Читать книгу The French Navy in World War II - Paul Auphan - Страница 15
ОглавлениеIn September, 1939, the combined British-French naval forces were far superior to the German Navy. Outside of the North Sea, a zone of contact, all they expected to meet on the high seas were German submarines or occasional lone surface raiders. However, merchant shipping was as vitally important to France as it was to Great Britain, and the French Navy was determined to guard it well.
Ordinarily France received almost three-fourths of her imports by sea, mainly through Atlantic ports. War requirements would greatly increase French overseas purchases, particularly in America, where, without waiting for mobilization, she had placed large orders. On the side toward Germany, the frontier of course was already closed to traffic. Imports over the other land frontiers had never been very large. From an economic point of view France was almost an island like England. Her heavy industry was smaller than that of Germany, and her agriculture was seriously affected by the calling up of so many of the farmhands to the colors. The sea alone could assure the necessary food, arms, ammunition, petroleum, and other materials needed to supply the armed forces and civilian inhabitants, and to carry on the war.
Moreover France had to maintain close liaison with North Africa and the various colonies of the empire everywhere. It was not merely a matter of administering the colonial governments but also of transporting to Europe the immense resources of men and raw materials which these overseas possessions could contribute. All Navy men remembered that during the First World War the colonies sent to the assistance of the mother country some 500,000 fighting men and 200,000 workers. The lines of communication with Africa were as important to France as the great commercial shipping routes which brought the products of America.
Finally, transporting the British Expeditionary Force to France, along with the supplies necessary to maintain it, required the establishment of a convoy system linking Britain with French ports on the Channel or the Atlantic.
Strategically, France was the bridgehead of the Allies on the European continent—a fact brought home to the democracies, including the United States, in 1944 when the bridgehead no longer existed and had to be regained by a tremendous amphibious effort.
The problem of utilizing their merchant shipping to maximum benefit had been discussed between the two countries in the London meetings before the war. At that time the two navies had expected to have to face the Italian Navy as well as the German, and it had appeared necessary to have all the French light forces stationed in the Mediterranean in order to protect traffic with North Africa. Even then the ships available for escort would have been fewer than needed. Accordingly the French Admiralty had decided to permit its ordinary merchant ships in the Mediterranean to proceed unescorted, with routing varied according to circumstances, and to convoy only the troop transports and vessels with unusually valuable cargoes. In the Atlantic, French ships would join up with convoys which the British intended to form at regular intervals at Freetown (Sierra Leone), Kingston (Jamaica), and Halifax (Canada) for passage to the British Isles and return. The French Navy would participate in escorting certain convoys across the Channel.
Such were the plans of the French Naval High Command at the time hostilities began.
On the 1st of September, the French Admiralty, as a matter of precaution, had prohibited the sailing of any merchant ship from its ports. The following day this embargo was lifted—except for Atlantic traffic—as soon as Italy’s declaration of nonbelligerency permitted Mediterranean and coastal traffic to proceed almost normally. The Navy waited for positive information as to the whereabouts of the German Fleet before authorizing the resumption of transatlantic traffic, which it did on September 5.
One of the problems of the moment was what disposition to make of the Normandie. This magnificent liner of 80,000 tons, the pride of the French merchant marine, was in New York, scheduled to sail for Europe toward the end of August. Too large to be of immediate use as a transport, she would have to be put in a caretaker status either in France or in New York. The decision was to leave her in New York. Those who made that decision—including one of the authors of this book—could not then guess the destiny which fate held out for this beautiful vessel.11
Taken over by the American Maritime Commission shortly after Pearl Harbor, the Normandie was rechristened the USS Lafayette (AP 52). While undergoing conversion to a troop transport, she took fire from a workman’s blowtorch, and, after burning for hours, capsized. A total loss, she was raised, only to be scrapped.
Within weeks after mobilization began, French maritime traffic increased to a point it had never reached before. To the approximately 3,000,000 tons which made up the French merchant marine, there were progressively added 2,000,000 tons of ships—Greek, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch—which were chartered for French account by a mission with headquarters in London. This entire fleet was administered by the State. Singly or in convoys, the ships followed the routes and schedules laid down in each port by the routing officers responsible to the Admiralty.
On the very day that war was declared, the British passenger ship Athenia was torpedoed and sunk in British waters, but it was two or three weeks later before French ships were likewise attacked—a discrimination made, it is now known, by direct order of Hitler to the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy.
At the end of September an important convoy which included several large tankers left the Caribbean Sea for Britain and France. In its Atlantic crossing, up to the point where it was to be met in European waters by a British escort, it was convoyed by the large French submarine Surcouf, which was armed with two 203-mm. (8-inch) guns. But bad weather and machinery breakdowns on several ships resulted in the convoy scattering and the Surcouf losing contact. In this state the dispersed ships were attacked with torpedoes and gunfire by several German submarines. Between October 12 and 15, seven ships were sunk, including four French vessels: the tanker Emile-Miguet, the freighters Louisiane and Vermont, and the passenger ship Bretagne. French light units and seaplanes from Brest joined British ships in searching for the U-boats, and the British succeeded in rescuing 300 passengers from the Bretagne.
This was only the beginning. While the land front was settling down to a war of patrols and limited objective raids, the sea front was aflame with daily torpedoings and sinkings. If Germany had waited until she had had more submarines and, especially, more magnetic mines in order to unmask all her weapons simultaneously, she could have obtained more important—even decisive—results. The German Naval High Command was to recognize that fact later. But it requires great strength of character to sit back patiently and delay the employment of a new weapon when one is at war, particularly when there are tempting opportunities to use it. In fact Germany plunged immediately into a form of war based upon that of 1918, which obliged the Franco-British allies to convoy almost all of their commercial shipping, just as in World War I. Fortunately the abstention of Italy facilitated the task.
For some time the explosions of the new German magnetic mines were taken for the work of torpedoes or else ordinary mines equipped with some sort of effective antisweep mechanism. The technical experts of the two navies were at their wits’ end. Finally on the 23rd of November the mystery was solved. One of the magnetic mines, dropped from a German minelaying plane, fell in shallow water in the Thames estuary, where it was discovered and pulled ashore. Then two British officers disassembled it and discovered its secret—a feat of daring and technical skill which received the admiring accolade of all French officers.
Nevertheless the tempo of war—and especially mine warfare—increased with each passing day. To counter the new menace, the French Navy requisitioned in France, and purchased in Belgium, all the wooden-hulled fishing boats it could find, and equipped them with electric sweeps. These boats were mostly old and worn out, and their decrepit engines could not buck the current in many areas. However, no means could be neglected. At the end of a few weeks there were eight pairs of magnetic sweepers working in the channels off Dunkirk, four at Le Havre, and as many at Cherbourg. They exploded quite a number of magnetic mines, but they were to prove even more useful later in the evacuation of the northern ports as the German armies swept to the sea.22
If Dunkirk was little plagued with magnetic mines during the evacuations of May-June, 1940, Le Havre on the other hand was the target of a very heavy mine drop during which several of our minesweepers destroyed as many as eight mines each in a single day.
Another measure for insuring the safety of the coastal shipping lanes and the Dunkirk roadstead was the laying of twin electric cables at the bottom, in the center of the ship channel. When electric current was sent through these cables in the proper manner, they were capable of blowing up any magnetic mine in the near vicinity.
Finally all men-of-war and merchant ships sailing the Atlantic, the Channel, or the North Sea were immunized or demagnetized by the system known as degaussing, a method discovered in the nick of time. When the waters of the northern ports became infested with magnetic mines upon the approach of the German armies, not a single ship degaussed in the Cherbourg navy yard was lost to them during the entire evacuation.
During the first four months of the war forty per cent of Allied ship losses resulted from magnetic mines; after that, the percentage of losses dropped by half. On the whole, while magnetic mines constituted an added hazard to navigation and a source of mental anxiety to the High Command, they caused less actual losses than might have been expected. In fact they proved less deadly than the more conventional weapons, such as submarines or surface raiders.
At the very beginning, however, the situation was at times so alarming that Winston Churchill, accompanied by Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, made a special trip to Maintenon to ask the French Navy for assistance.
Admiral Darlan, who, like General Gamelin, had a special train at his personal disposal, sent it to Cherbourg to pick up the distinguished guests. The French naval stewards who manned the dining car were ordered to make certain that there would be no lack of champagne and other spirituous refreshments. Consequently the atmosphere of the meeting was particularly cordial. The conference took place under the trees of the Parc de Noailles, a setting which somewhat astonished the English. But the exchange of views which took place was straightforward and without ulterior motive, for both sides had in mind the one objective of winning the war. Curiously enough, when one reflects on events which were to follow, Mr. Churchill declared to Admiral Darlan that he had complete confidence in the Admiral and his officers—but he would prefer that the French Navy Minister and the French politicians not be kept too well informed on operating plans as he, Mr. Churchill, did not consider them capable of keeping a secret!
The British were particularly interested in the large new French battleships. To meet German battleship and cruiser raids they had only battleships that were too slow or battle cruisers that were too thinly armored. Until the time the new Prince of Wales would be ready in 1941, the British were counting a great deal on the Dunkerque and the Strasbourg, as well as on the Richelieu, then nearing completion, and on the Jean Bart, under construction, which they asked be completed at the earliest possible moment.
French industry was to perform miracles in this respect; the British were far ahead in submarine detection gear, and they promised to provide the French Navy with a class of trawlers equipped with asdic.
Returning to London after his conference with the French Admiralty, Mr. Churchill informed the House of Commons on November 8, “I wish to point out to you the remarkable contribution of the French Navy, which has never been, for many generations, as powerful and effective as it is now.” Later, he was to write in his memoirs that French assistance “exceeded by a great deal all the promises made or engagements entered into before the war.”
A few days after the conference, and in the same spirit of fellowship, the British Admiralty asked for the assistance of French submarines in escorting the transatlantic convoys being formed at Halifax. To defend against German surface ships that might possibly be encountered, the convoy escort generally included one British battleship or cruiser and one submarine steaming in the midst of the merchant ship group. From November, 1939, to May, 1940, except for the middle of the winter, French submarines of 1,500 tons alternated with British submarines in escorting eight Halifax convoys. On the African coast, likewise, the British often requested French assistance in escorting British convoys for Sierra Leone and Cape Town.
With their resources strained by the transatlantic convoys, the Royal Navy no longer had enough ships to escort their important shipping which traversed the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean unguarded, but which had to be convoyed from Gibraltar to England. The French Navy agreed to take turns with the British Navy in escort duty on that essential route, and from October, 1939, to May, 1940, French destroyers, torpedo boats, and sloops provided the escort for 29 convoys in one direction and 27 in the other. Ships thus escorted totalled 2,100, of which 89 per cent were British or British-chartered vessels. Out of the 56 convoys, only four ships were lost—three British and one Greek.
These large convoys, sometimes numbering as many as 60 ships, were too unwieldy to burden them further by adding French ships bound from the Mediterranean or Morocco to French Atlantic ports. Moreover many of the older French merchant ships could not make the minimum required speed of nine knots to keep up with the English convoys. Consequently the French Admiralty was forced to sail its ships in small groups from Oran and Casablanca, and then form them into one convoy off Gibraltar for the run north; on the return voyage, the procedure was reversed. From October, 1939, to May, 1940, the Navy thus escorted almost 200 small convoys between the Bay of Biscay and Gibraltar. These convoys totalled 1,532 French or French-chartered ships, of which only seven were sunk by the enemy.
The greatest deficiency of the French Navy in antisubmarine warfare was in submarine detection devices. Rarely was a U-boat found on the surface where well-aimed guns would quickly eradicate it, and the only way to reach it down below was by depth bombs. Differently from the gun crews, for whom target practice was frequently held, there had been no practice at depth bombing with live charges. Consequently the ships too often mistook the great surface upheaval resulting from the explosion of the depth bomb as sure evidence of a “kill.” To reduce such erroneous reports to a minimum, the French Admiralty distributed a film on depth charging which showed the true crescent-shaped eddies formed on the surface by a series of explosions. Still, in order not to discourage the attackers, the Admiralty was quite liberal in giving credits to those who had pressed home an attack vigorously.
Up to May, 1940, the French Navy had recorded more than fifty attacks on submarines in the western theater, not counting numerous ineffectual searches. In the eastern end of the Channel, German submarine activity was practically zero, thanks to the effective Allied Pas-de-Calais minefield barrier, in which three U-boats were sunk during the month of October. Most of the reports of submarines sunk, however, were found to be erroneous. Such was the case with the U-boat which the Lorientaise reported it had sunk in the Bay of Biscay on January 19, 1940, and which a diver even claimed he had actually seen lying on the bottom. German archives, examined after the war, proved however that no U-boat was lost in that vicinity. Similarly the U-41, attacked with gunfire and depth charges by the Siroco in the Bay of Biscay on November 20, 1939, and reported sunk, was able to return to port and report the attack. These same German archives, however, confirmed the victory of the Simoun, which rammed and sank the U-54 on February 23, 1940—a sinking which had not been officially recognized by the French Admiralty at the time.
As for other attacks carried out in conjunction with British forces, the degree of success attributable to either will never be known. Such was the case of the U-55, attacked simultaneously on January 30, 1940, by the French destroyer Valmy and two British destroyers and a British plane.
The really important thing was that the U-boat had been sunk!
In addition to convoy escort and antisubmarine warfare—routine tasks in any naval war—numerous other missions devolved upon the French Naval Forces.
First there was the protection of the heavy troop movements at the beginning of the war: seven convoys transporting two divisions from Africa to the Rhine front; eight troop convoys from Marseilles and Algiers to Beirut, to form the Army of the Levant; and two convoys of British troops from Gibraltar to Malta, which were escorted by the French. In addition a steady stream of native African troops—45,000 men in nine months—began to flow from Dakar and Casablanca to France.
Other important convoys were those carrying the British Expeditionary Force to French soil—four modern divisions in 1939, and thirteen by the end of May, 1940. At first these landed at Brest and in the ports of the Loire, in order to be beyond range of German air raids. The escort was British, though French destroyers and fighter planes often participated in the protection of convoys carrying troops. Local patrols and the sweeping of harbors and harbor entrances for mines was the particular responsibility of the French.
The great minefield barrier which the Allied navies had laid across the Pas-de-Calais at the beginning of the war, had only two narrow passageways through it, each of which was guarded by microphones and other detection gear. One of these passageways was close to the English coast, and opened toward the Downs roadstead; the other was at the foot of Cape Gris-Nez, and opened toward Dunkirk. As its share in the barrier, the French Navy laid 1,000 mines, but within the next few weeks the swift Channel currents tore over 200 of them up and deposited them on the nearby beaches. But just as many British-laid mines washed up on these same beaches. With typical courtesy the French mine disposal officer disarmed these mines, disassembled them, greased them, and returned them to their British owners.
As soon as the Pas-de-Calais mine barrier was in place, the terminal ports for British military convoys were moved closer to the front. Saint-Malo replaced Brest, but the principal port of disembarkation was Cherbourg, where before April, 1940, over 300,000 men were landed without incident. On mail steamers from Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk a stream of sick or wounded men, of non-combatants from various organizations, and of men on leave crossed the Channel for England, sometimes as many as 2,000 or 3,000 within a day.
It was not only in the Channel that the French Navy cooperated in ensuring the safety of British troop convoys; in December, 1939, London requested the loan of the Dunkerque to escort a Halifax-to-England convoy of seven passenger liners carrying Canadian troops to join the British Expeditionary Corps in Europe.
Other crossings requiring special care were the convoys carrying gold. Not only was the United States of America not in the war at that time, but it was so fearful of being dragged in that a special neutrality law—the “cash and carry” law—governed all dealings with the belligerents. Under the law these latter were required to pay for all purchases in cash and then to transport the goods themselves, as American ships were forbidden to enter the war zone. The Allies had to transport the purchased goods either in their own ships or in neutral ships chartered by them. When the Allies ran out of U.S. dollars, the only currency the Americans would accept was gold.
In November, 1939, the battleship Lorraine, escorted by two cruisers, carried the first shipment of gold to the United States; on its return it escorted a convoy of merchant ships loaded with airplanes. When in December the Dunkerque went to Halifax to escort the Canadian troop convoy mentioned above, it deposited there, as at a teller’s window in a bank, 100 tons of gold. The aircraft carrier Béarn, going to pick up airplanes in the United States, took over 250 tons of gold, and the passenger liner Pasteur an additional 400 tons. The cruiser Emile Bertin started for America with 300 tons, but the armistice intervened and she was diverted to Fort-de-France, in the island of Martinique, instead.
In addition to safeguarding the transfer of all this gold without a penny’s loss, the French Navy also rescued, via Beirut, 78 tons of gold belonging to the Republic of Poland—gold which later figured in important diplomatic exchanges at the time of the evacuation of the reserves of the Bank of France when the country was invaded by the Germans.
Nor was the Navy’s part confined to the mere convoying of ships; it also mounted offensive operations against surface raiders which threatened them.
The operations of the German surface raiders are now well known, but in 1939 the Chiefs of Staff in London and Maintenon could not deduce the German plans from the maze of information, both true and false, which poured in from all over the world.
On September 30, for instance, news was received of the sinking of the English freighter Clement, sunk in the South Atlantic by a German pocket-battleship. The French battleship Strasbourg promptly sailed from Brest for Dakar on October 7, to join the British aircraft carrier Hermes in forming a “killer group.” The Strasbourg would be relieved later by two heavy cruisers from the French Mediterranean Squadron. These “killer groups” made periodic sweeps of the tropic seas, and eventually the raider, identified by then as the Admiral Graf Spee, was brought to action off the Río de la Plata on December 13, 1939, by a British force under Commodore Henry Harwood. Damaged, and driven into the neutral harbor of Montevideo, the Graf Spee scuttled herself. Perhaps her refusal to come out for a final fight was due in part to a rumor, carefully “leaked” by the French, that several large ships were cruising off the Río de la Plata.
A second German raider, the Deutschland, was reported loose in the North Atlantic on October 21. The Dunkerque and a division of cruisers promptly put to sea to safeguard to its destination an unescorted British convoy from the West Indies.
A month later a British auxiliary cruiser was sunk north of Scotland by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Believing mistakenly that the blow had been struck by the Deutschland, which in reality had already returned to Germany undetected, the British sent out a search group built around the Dunkerque and the British battle cruiser Hood, which swept the northern seas unsuccessfully from November 25 to December 2.
In the Indian Ocean the French heavy cruiser Suffren was escorting Australian convoys, while in the Atlantic joint patrols searched for the Altmark, the Graf Spee’s supply ship. But the Altmark escaped all its hunters until two months later when it was intercepted in Norwegian waters, bare hours from the safety of its home port.
Also watched by the French Navy were certain areas suspected of running supplies to enemy ships at sea. One such area was the Iberian Peninsula. Spain was proclaimedly neutral, but her government was indebted to the Germans for help rendered during the Civil War. Also many German merchant ships, caught at sea by the war, had taken refuge in Spanish ports, especially Vigo. The British and French Admiralties suspected that some of these ships were secretly taking supplies out to enemy submarines or even enemy cruisers at sea. Therefore the French Navy had its light craft, during the entire war, patrolling the approaches to the Cantabrian coast and the principal ports from Bilbao to Vigo. French airplanes and even French submarines participated in these patrols at the beginning. Nevertheless, out of the score or more of German merchant ships that were reported to have slipped out of Spain’s northeast ports between September, 1939, and May, 1940, only two were intercepted. Of these one was captured, and the other was scuttled by its crew.
As for German submarines slipping in and obtaining supplies from German merchant ships anchored in Spanish harbors, even today little is really known.33
The French naval attaché at Madrid sent in reports giving in detail the identifying numbers of German submarines supposed to have been supplied from merchant ships anchored in Spanish ports. German records examined after the war proved, however, that none of these particular submarines had been within hundreds of miles of Spain at the times cited. On the other hand a German submarine commander made an official report, as evidenced by the German archives, that he had had to forego seeking the shelter of the Spanish coast in order to recharge his batteries, because the sector was too closely patrolled by the French for safety.
In addition to all the areas mentioned thus far, the French Navy was also responsible for patrolling the regions of the Azores and of the Canary, Madeira, and Cape Verde Islands, where some German freighters and tankers had taken refuge. On several occasions our own submarines or auxiliary cruisers would investigate these suspected areas, and on September 23, 1939, the French submarine Poncelet captured the German freighter Chemnitz, which had slipped out of Las Palmas and was attempting to get back to Germany. In October a joint Franco-British “killer group” intercepted the German freighter Halle, which scuttled itself, and captured the German Santa Fe. In the middle of the following month the German freighter Trifels was captured by the French auxiliary cruiser Koutoubia, while trying to get away with 21,000 cases of gasoline. On February 14, 1940, a prize crew from the small sloop Elan sailed into Brest with the German Rostock, captured off the Spanish coast three days earlier.
But the most extraordinary episode was that of the German freighter Corrientes, which on the night of May 9 suddenly blew up with a mysterious explosion while trying to get under way in the Las Palmas roadstead. Now it can be revealed that the explosion was caused by two audacious officers from the French freighter, Rhin, cruising off the port, who swam in and placed limpet mines against the underwater hull of the German ship.
But convoy escorting, blockade duty, and vain “killer” patrols were not enough to fill a need for activity which the Italian status of nonbelligerency left unsatisfied in the Mediterranean. At the suggestion of the French Navy, the Royal Navy accepted the offer of a few French submarines to assist in keeping the watch in the North Sea against a possible sortie by the German forces.
The French submarine tender Jules Verne, with a division of 600-ton submarines, arrived at Harwich on March 23, 1940. A month later another division of 600-ton submarines as well as a division of 1,500-ton boats reported at Harwich, bringing the total to 12 submarines thus placed at the disposal of the British Command. The force was further increased by the submarine minelayer Rubis, since the services of such a vessel had also been requested by the British.
But the hazardous operations of this flotilla in German waters more properly belongs to the account of the Norwegian expedition and therefore will be told in that chapter, along with the equally fascinating story of the super-destroyers of our Fantasque-class in the grim battles of the North Sea.
1 Taken over by the American Maritime Commission shortly after Pearl Harbor, the Normandie was rechristened the USS Lafayette (AP 52). While undergoing conversion to a troop transport, she took fire from a workman’s blowtorch, and, after burning for hours, capsized. A total loss, she was raised, only to be scrapped.
2 If Dunkirk was little plagued with magnetic mines during the evacuations of May-June, 1940, Le Havre on the other hand was the target of a very heavy mine drop during which several of our minesweepers destroyed as many as eight mines each in a single day.
3 The French naval attaché at Madrid sent in reports giving in detail the identifying numbers of German submarines supposed to have been supplied from merchant ships anchored in Spanish ports. German records examined after the war proved, however, that none of these particular submarines had been within hundreds of miles of Spain at the times cited. On the other hand a German submarine commander made an official report, as evidenced by the German archives, that he had had to forego seeking the shelter of the Spanish coast in order to recharge his batteries, because the sector was too closely patrolled by the French for safety.
