The French destroyed 77 vessels, including 3 battleships, 7 cruisers, 15 destroyers, 13 torpedo boats, 6 sloops, 12 submarines, 9 patrol boats, 19 auxiliary ships, 1 school ship, 28 tugs, and 4 cranes. Thirty-nine small ships were captured, most of them sabotaged and disarmed.
By June 10, 1940, the French Army was shattered, but the French Navy was amazingly intact. François Darlan, the Admiral of the French Fleet told Churchill point-blank that the Fleet would be sunk before it was surrendered to the Germans. … On June 17, France pressed for peace with Germany.
France put more emphasis on its land forces. The French Naval leaders often operated under fear of failure. The crews were not as seasoned as their English counterparts as they spent most of the war bottled up in ports and blockaded. 2 lack of concentration of naval forces.
In 1940, the French fleet was the fourth largest naval force in the world after Britain, the United States and Japan. Its strength included seven battleships, 19 cruisers, 71 destroyers and 76 submarines.
Admiral François Darlan, commander of the French Navy, assured the British, even after the French armistices with Germany and Italy, that the fleet would remain under French control but Winston Churchill and the War Cabinet judged that the risk was too great.
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Attack on Mers-el-Kébir.
| Date | 3 July 1940 |
|---|---|
| Result | British victory |
Churchill, worried that one of the world’s great navies would end up in German hands, asked the French to turn the ships over to the British instead. The French refused, but Admiral Darlan, commander of the French fleet, swore that he would sink his own ships if the Germans ever tried to take control.
What happened to the Vichy French after ww2?
The last of the Vichy exiles were captured in the Sigmaringen enclave in April 1945. Pétain was put on trial for treason by the new Provisional Government, and sentenced to death, but that was commuted to life imprisonment by de Gaulle.
Why didn’t Germany use the French fleet to invade Britain in WWII? – Quora. Because the Royal Navy would have destroyed it, of course. Churchill gave the French some options. The French scuttled their fleet in Toulon and the Royal Navy sunk the French ships in Algeria, to prevent the Germans seizing them.
Why did the French fleet not join the British?
In WWII, why didn’t the French navy join the British, and free France after the surrender? – Quora. Simply put, it would have been a violation of the armistice treaty between France and Germany, which Germany could have used as an excuse to resume hostilities.
‘National Navy’), informally La Royale, is the maritime arm of the French Armed Forces and one of the five military service branches of France. It is among the largest and most powerful naval forces in the world, ranking seventh in combined fleet tonnage and fifth in number of naval vessels.
At the beginning of World War II, the Royal Navy was the strongest navy in the world, with the largest number of warships built and with naval bases across the globe. It had over 15 battleships and battlecruisers, 7 aircraft carriers, 66 cruisers, 164 destroyers and 66 submarines.
Charles de Gaulle is the flagship of the French Navy (Marine Nationale). The ship is the tenth French aircraft carrier, the first French nuclear-powered surface vessel, and the only nuclear-powered carrier completed outside of the United States Navy. She is named after French statesman and general Charles de Gaulle.
The French Navy consists of nearly 100 vessels of the Force d’action navale (Naval action force) and the 10 submarines of the Forces sous-marines (Submarine force).
By the outbreak of the Second World War the French Navy was a strong force. Between 1926 and 1939 two battlecruisers, seven heavy cruisers and 12 light cruisers had been built. Their large battleships were either new or had recently been modernized. It also had 71 destroyers and 76 submarines.
How many battleships did France have in ww2?
In thirty years, from her first dreadnought battleship, Courbet, started late, in 1910 to the Jean Bart and Gascogne project in 1940, France only had produced four classes of battleships, the Courbet, Bretagne, Dunkerque, and Richelieu, transitioning from dreadnought to super dreadnought, and semi-battlecruiser to fast …
What is Churchill’s dilemma?
Reflecting on World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill observed that the greatest challenge was to fight the fascists without deploying the tools of the fascist state. This was Churchill’s dilemma. This is a particular burden of obligation borne by liberal societies.