Made during WWII in 1942, this profile of the Free French Navy begins with footage of a Frenchman escaping to England to join the fight against the Axis. The Free French Navy Headquarters in London is shown, along with sailor cadet training at sea aboard sailing vessels. The most unique vessel shown is at the 4 minute mark, where the submarine Sourcouf is shown, followed by various French destroyers, and British built Corvettes manned by Frenchmen at the 5:30 mark.

Les Forces Navales Françaises Libres (“Free French Naval Forces”) were the naval arm of the Free French Forces during the Second World War. They were commanded by Admiral Émile Muselier.

In the wake of the Armistice and the Appeal of 18 June, Charles de Gaulle founded the Free French Forces (Forces Françaises Libres, or FFL), including a naval arm, the “Free French Naval Forces” (Les Forces Navales Françaises Libres, or FNFL). On 30 June 1940, De Gaulle was joined by vice-admiral Émile Muselier, who had come from Gibraltar by flying boat. Muselier was the only flag officer of the French Navy to answer the call of De Gaulle.

The French fleet was widely dispersed. Some vessels were in port in France; others had escaped from France to British controlled ports, mainly in Britain itself or Alexandria in Egypt. At the first stage of Operation Catapult, the ships in the British ports of Plymouth and Portsmouth were simply boarded on the night of 3 July 1940. The then largest submarine in the world, the Surcouf, which had sought refuge in Portsmouth in June 1940 following the German invasion of France, resisted the British operation. In capturing the submarine, two British officers and one French sailor were killed. Other ships were the two obsolete battleships Paris and Courbet, the destroyers Triomphant and the Léopard, eight torpedo boats, five submarines (the Minerve, Junon) and a number of other ships of lesser importance.

As soon as the summer 1940, the submarines Minerve and Junon, as well as four avisos, departed from Plymouth. Towards the end of 1940, the destroyers Le Triomphant and Léopard followed. Le Triomphant sailed for New Caledonia and spent the rest of the war based there and in Australia. The ship saw action in both the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

To distinguish the FNFL from the Vichist forces, vice-admiral Émile Muselier created the bow flag displaying the French colours with a red cross of Lorraine, and a cocarde also featuring the cross of Lorraine for aircraft of the Free French Naval Air Service (Aéronavale Française Libre) and the Free French Air Force (Forces Aériennes Françaises Libres).

A number of ships were leased from the British to compensate for the lack of warships in the FNFL, among them, the Hunt class destroyer La Combattante and the Flower class corvette Aconit.

The FNFL suffered their first loss when the patrol boat Poulmic hit a mine and sank on 7 November 1940 off Plymouth.

A number of warships were lost, notably the submarine Surcouf, possibly sunk in a friendly fire incident. Other losses include the destroyers Léopard, Mimosa, Alysse, and La Combattante; submarine Narval; patrol boats Poulmic and Vikings.

Surcouf was a French submarine ordered to be built in December 1927, launched on 18 October 1929, and commissioned in May 1934. Surcouf – named after the French privateer Robert Surcouf – was the largest submarine ever built until surpassed by the first Japanese I-400-class submarine in 1943. Her short wartime career was marked with controversy and conspiracy theories. She was classified as an “undersea cruiser” by sources of her time.

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