Sea Control - Sea Control 268 - French Seapower with CAPT Hugues Canuel and Dr. Brian Chao

Episode Date: August 15, 2021

Links: 1. The Fall and Rise of French Seapower, France's Quest for an Independent Naval Policy, 1940-1963 by CAPT Hugues Canuel, April 15, 2021. USNI Press 2. BrianCChao.com

Hey folks, Jared here. Today I'm joined by Captain Hugh Canuel and Dr. Brian Chow, and we're going to be discussing the evolution of French sea power from the Pax Botanica through the period immediately post-World War II. We'll also touch on the way France's rise as a sea power parallels China today. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. Don't miss everything going on over at the website simsec.org. The final call for articles for Project Trident is live, and we're partnering with Lockheed Martin and Naval Warfare Studies Institute

at the Naval Postgraduate School for the topic Emerging Technologies. You can find more information about submissions at simsec.org. We've also officially put out our call for articles for our fiction contest. Again, go over to simsec.org for full details. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts.

On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control. hosted by the Center for International Maritime Technology. Aloha, Shoemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, my guests are Captain Hugh Canuel, Royal Canadian Navy, author of The Fall and Rise of French Sea Power, and Dr. Brian Chow. As a reminder, our opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might otherwise be associated.

So, Hugh, would you mind starting by introducing yourself to our listeners? Absolutely. And thanks again, Jared, for having me today. This is a great opportunity. Very much looking forward to this discussion. So, as you mentioned, Captain Hugues Canuel, the Royal Canadian Navy. I'm currently employed as the Canadian Defence Attaché to Japan. So, I'm working out of the Embassy of Canada here in Tokyo. I've also completed a PhD in War Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada, part-time basis while continuing my naval career,

and Fall and Rise of French Sea Power is basically based on my doctoral work. Well, thank you very much for joining us. Brian, could you tell us a little bit about your background and in particular about your doctoral work? Yes. And thank you for having me on here, Jared. So my name is Brian Chow. I am on the other side of the world from Tokyo. I'm in Rhode Island where I'm an assistant professor of national Security Affairs at the Naval War College. I study basically great power politics as they relate to the Asia Pacific. And my doctoral work looked at how continental great powers, including France, fare when it comes to naval development, why some of them are more successful

than others, why some of the failures actually managed to fail in different ways. And that's really emblematic of my broader research interest in how geography shapes state perceptions and behaviors in the international system. Thanks. Well, Brian, let's start with that geography question then. So you refer to France's geography as the hexagon, as of its shape, but how has France's geography shaped its choices regarding whether it's a sea power or a continental power? Well, it's really been both. France is essentially one part of an hourglass-shaped peninsula at the edge of Eurasia. It's a hexagon, as it's often called, but half of those borders are on the sea. And in fact, a couple of French scholars writing decades ago went so far as to say that all the drama in French history derived from this land-sea dualism.

But balancing this dualism has proven particularly difficult for France. And if you think about France in its shape today, which began to form around the conclusion of the Hundred Years' War, You'll see that the French state has always gone back and forth between the pursuit of maritime power and a refocus on the land. So what this means is you'll see France pop up over the centuries as a naval power, but intermittently so. To the extent that when you read scholarship about the French Navy, you'll often see it referred to as the personal luxury of some specific monarch or his ministers. And the Navy is usually referred to as the Navy of so-and-so, the Navy of Colbert, the Navy of Napoleon III, whereas the French Army, by contrast, is usually talked about as simply that, the French Army, the nation's military force. And so that gives you a lexicographical, I suppose, sort of view of how the Navy in France has sort of evolved over the years and the role that it's tended to play in the French state and in geopolitics. Now, as you mentioned in your dissertation, which I said this to you privately, I'll say it publicly here.

You should publish your dissertation. That was a it was it was a tremendous read. I know you told me you thought it was going to put me to sleep. It did not. I'm looking forward to getting back to it after having just read the French piece. But the British and the French spent almost 125 years in continuous conflict from the late 1600s to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. So what role did the French Navy play in that conflict? Well, I appreciate your compliment. I am actually working on the Desert Union as a book project right now. So fingers crossed in the coming months. The Navy actually played a pretty large role, though not always the most effective one. For Americans, you can think of the Battle of Yorktown, which secured American independence and probably would not have been won without the French Navy cutting off the British Navy from the British land forces on the peninsula. But in the Napoleonic era, I mean, we could talk about Napoleon himself all day.

In fact, he could have become a sailor instead of a soldier. But the French Navy's goal during that war was basically to take the fight to the British and to beat them directly in battle. And it was a disastrous failure. But that failure actually taught the French a lesson that they have carried with them ever since. And that is do not build a navy to directly contest the world's naval number one. and instead figure out how to be number two and figure out how to make it work for the French. I'm going to switch the order of these questions a little bit. So if this throws you off or you need a second, just let me know. But how did France's navy evolve during the Pax Britannica

period? So it evolved in a couple of different ways. It evolved in terms of outlook and strategy and it also evolved in terms of material. So after the trauma of the Napoleonic Wars, France made two big changes to how it operated in the world. And both these changes involved the Navy. So first, France settled on being number two at sea and figuring out what that meant. What kind of a Navy was the number two naval power supposed to look like? What was it supposed to do? And second, France decided that instead of pursuing power and prestige and resources on the European continent, it would redirect its focus to overseas. Building an empire against, frankly, weaker opponents. Now, the trick, of course, was to go overseas without antagonizing

the British Empire, at least not too often or too severely. So outlook and strategy changed. But this also meant, in practical terms, that there were changes to fleet composition and material. So for France, it meant still building a fleet that was pretty powerful, easily the world's second most powerful navy, but one that put a greater focus on ships like cruisers to engage in empire building and empire policing, as opposed to one that was geared for another battleship type of head-to-head conflict to threaten British naval hegemony. And so one thing I argue is that by doing these two things together, France was able to accomplish a lot of its foreign policy objectives, and to also normalize those behaviors, so that London over

the years would look at what Paris was doing around the world and see it as basically the normal sort of thing that a great power would do, and that was not too alarming. In fact, if you think about how the United Kingdom and France managed to cooperate on certain things, most notably the Crimean War, it shows you just how far the French were able to go in terms of achieving their foreign policy objectives and using their navy to do so. And the last point I'll make is in terms of evolution. France was able to maintain its place as the naval number two because it could focus on technological innovation. And that's one thing that the French carried out throughout the 1800s in terms of how to counter asymmetrically, the word we use today, counter asymmetrically

the superior British Navy. So constantly pushing the boundaries of the Industrial Revolution, France was able to give itself an added sense of security. And we think about many of the things that are taken for granted today, steam propulsion, the screw propeller, the ironclad warship, the steel warship, torpedoes and torpedo boats, submarines. These were all things that were developed into militarily useful technologies because of French experimentation and French ingenuity. And last question for you, and then I think you're going to jump in on some of Hugh's questions as well. But you've made the argument that we should be viewing China's rise through the lens of the British-French relationship during Pax Britannica, rather than the Anglo-German

relationship just prior to World War I. So could you compare and contrast those two relationships and why you think that Anglo-French relationship might be more apropos? So a few years ago, when we were marking the centenary of World War I, you saw a lot of pieces come out comparing Anglo-German relations of early 1900s with US-PRC relations today. And I was myself guilty of that. But the more I thought about this comparison and the more research I did looking at my France case study, there are three things that I think struck me as problematic. First is the analogy you use structures how you think about something. So, for example, if you if you view something as like the 1938 Munich negotiations with Germany, then you can't possibly give in to the other side because then you'd be appeasing. right? And appeasement didn't work in 1938, so it can't work if that's the framework that you're

operating under. Now, this wouldn't be such a big issue if there were other competing analogies. And aside from occasional references to a Cold War comparison, I didn't see any other competing analogies for looking at the US-PRC relationship. And this led to the final problem, which is that the Anglo-German analogy sucks. I mean, it's really depressing, right? I mean, no one I know at least wants this outcome. We don't want things to devolve into this horrendous spiral, this security dilemma, as international relations scholars call it. And so this doesn't really offer any positive lessons for Beijing and Washington in the 21st century. So this is where I come to the Anglo-French analogy. The late great Sir Michael Howard observed some years ago that the

Anglo-French relationship during the Pax Britannica included the longest naval arms race in modern history, and yet it ended peacefully. In fact, it ended with the two countries becoming allies and remaining so to this day. And this was after Britain and France had spent almost the entire previous millennium fighting each other. So the question is, how did London and Paris manage this? Well, so as I said earlier, one of the things that the French did, and I looked at this primarily from a French perspective, was they deployed their navy around the world in very smart ways for smart purposes. They decided to compete indirectly with the United Kingdom as an imperial great power. The second thing was that they managed to look for ways to cooperate.

And keep in mind, this was in the 1800s when we were living in a social Darwinist, zero-sum, ultra-competitive world. The two great powers of the day were the two most powerful navies of the day, who had been enemies for going on 900 years, still found mutual interests, still found ways to cooperate, and still managed to keep their disagreements from blowing up into conflict. The Crimean War is just one example. Now, I'm not suggesting for a second that the United States and China resuscitate imperialism and go conquering the world together. What I am suggesting, though, is that if two countries, Britain and France, that had hated and fought each other for centuries could come together in a dog-eat-dog social Darwinist international

environment and find ways to work together on issues of common concern, then surely China and the United States can manage their relationship in a way that doesn't spiral downwards the way that the Anglo-German relationship did, especially since China and the United States don't have the historical animosity that Britain and France did, and China and the United States are not living in a zero-sum social Darwinist world. And the last thing I'll note is that analogies by definition are not perfect. I certainly recognize that. There are contextual and other differences between China and the United States, serious differences. Nuclear weapons is one, and the stability-instability paradox that they cause. Culture is an obvious one. But I think on balance, if one examines what

the Anglo-French relationship can tell us and what the Anglo-German relationship can tell us about great power politics. The Anglo-French one is far more hopeful, far more constructive, and deserves some serious consideration when we think about what we want Beijing and Washington's relationship in the 21st century to look like, and what do we do to get there? Thanks, Seth. I'm going to come to you now, and we're going to start diving into your book. So when World War II started, the U.S., Britain, and Japan were the leading sea powers. Where did the French Navy stand at the war's outset? Obviously, I find it a fascinating subject as the French naval experience in the years leading up to the Second World War and during the Cold War is by and large ignored in English literature.

So that was very interesting to pursue research in that domain. And now that we're chatting with Brian, it's interesting to see how that experience reflects many of the lessons he's drawn from the earlier period. Now, obviously, the period I studied was different in many ways, and the aspirations of France as a nation and the French Navy itself were somewhat different. Some of those differences were obviously by 1939, the French had abandoned aspiration to be number two in the face of the rise of the American Navy, the continued dominance of the British Navy and the rise of the Imperial Japanese Navy at the time. Nevertheless, while being ranked fourth, the Fourth Navy in 1939, they were by a wide margin, they were the number one European continental Navy that still had worldwide reach. They did a pretty good job actually of building up that needed during the interwar period.

As you know, as a result of the Washington conference in 1922, there were ratios published or agreed to by the signatories. Many French naval leaders were not happy about those as France was relegated to an equal footing with Italy and such things. But afterwards, they did a pretty good job in nevertheless building up in those other categories of ships that were not uh limited and uh and by 1939 they had a credible effective and and a wide-ranging navy uh they had accumulated the modern battleships that they could under the terms of the washington treaty uh they had a vast fleet of modern fast powerfully armed uh cruisers and they had a vast range of smaller destroyers, corvettes and such things

to patrol their empire, which was a big part of the overall French defense posture. Now, was it the perfect navy at the time? No, they had mostly disregarded carrier aspect in the years leading up to the Second World War. They had one, basically one carrier, which was an experimental platform the bay iron and it was indicative that at the outset of the war in september of 1939 the first thing they did were their two carrier-borne squadrons is they send them ashore and they base them in northern france in preparation for the german assault to operate from the shore versus from their carriers as well they had neglected research in anti-submarine warfare both in terms

of sensors and tactics and such things uh and the last point that would play a an important role in the second world war is that as they were uh setting up to the their main responsibilities were going to be in the mediterranean and they envisioned their main enemy as italy they put their money on having fast and heavily armed vessels at the expense of range and armor And the Second World War experience would reveal that as being a grave mistake. But by and large, as I said, the largest Navy on the continent in September of 1939, very experienced, very confident officer corps. And they stood ready and convinced that they would make an important contribution to the defense of France. And what were the primary roles and responsibilities of the French Navy at the outset of the war there?

Yeah, in terms of national roles, obviously, the defense of the Hexagon and the Empire was the first mission. Secondly, was maintaining the sea lines of communication to the Empire, just as in the First World War, it was envisioned that on day one of mobilization, colonies would send a large number of troops and resources to defend the mère patrie. And so the two main lines of communications between Marseille and French North Africa, as well as between the Atlantic face of France and French Western Africa, meaning their main base of Dakar, was essential. And lastly, as a result of discussions in the years leading up to the war, just like before the First World War, there was an agreement with Great Britain that Great Britain would assume responsibility for naval operations in the North Sea and the Atlantic, while France would concentrate its most modern resources in the Mediterranean. So as Germany was overrunning the French army, what happened to the French navy? However awkward this may sound, up to the fall of France, the French Navy had a pretty good war. While the French Army was camped at the border awaiting the German offensive, the French Navy, from day one of the conflict, put to sea and started doing the business. And they did it well.

As indicated, they put in a convoy system in order to ferry all of those troops and resources from the colonies to the Hexagon. and they responded fairly well to the U-boat menace or the U-boat threat against those convoys. By and large, all of the most important troop-carrying vessels made it unharmed. The French Navy was active during the first campaign up in Norway, and even during the Battle of France, they also made an important contribution, such as, even though it was not quite recognized by Nolan in his movie Dunkirk, there was a large French naval component to the evacuation of Dunkirk. And the French naval vessels actually evacuated more British soldiers

than French soldiers from the Dunkirk pocket. And right up to the armistice, when Italy joined the fight very late in early June of 1940, The French Mediterranean fleet put to sea and they conducted some bombing of the northern Italian region. And they stood ready to continue the fight right up to the surrender of France. Post-surrender, the British were obviously concerned about the Mediterranean. I'm going to insert a question here based on we're zipping right along. So what did the British do to neutralize the French Navy? And then how did de Gaulle build the French Navy in the interim?

And I'm assigning de Gaulle the responsibility here. Obviously, that was delegated down first to a vice admiral and then other other admirals. Yes, indeed. So so the French Navy, through the fighting of the first 10 months, had suffered some losses. But by the 25th of June, when the armistice took effect, French Navy was still quite a potent force. And as you mentioned, it was the faith of that force was of interest to Great Britain. It was of interest to both Germany and Italy. And it was of interest to those other French who wanted to keep the fight. So, as you know, 25th of June, the armistice takes effect.

Basically, recognized French regime, that of Marshal Pétain, establishes itself in Vichy. France then formally claims basically a neutral status. The clauses of the armistice indicated that the French naval vessels were to return to their own port and for the majority of them to be disarmed while a few would remain in service, just enough for France to maintain some defensive capability both in the Hexagon and in the colonies. The British very quickly came to the conclusion that there was a glaring threat that the French Navy would either be seized by the Germans themselves or join the German camp at some point. Therefore, they took the fateful decision on the 3rd of July to seize as much of the French fleet as they could themselves and destroy the remainder if it had to come to this extremist. Most of the French fleet that was based on the Atlantic coast had found refuge in Great Britain after the armistice.

So those were within easy reach. And on the 3rd of July, in the morning hours of the 3rd of July, the British basically boarded all of these ships by surprise, put the crews ashore in captivity and neutralized the ships from there. Other ships were also seized who had found refuge in other British possessions, including in Canada. And those that were beyond that reach were given a summons to either actively sail and join the British camp or withdraw to other French colonies that were beyond the reach of Germany and to disarm in those locations. In some places, they were able to reach an agreement, such as in Alexandria, Egypt, where there was a Force X, which was a large group of one battleship plus a number of fairly heavy cruisers that agreed to disarm and remain in place in Alexandria without further discussion. But the worst case occurred in Mers-el-Kebir, which was a French naval base just outside of Oran in Algeria,

where the two local commanders, the British and the French one, could not come to such a compromise. And late in the day, at around 1700 that afternoon, the British admiral ordered an assault. And within 15 minutes, two French battleships had been disabled. A number of cruisers were also taken on the fire. And by the end of that day, close to 2,000 French officers and sailors had been either killed or wounded during that engagement. Then how did Gall and his naval subordinates go about rebuilding the French Navy? Because at that point, sort of decapitated, dismembered, cut up into pieces with sailors ashore, interned in parts of the UK or overseas. So obviously at that point, as people know, Charles de Gaulle had flown into Great Britain on the 17th of June and had decided to go against the Marshal Pétain's regime option of becoming neutral.

He wanted to continue the fight. And from that day, he went actively to recruit other French, both military personnel and civilians, whoever was out there, who would willingly join his legion of volunteers to join the Allied camp in order to continue the fight. Obviously, the action, the British action on the 3rd of July caused a major reaction on the French side and caused a major obstacle to his recruitment effort. And when he met with his naval commander, Vice Admiral Muselier, who had also escaped to Great Britain, when they met on the 4th of July to discuss the aftermath of Operation Catapult, the action that had taken the preceding day, there was some uncertainty as to where they were going to go. At any rate, a long story short, this decided to keep going with the Free French Movement and continue recruiting and such things. But this is where the first instance of the French experience changed from that narrated by Brian, where France was no longer trying to build up or rebuild French naval power on its own, but accepted the requirement to seek assistance from an ally in order to both obtain material, ships, ammunition, training, and assistance in rebuilding that fleet. Now, admittedly, the Free French Movement was very small at the time.

And it remained fairly small, to be quite honest, until 1942, November 1942, at the time of the North African landings, when basically the remainder of the empire joined the Allied camp. We're talking about by November 1942, the Free French Navy was an assembly of maybe 50 ships, all of them fairly small. The larger ship was an arm merchantment. The largest warship per se was a destroyer, and the rest of the fleet was basically small destroyers, corvettes, and frigates. But that effort during those two years, the precedents that were set in France seeking the support of Great Britain, Great Britain, providing this support, left a legacy that would mark the full-on involvement of the United States in rebuilding the French fleet for the remainder of the Second World War and set precedents that would be used once again during the Cold War within the larger NATO alliance. Jared, can I just add something very quickly? Absolutely.

I think it's difficult to underestimate the role that de Gaulle played in resurrecting the French Navy, as Hugh points out in his book. Not just during the war, but if you look at what he did during the war, there is a precursor of what he does later in the 60s. This is, you know, a lifelong general who confers the SSBN deterrent on the French Navy and who says, this is probably true, he said, for the first time in history, it is the Navy that is the guarantor of our existential security. um so and by also by pursuing an independent foreign policy uh as evidenced most clearly by the break from uh from nato uh you know saying that france is still a great power france is still going to pursue an autonomous foreign policy it's not just going to be sort of the america's sidekick um that also did a lot in shaping the the french navy that you see rise out of the ashes of World War II, you see an expeditionary naval force. You know, this is

something that a great power should have. France, you know, sort of becoming a middling power like Britain. You know, do they really need carriers? Can they afford them? But it was really, I think, de Gaulle's insistence on the status of France. I think de Gaulle famously said, you know, worrying about status is like second nature to a Frenchman. You know, the status of the country is important. And so it was vital that France have a carrier, that France have an independent nuclear deterrent. And so I think it is, however ironic, it is difficult to underestimate the role that this army general played in not only resurrecting the Navy, but in giving it a place in the national culture or mindset that it had really never enjoyed before.

Thanks. Hugo, I'm going to come back to you and we can talk a little bit about the rise that Brian just alluded to uh what did the french navy look like at the end of world war ii and what were some of the problems facing is it you know contemplated a post-world war uh future yeah once again uh so after the uh reaching its nadir really at the end of 1942 as you know after the French or the Anglo-American landings in North Africa, as Germany took advance into the free zone, there was a fateful decision by the French naval leadership on the Vichy side to scuttle the remainder of the French fleet that was still under their power, under their control in Toulon. And in one day on the 27th of November 1942, the equivalent of one third of what the

fleet had been in 1939 was coddled dramatically but at the same time is when the americans came in and volunteered to start assisting or rebuilding the french fleet at the side of the at the side of great britain great britain had obviously a leading role with the free french until then But after November of 1942, the fleet was kind of reunited and the Americans conducted this assistance very proactively. So that by the summer of 1945, the French Navy was back to ranking as the fourth largest navy but it was the most uh most awkward and most um unbelievably diversified uh assembly of vessel uh that make it that made it quite challenging so it was a very large navy uh it had it was back to roughly half of the tonnage it had in 1939

But we are talking about an assembly of vessels that went from pre-war French construction to emergency British and American wartime constructions to a number of vessels seized or transferred from Germany and Italy. So we are talking about and we're talking, we're going to details here, but important details when we are talking about maintaining a fleet, operating a fleet along common standards and such things. So we're talking about such a different range of technologies, of ammunition caliber, of down to screws that turn in a different way between ships. And obviously, a large number of these ships were either already coming to the end of their operational life or due to their quick construction and fairly fickle, to be quite honest, assembly would not last the usual length that a peacetime warship would do. So right away, they faced a huge challenge of trying to regenerate the fleet, create a more uniform fleet that would be more closely adapted to their national objectives and defense priorities. Now, the formation of NATO follows not that long after the end of World War II. So what was the initial expectation of the French role in NATO and how did that affect the French Navy? A very ambivalent relationship where French expectations and NATO expectations were dramatically different, as you can expect.

Now, admittedly, NATO and once again, the American effort within NATO was fundamental to the continued rise of French sea power during the Cold War. France would not have been able to get back to a well-rounded blue water fleet by its own national means during the late 1940s, early 1950s for sure. The allocation of resources were divided, strained by a number of competing priorities ranging from civilian reconstructions at home, rebuilding a merchant navy which had also been vastly uh destroyed during the war years and obviously where do you put your money between the army the air force the navy in terms of force regeneration and how much of that money do you put into actual operations as france remained at war for another 17 years after the end of the Second World War. Once again, the scale of fighting

and how much resources were consumed by fights in colonies, not only Algeria and Indochina, but there were rebellion regions or smaller possessions, which were all consuming and kept being a challenge to French admirals trying to promulgate longer term plans. Then what role did the, so you just alluded to, you know, the conflicts that continued for the next 17 years, what role did the Navy play for the French in Indochina and Algeria?

And you can expand that question if you want as well to talk about some of those other conflicts you hinted at. Indeed, thanks for that. So obviously, both fights were counter insurgencies. And in both fights, it's really the army that was bearing the brunt of the fighting on shore. But again, an area that has been little covered in English literature is the maritime dimension of both of those theaters of war. Starting with Indochina, the French Navy assumed roles that to this day, navies do in a counterinsurgency role, which is patrolling the coast of the territory at stake, trying to intercept the maritime routes that would provide insurgents with weapons, resources, additional people and such things. But the French Navy also developed, due to the geography of Indochina, developed quite the expertise into riverine warfare.

Just like as you would see with the American experience later during the Vietnam War, the French had to create the same fleet of vessels that were armoured to a certain level, that had to carry some fairly heavy armament and yet had to be shallow draft and were able to go up those rivers from the sea into deep into the heart of Indochina. china uh the french navy as well has also has a marine core of its own in a way the fusie marin so these were heavily involved in fighting ashore where you often had combination of division naval naval assault divisions uh that would uh that would operate from vessels operated by french trailers embarking French fusiliers marins who would move up a river and combine their offensive actions with, for example, army paratroopers who would drop in from the sky

and try to take insurgents in a visor. In Algeria, same thing, same employment off the coast, obviously. The one difference, obviously, there's not so much of a riverine dimension due to the Nigerian geography. On the other hand, the French fusiliers marins were given a number of districts. They were assigned actual districts where they were responsible for the full range of counterinsurgency operations and security duties of both civilian and military installations. And very lastly, after the Second World War, the French had started getting into the carrier business uh more seriously and in both conflicts french aircraft carriers provided or augmented

air power uh in both theaters of war then i'll close on a one last question here how did nato involvement we hinted at this a little bit before but how did nato involvement ultimately help the french recapitalize their navy yeah i will finally get to your to your the question you wanted to address really and it goes back to my comment about uh the awkwardness of uh of conflicting parties going back to the larger nato picture obviously the nato alliance is the alliance of north american nations brit britain and the western european allies that are being set up to repulse a uh soviet offensive across the west across the uh the iron curtain on the naval side They are being set up to resist an advance by mostly Soviet submarines and large surface ships that would be deployed into the Atlantic to intercept the sea lanes of communication between North America and France.

So the Anglo-Americans vision or the Anglo-Americans had been in agreement that they would favor a specialization of duties among the various countries. And on the naval front, basically, this would leave the missions of offensive strike from the sea, sea lanes of communications, oceanic sea lanes of communication defense would be mostly a duty for Great Britain and the United States, while the continental powers would be looking after their local sea lanes of communication as well as their coastal defense. So how that would translate for France as one of the continental powers would basically be not really a blue water navy, right? It'd be about maintaining those small coastal escorts, some coastal submarines, mine warfare vessels and such, which are more than useful. They're fundamental to building up a navy. The French needed those vessels, but as mentioned by Brian, they considered that due to their worldwide responsibilities with regards to the French Empire and such things, they needed these other instruments to really create a blue water fleet. Aircraft carriers, larger battleships and cruisers later in the Cold War, amphibious vessels, which the Anglo-Americans and especially the United States, as they were financing a large part of the French naval rebuilding, disagreed with, really. And this matter of disagreement was never really solved through the period that I cover. And you had the French within a strategy of alliance with NATO, resorting to a number of means in order to carry out their independent naval policy, striving to establish this blue water force.

Thanks. Brian, any final thoughts here before I close it out? Yeah, so I'd like to pick up on something that Hugh has alluded to a couple times already, and that is the English language literature and how it deals with, or rather does not deal with, both the French Navy and, well, the navies of continental powers in general. And that was one of the main beefs I had, if you will, with the scholastic literature. One of the reasons why Hughes' book was so enjoyable to read and why it's necessary for people who study naval power to read it is because people writing in the English language have tended to view naval affairs from the perspective of the United Kingdom and the United States. And that's all well and good. But the problem is that you're viewing things from the perspective of the world's number one, two countries that, I'm sure Andrew Lambert would quibble with this, but two countries that, you know, you could argue are naturally prone to be naval powers. But you don't really consider things from the other side, countries for whom naval power is not the natural advocation or is not an easy one. And if we're looking at, and I'm a political scientist, so I'm always sort of thinking about the future.

If you look at what China's doing today, the question is, is China going to succeed at naval development or not? And there really isn't very much in the Anglo-American literature in naval history that could give us a historical, a well-informed historical discussion of what other continental great powers have done, how they have fared uh why they have succeeded or failed at various times and that's sort of what my book project is is working on so i think hugh has touched on something that is a really much bigger issue we're not going to solve it in the in the in the you know in the hour of this podcast but it's something that i think the wider field needs to have a better grasp of and a better appreciation for and that is that could be something it could be the solution could be as

simple as just reading other sources. It's not like the French haven't written about their natives. Most of the sources I use were French sources. It's just that they weren't being translated into English and no one writing in English was writing about them. So the French have known this for years, decades, but no one writing in Britain and America seemed to engage with that body of scholarship. So, you know, I would hope that in the future we would see more works like this that think about naval power from a perspective broader than just who is or was the world's number one. Well, thank you very much, gentlemen. That's unfortunately all the time that we have for today. I'll say the book title again. It's The Fall and Rise of French

Seapower. Go out, buy it, read it, discuss it with your friends. I'd like to thank my guests, Dr. Brian Chow and Captain Hugh Canuel. Brian, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? So you can find me on my website, bryancchow.com. There are links there to my CV, some of my research projects, my Twitter. My big project right now is this book project that I'm working on and a couple other sort of side projects also related to naval power. I'm going to be starting, or I've technically already just started a new position at the Naval War College. And after the past year and a half i'm looking forward to being able to have a conversation with live human beings in person again uh you know have a have a classroom have an intellectual

environment that is you know as as it should be uh so i'm really looking forward uh looking forward to a new chapter there you same questions to you uh where can we find you online and what are you working on yeah no website but uh you can obviously find me in the usual facebook linkedin twitter and such things uh and i can easily provide uh my uh email email address upon request uh project that i'm working that i'm just starting now that the i've put that book to bed uh i will be writing another book uh on the military history of post-war japan uh so post 1945 to today uh how did japan rebuild the self-defense force what are they doing with the self-defense force what is it they cannot do today uh due to constitutional requirements and such things and uh what are

the potential futures for this uh for this growing force i look forward to reading that and hopefully we'll be able to discuss it with you in the future but uh thank you both again for joining us for our listeners thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time © BF-WATCH TV 2021 We'll be right back.