Golden Journal No. 50:
Les Portes-Avions
France’s First Carrier
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
February 2024

On the eve of the Second World War, France’s Marine Nationale operated the world’s fourth-largest aircraft carrier force. It was also the world’s smallest, with just one ship to its name. But as a new war loomed, the French made plans to greatly expand their carrier aviation arm.

The carrier program made sense in the same light as those for new battle cruisers and fast battleships. In the event of a new war with the rapidly re-arming Third Reich, France would be dependent on ocean communications for deliveries of food, industrial goods and weapons from the neutral United States, and troops, food and raw materials from her overseas colonies. Carrier-based aircraft would be very effective protecting convoys and searching for enemy raiders.

French studies of through-deck aircraft carriers began in 1912, though these did not progress beyond the drawing-board stage. The Marine Nationale had great interest in taking aircraft to sea, and converted the otherwise useless torpedo-boat carrier Foudre into a seaplane carrier in 1912, the first such vessel permanently altered into an aircraft carrier of any type. During the First World War, the French converted three more steamers to operate seaplanes, and studied catapult technology as well.

Any other projects had to wait, as wartime priorities eventually halted all naval construction other than escort vessels. That included the five battleships of the Normandie class. After some studies of completing them with modified armament and protection, and even lengthening them to improve their lumbering speed, the Marine Nationale realized that the funding would never appear in France’s post-war shattered economy. The Navy decided to retain the least-advanced ship, Béarn, as she had not yet been launched and could more easily be modified. The other four eventually would be cut up for scrap, though what machinery and weapons that had been delivered were retained, at least initially.

Béarn seen off Le Havre, July 1928. A handsome ship when new.

FCM La Seyne launched the incomplete hull of Béarn in April 1920 to clear the slipway for other projects, and the Marine Nationale took possession for use in aircraft takeoff and landing experiments. They built a wooden flight deck and pilots conducted tests with improved arresting gear. At this point, the ship still lacked her machinery and most of her armor. A team of French naval architects visited the then-new British aircraft carrier Argus, and began to sketch plans to complete Béarn as an aircraft carrier rather than a battleship.

The 1922 Washington naval limitations agreement allowed each signatory to convert two existing battleship or battle cruiser hulls into aircraft carriers; the British delegation cleverly negotiated the clause to allow the Royal Navy to do so with three smaller battle cruisers. The United States and Japan each completed their two conversions, while Italy passed on doing so. France’s Marine Nationale chose to make one conversion, and after some study of the more complete hulls, settled on Béarn, returning her to La Seyne for conversion.

Béarn received the machinery intended for Normandie, but with a new set of boilers exclusively burning oil rather than the mixed coal-and-oil arrangement intended for the battleships. Béarn kept the protective coal bunkers that shielded her engine spaces, including their coal, despite having no coal-burning boilers (French cruisers also used coal for protection, exploiting a loophole in the Washington agreement, but Béarn displaced 22,000 tons against a treaty limit of 33,000 tons – saving weight was not an issue in her design). She would have the mixed propulsion arrangement of Normandie, with both turbines for high speed and more fuel-efficient but less powerful triple-expansion engines for cruising. Her pre-war design, mixed machinery and stubby dreadnought hull made for a designed speed of 21.5 knots.

With design and construction taking place almost simultaneously, Béarn did not enter service until May 1928. She had two hangar decks, with only the upper hangar used to store aircraft (workshops, spare parts and extra aircraft occupied the lower hangar). The three elevators only reached the upper hangar, and never worked as designed. She initially carried 32 aircraft, but often actually operated far less than that number.

Béarn launches a PL7 torpedo bomber, sometime in the 1930’s.

The carrier spent fifteen of the next 32 months in refit or repair, and when she was in service, she simply wasn’t a very good aircraft carrier – her speed was much too slow to both operate her aircraft and keep up with the fleet. Planning for a full reconstruction began in January 1931, but the financial effects of the Great Depression and the questionable results of such rebuilding led to only a minimal refit, which still lasted for 21 months of 1934 and 1935.

When war came in 1939, Béarn flew off her aircraft and commenced a seven-month refit. After a few weeks of carrier pilot qualifications (a skill that could not possibly help the French repel the looming German onslaught), she loaded gold bullion in May 1940 and set sail for the United States, to pay for and pick up new aircraft purchased from American manufacturers. She loaded the planes at Halifax, Canada during the first half of June, departing on the 16th. While on the way home, she and other French ships received orders to divert to Martinique as the Germans had overrun the Atlantic ports and an armistice would take place soon.

At Martinique, she unloaded the aircraft, which had no shelter and soon deteriorated. The aircraft carrier deteriorated, too. The Vichy authorities in charge of the Caribbean island maintained a strict neutrality, while the U.S. Navy maintained a blockade to keep the carrier and the airplanes in check, apparently unaware that both had rotted away past the point of relevance. The Vichy government ordered the warships sabotaged in May 1943, and Béarn was dutifully run aground and her engine spaces partially flooded.

Béarn rots at Martinique. Note the warped flight deck.

Now a useless hulk, Béarn was towed to Puerto Rico in September 1943 for temporary repairs, and moved on to New Orleans that December for more thorough reconstruction. Initial plans called for turning her into an escort carrier, but that seemed a waste of resources. Converted to an aircraft transport instead, she made just one voyage across the Atlantic bearing new aircraft and managing to ram an American troop transport during the trip, killing 68 American soldiers. Once arriving in France, she conducted a few transport missions between France and Algeria before taking a load of equipment and troops to French Indo-China. After returning with a load of wounded, she served as a depot ship before her scrapping in 1960.

Béarn had been an utter failure. Though allegedly serving for 32 years (on top of the 14 years that elapsed between keel-laying and entry into service), she spent most of that time either docked or under repair. She never operated aircraft in combat, and rarely operated aircraft in any other role, either. Her hull, outdated when laid down and then neglected for six years, simply was not suitable for conversion into a carrier. And given her poor service availability, she couldn’t even help prepare a cadre of pilots for a new generation of French aircraft carriers.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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