be discussed—arms in which France at that time had superiority. On the other hand, England and the United States, which were withdrawing more and more into their own spheres, one into its commonwealth and the other into the American hemisphere, were interested primarily in naval armaments. So doing, they were abandoning Europe more or less to French influence.
It is very difficult to reduce armaments, particularly through the establishment of an hierarchy between nations, if disarmament is not wholeheartedly desired by all.
Both England and the United States had seen that submarines constituted a threat to the usual control of the seas by the larger naval powers, and they proposed that their construction and use be prohibited. This met opposition from the second-rank naval powers, for whom the submarine was an instrument of pressure and thus a means toward equalization. France for one refused to do away with the submarine, thereby drawing sharp rejoinders from the British. And partly as a consequence, France found herself, along with Italy, forced to accept a capital ships tonnage ratio of 1.75 to 3 for Japan and 5 for the United States and Great Britain.
Justifiable or not, in time of peace the political power of a nation, and hence her influence in world affairs, is often measured by the relative strength of her naval forces. With this limitation on her battleship tonnage, the measure of naval might at that time, France was deeply humiliated by the ratios of the Washington Treaty.
True, these ratios were fairly in accord with the relative strengths of the various navies at the end of the war. But during the war, with the French Army given industrial priority, the construction of capital ships in France had been suspended; in other countries, which had not been invaded, naval construction had been expedited. Moreover, parity with Italy failed to accord with tradition, or with the respective obligations of the two navies, or with the relative political power of the two countries. Nevertheless the French Government accepted the Washington Treaty ratios for capital ships—designedly offensive weapons—though it refused to limit cruisers and lighter craft, which were generally considered defensive weapons.
In actuality the capital ship limitation did not injure the French Navy, for the naval funds allotted from the war-exhausted treasury would not have permitted much more construction than was actually undertaken. But the blow to French naval pride—a blow for which they held the British responsible—caused ill feeling that lingered on until 1938 and Munich, with its ominous shadow of World War II.
In the opinion of one of the French Ministers, why should the French Navy build new combatant ships, anyway, since there would never be another war? Accordingly some twenty submarines and torpedo boats taken from the Germans, plus some dozen torpedo boats built in Japan and a few English sloops and several American dispatch boats, were amalgamated with what remained of the French Fleet to form the postwar French Navy. It was a navy of highly irregular composition and appearance, to say the least. And while there were enough ships to conduct a training program for officers, there were not enough to interest them in naval careers. The naval academy consisted of nothing more than temporary barracks. Pay schedules were not adjusted to compensate for devaluation of currency. Many officers left the service, and there was a constant shortage of personnel.
Within that decrepit body, however, the soul of the Navy persisted, the survivor of many trials and of more misunderstandings, sacrifices, and unmerited criticisms than glorious victories. But adversity had deeply impressed its officers with the conviction that despite its checkered history, the French Navy had served as an elite corps—few in numbers but of homogeneous organization, aloof from politics, always an example of efficiency and devotion in the critical hours of the destiny of France.
1 Samuel E. Morison, “The Battle That Set Us Free,” in the Saturday Evening Post, July 7, 1956.
