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Between the Wars

Following the Great War, the French Navy came under the influence of the writings of Admiral Raoul Castex. His five volume Théories stratégiques is perhaps the most complete theoretical survey of maritime strategy to ever appear. The essence of Castex's work can be found in a summary of some 2,600 pages of original French text translated into English by the U.S. Naval Institute into 428 pages as Strategic Theories. Castex completed an additional eighteen major works and more than fifty journal articles. Castex's conclusions were that decisive battles were rare in history and that the enemy battle fleet was not always the main object of an operation or battle. The centerpiece of his writings are strategic maneuver and not battle. Castex recognized that this task was to provide doctrine for a second-ranking navy and not one that would ever hope to challenge the British. Thus he formulated the concept of la force organisée, the main force which could be mustered for a limited counteroffensive against a superior enemy. Castex gave significant attention to commerce raiding, raids, blockade, mine, and amphibious warfare. Castex's writings appeared to have had only modest direct impact on the behavior of French governments. Students at the école de guerre navale were still educated in traditional French naval doctrine of guerre de course.

Free French Naval Forces

After the Armistice and the Appeal of 18 June, De Gaulle founded the Free French Forces (Forces Françaises Libres, or FFL), including a naval arm, the "Free French Naval Forces" (Les Forces Navales Françaises Libres, or FNFL). On the 30 June 1940, De Gaulle was joined by vice-admiral Émile Muselier, who had come from Gibraltar by flying boat. Muselier was the only flag officer of the French Navy to answer the call of De Gaulle.

The French fleet was widely dispersed. Some vessels were in port in France; others had escaped from France to British controlled ports, mainly in Britain itself or Alexandria in Egypt. At the first stage of Operation Catapult, the ships in the British ports of Plymouth and Portsmouth were simply boarded on the night of 3 July 1940. The then largest submarine in the world, the Surcouf, which had sought refuge in Portsmouth in June 1940 following the German invasion of France, resisted the British operation. In capturing the submarine, two British officers and one French sailor were killed. Other ships were the two obsolete battleships Paris and Courbet, the destroyers Le Triomphant and the Léopard, eight torpedo boats, 5 submarines (the Minerve, Junon) and a number of other ships of lesser importance. As soon as the summer 1940, the submarines Minerve and Junon, as well as four avisos, departed from Plymouth. Towarsd the end of 1940, the destroyers Le Triomphant and Léopard followed. Le Triomphant sailed for New Caledonia and spent the rest of the war based there and in Australia. The ship saw action in both the Pacific and Indian Oceans. A number of ships were leased by the British to compensate the lack a warships of the FNFL ; among them, the Hunt class destroyer La Combattante and the Flower class corvette Aconit.

Soon after the fall of France, Free France was but a government in exile, with no land to speak of, and very little land and sea forces. In an attempt to set his authority on an important French territory, General De Gaulle attempted to rally French West Africa by personally sailing to Dakar with a British fleet, comprising a few Free French units; at the same time, a cruiser force had been sent by Vichy France to reclaim African territories which had already declared their support to De Gaulle (notably Chad). The resulting Battle of Dakar ended on a Vichist tactical victory, which did not prevent French West Africa from eventually joining the Fighting French in November 1942. When it did, important ships based in Dakar were obtained: the modern battleship Richelieu, the heavy cruiser Suffren, light cruisers Gloire, Montcalm, Georges Leygues, and a few destroyers, including cruiser-sized Le Fantasque class destroyers.

To distinguish the FNFL from the Vichist forces, vice-admiral Émile Muselier created the bow flag displaying the French colours with a red cross of Lorraine, and a cocarde also featuring the cross of Lorraine for aircraft of the Free French Naval Air Service (Aéronavale Française Libre) and the Free French Air Force (Forces Aériennes Françaises Libres).

With the Second World War came major changes to doctrine in the French Navy and combat interaction with the U.S. Navy and other allies. Free French Navy forces during World War II were quick to abandon their own pre-war doctrine and adapt-to allied navy doctrine. Where there was a choice between allies the French were usually more likely to accept American doctrine instead of British. Following World War II, France turned a good deal of its attention to the recovery and defense of overseas colonies. Most of this effort did not require navy forces for fleet versus fleet interaction, yet the French concepts for operations from the sea using aircraft carriers were based upon American navy doctrine rather than the British model.

Le Surcouf was launched in 1929 and commissioned in 1934, as a one-of from the ideas that submarines would surplant surface warships, an old idea all but obsolete by the time the ship was finished and launched. The boat was 110 meters [358 feet] long and a crew of 110 men and 8 officers, she was more an underwater cruiser than a submarine in the modern sense. She carried a observation aircraft in a watertight hangar, and her main armaments was twin 203mm cannons in a turret.

It is often missed that the submarine itself has been a projector of forms of air power, and that virtually all major nations have, at one time or another, experimented with operating aircraft from submarines. The French, in the years prior to the Second World War, produced a series of small submarine-launched floatplanes designed by Marcel Besson to be carried and flown by a large "submarine cruiser," the Surcouf. The French submarine Surcouf was reportedly sunk by US planes after being mistaken for a German U-boat, as was the USS Dorado (SS-248).

Throughout Indo-China there were large French investments. Indo-China was the most prosperous, the most valuable, and the largest in area and population of all colonies in the French Empire. France does not desire to lose it. Indo-China had two organized centers of opposition against the return of the French, with strong possibility that others may develop later.

The inhabitants of Cochin-China are Annamites by race, and the fact that Annamites are in arms against the French and British is not to be construed as meaning that they are from the state of Annam. However, Annam is in sympathy with the resistance movement against the return of the white races. The weapons in the hands of the Annamites had been regularly issued following Japanese recognition of the independence of Cochin-China on 9 March 1945.

On 01 October 1945 an armistice was arranged and fighting ceased. Two days later the French battleship Richelieu and alight cruiser arrived. Seven other cruisers, a dozen destroyers and small ships, and a detachment of the French naval air service were reported to be following. The Richelieu was present in Tokyo Bay during the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender.

The role of the Mediterranean theater is difficult to analyze. None of the avant-garde dictatorships had aircraft carriers or adequate radar. Trumbull Higgins explores the matter in Sofa UnderbelIy: The Anglo-American Controversy over the Italian Campaign, 1939-1945 [1968], but the best book is Michael Howard's The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War (1968). British interest "east of Suez"' was hard to shake off. The Balkans and Crete are taken up in Walter Ansel's Hitler and the Middle Sea (1972), and the Mediterranean war is covered broadly but apologetically by Marc Antonio Bragadin's The Italian Navy in World War II (1957) and by Admiral Paul Auphan and Jacques Mordal's extremely biased The French Navy in World War II (1959).