The Cruel Sea:
The Marine Nationale
in the Second Great War, Part One
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2023

In the world of the Second Great War, American President Woodrow Wilson mediates a peace settlement at the end of 1916. Not everyone is satisfied, and in 1940 war returns as France, Russia and Italy seek to redeem this “lost victory.” That’s the theme of our Second Great War alternative-history story arc, which includes The Cruel Sea, an expansion for Second World War at Sea: Bismarck. Our storybook Fleets of the Second Great War: La Royale tells about the French fleet of this reality in exhaustive detail.

France ended the Great War with an obsolete battle fleet and cruiser force, a lack of modern cruisers and destroyers, and some incomplete hulls of poorly-designed battleships. The Marine Nationale would need to be rebuilt almost from the ground up if France were to play a role as a naval power.

One faction within the naval establishment pushed for a return to the Jeune Ecole theories of the previous century: a coast-defense navy, centered on torpedo craft and submarines. Given the lack of modern large surface units, this was a tempting suggestion. But the Washington Naval Conference, held between November 1921 and February 1922, confirmed France as a naval power, though one of the second rank. That propelled French naval policy to rebuild the battle fleet, since not to fill out her allotted tonnage would represent an unacceptable loss of prestige.

In the world of the Second Great War, the power politics of battleship construction are somewhat different than those of our reality. There is a naval conference, convened in Vienna by Kaiser Karl in 1918 to address the runaway costs of armaments. With many nations using their naval programs to address unemployment, the cycle of “response” to rivals’ new ships threatened to become an unstoppable spiral.

France emerged with second-tier status, after Russian Grand Duchess Tatiana accepted great-power status for her own empire at the price of abandoning her French and Italian allies. That rankled some French nationalists, but in truth the Republic had no ability to build new warships at the same pace as Germany or the United States. France and Italy insisted on special status, and finally the others gave in: France could build three battleships every two years, and in addition the French could build as many oversized destroyers as they did of the standard type; other signatories could only build one such “leader” for every six standard destroyers.

Whether France needed a battle fleet, when the enemy stood right across the barely-changed Franco-German border, actually provoked relatively little debate. France had been denied the fruits of her hard-earned victory, by the American gangster Wilson acting in concert with “the Jews.” And now the decadent Austrians – who openly paraded the presence of Jews in the highest levels of their government and promoted cross-dressing musical performances – had deployed their honeyed words and inherent dishonesty to push France into second-class status. France would keep her word, unlike some other less honorable nations, but would build every ship allowed under the agreement.

Initially, at least, the arms buildup had a great deal of popular support. The French populace had been led to believe they entered Wilson’s mediated talks as victors, and would receive the justly-earned spoils of their victory. When that failed to happen, right-wing politicians made this “lost victory” the centerpiece of their platforms. France would have to fight again, and the left’s visions of an integrated European society built around traditional French values of liberty, equality and brotherhood were simply German-inspired treason.

The Marine Nationale’s first step toward recovery would be completion of the ships abandoned at the start of the Great War. Those included five ships of the Normandie class, laid down in 1913 and 1914, and four of the similar but larger Lyon class laid down in 1917 as part of the post-war program. The Marine Nationale also took over the Bretagne-class battleship Basileus Konstantinos, laid down in late June 1914 for Greece and abandoned at the outbreak of war. Afterwards, the Greeks had refused to resume payments, and the Marine Nationale took over the contract with St. Nazaire’s Penhoët shipyard. That gave the French battle fleet ten new battleships completed between 1919 and 1922, though all of them were somewhat obsolete at the moment they raised the tricolor. Combined with the eleven battleships available after the Great War, it is a formidable fleet on paper.

Note: The four Guyenne-class early dreadnoughts from Great War at Sea: Secret Treaties also appear in the Second Great War.

Four battle cruisers designed before the Great War but not ordered before it broke out completed the post-war building boom. The first class of two ships, more of a fast battleship than a true battle cruiser, carried a dozen 340mm guns in quadruple turrets much like those of the Normandie class. They were laid down in 1917, with the next class carrying eight 370mm guns in two quadruple turrets followed in 1919 just before the Vienna accords’ deadline to begin new construction.

Even before the Great War, the French battle line lacked cruisers for scouting and screening duties, and the Marine Nationale also felt the need for cruisers to show the flag and patrol the Republic’s world-wide colonial empire. Five light cruisers had been laid down in 1914, and abandoned at the start of the war; contracts for five more had been let but the ships had not been started. Work on all ten resumed in 1917, with some of the contracts shifted to other shipyards that did not have an available slipway for a new cruiser.

As those cruisers launched, a new set of ten orders replaced them on the slipway, similar ships with their main armament (eight 138.6mm guns) collected into four twin turrets instead of in eight single mounts, but otherwise very similar. That gave the Marine Nationale twenty brand-new cruisers, all of them falling short of the standard accepted at the Vienna Naval Conference: 8,000 tons’ displacement and a main armament of 155mm (6.1-inch) guns.

That still represented an upgrade over the aging armored cruisers that had filled those roles during the Great War, outdated relics of the prior century. The six most modern armored cruisers continued in service as training vessels until the mid-1920’s, when they received a thorough reconstruction, as under the treaty terms they were not subjected to the 10,000-ton displacement limit. The result was not satisfactory, and all would be relegated to the distant West African and Indo-China stations.

The naval accords did not allow battleship construction to begin until 1928, a decade after the talks opened. But they did not limit cruiser construction, though they did instill strict limits on numbers for the first decade. France built more capable light cruisers, and a sextet of poorly-designed heavy cruisers, during those ten years.

The fascist-oriented government of François Coty poured money into the fleet, and when the 10-year pause had elapsed, the Marine Nationale had the government’s full backing and plentiful funding. Not only did France now build new capital ships up to the treaty limits, all of the older ships received thorough modernization during the 1930’s.

Investment in all branches of the military soared after Coty and his Solidarité Française movement seized full power in February 1934 and stopped disguising their fascism. Though Coty himself dropped dead not long afterwards, his movement carried on and sought to make France an armed camp. Unable to count on support from the dithering British, France could only depend on her own sea power to assure overseas communications with foreign sources of raw materials and her own colonial empire, which would be fully mobilized in support of France’s war of revenge.

Strict censorship tried to keep the French people from learning how their standard of living steadily fell behind that of the neighboring Germans and Dutch, as the regime kept funneling resources into heavy industry including the steel mills and shipyards that created the fleet, and the factories that pumped out thousands of tanks and artillery pieces. Workers lost the right to unionize and to refuse overtime (at no added rate of pay), or even to leave their jobs in industries classed as “vital to the national interest.”

Any misery was the fault of the Germans, and would be set right after the coming war. Anyone who opposed these government policies, or even questioned them, was declared a traitor and imprisoned or worse. The mills and shipyards therefore kept humming to build this revenge fleet.

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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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