Fall and Rise of French Sea Power by Hugues Canuel;

Author:Hugues Canuel; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2021-06-20T21:00:00+00:00

The Continued Challenge of Clashing Naval Visions

As a committed building effort had only been launched the summer before, France’s naval fleet was still very much in transition in the summer of 1951 (see table 7.1). Figures show a total of 256,000 tons (300,000 tons if one included various auxiliaries and amphibious vessels), but the fleet remained an assemblage of French prewar construction, allied transfers of World War II stocks, and Axis trophies of war. The T-47 destroyer Surcouf was the only genuine postwar unit, and her construction had barely begun. The French navy did not have the ability to maintain a carrier task force available to respond to a national crisis or a sudden UN commitment, nor did it provide NATO with at least one ASW hunter-killer group on a continuous basis. The smaller destroyer escorts, minesweepers, and patrol craft were operating at full capacity, dispersed as they were on operations that ranged from the métropole to the antipodes of the Union française, especially as the fight in Indochina called on ever more resources. The submarine force could not conduct operations of its own, dedicated as it was to supporting the ASW training of the surface fleet. This portrait made for a bleak assessment of the Marine nationale’s operational capability six years after the end of World War II.

The Aéronavale had yet to join the jet age, with all of its carrier- and shore-based squadrons flying proven but obsolete aircraft designs from the previous decade. However, such a bleak reading of conditions at the time could be misleading. Naval aviation had already come to dominate planning at the Rue Royale when Admiral Henri Nomy, the navy’s senior pilot, took over from the boisterous Lambert as chef de l’État-major général de la Marine in June 1951. If any doubt still lingered in the immediate postwar era, the “gun carriers versus aircraft carriers” debate had since been resolutely concluded, with the latter the reigning capital ship, key to exercising sea power in the coming decades.4 Nuclear weapons would soon become small enough for delivery by carrier-based aircraft, while flexible carrier wings could discharge the full range of missions through the Cold War, from forming the nucleus of ASW hunter-killer groups to the provision of air defense at sea and in the littoral as well as mobile fire support to forces ashore, as demonstrated in Korea and Indochina. By 1951 the Marine nationale had also completed a resolute turn away from the Royal Navy toward the U.S. Navy in its approach to carrier operations—whether in terms of doctrine, procedures, and equipment—and could envision continued growth through the provision of American aid.

The purchase of Arromanches from Great Britain represented the final act in the postwar RN assistance to French naval aviation. London had agreed in 1946 to lease the former Colossus to France for five years, but the French government elected in March 1951 to buy her outright for 1.5 million British pounds.5 From then on, the Aéronavale embarked on a decided course of “Americanization.

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