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1 Regulars—91,093, of which 5,486 were officers; Reserves—69,243, of which 4,820 were officers.
2 In 1941 Moysset became Minister without Portfolio to Marshal Philippe Pétain.
In 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
