Le Fantasque-class Destroyer

The contre-torpilleur is a French idea with no exact equivalent anywhere else: a ship larger and far more heavily armed than a destroyer, smaller than a cruiser, built to run down and destroy enemy destroyers — and, in French thinking, to outrun anything bigger. The Royal Navy called them super-destroyers and did not build any.

The Le Fantasque class of six ships, in service from 1935, was the type at its peak: about 2,570 tons, five 138 mm guns, nine torpedo tubes in three triple mounts, and machinery of a power that no destroyer hull had carried before.

On trials in 1935, Le Terrible was timed at 45.02 knots — over 83 km/h. It is the fastest speed ever recorded by a conventionally-hulled warship, it has never been beaten in ninety years, and it was achieved by a ship of nearly 2,600 tons.

The usual caveats apply and matter less than they normally would: trials were run light, on a measured mile, in ideal conditions. But the whole class routinely made 40 knots and more in service condition, which no other destroyer of the period could approach. In a squadron of these ships France possessed something genuinely unique — the ability to arrive, or leave, faster than anyone could respond.

The speed was paid for in the usual currencies. The hulls were lightly built and the ships were wet and uncomfortable in a seaway; the machinery was demanding and consumed fuel at a rate that limited endurance; and anti-aircraft armament, in ships designed before aircraft became the main threat to warships, was inadequate and stayed that way until Allied refits.

There was also the question of what all that speed was for. A contre-torpilleur could outrun a cruiser, but a warship’s job is usually to be somewhere and stay there — screening a fleet, escorting a convoy, holding a patrol line. In those roles 45 knots buys very little, and the fuel it burns buys less.

And the French navy knew it. The ships were expensive — a contre-torpilleur cost a substantial fraction of a light cruiser — and only six of this class were built, in a fleet that also needed escorts, minesweepers and submarines. Extreme performance in small numbers is a luxury, and France bought it at the moment the money was most needed elsewhere.

The class’s war divided in the middle, as the French navy’s did. Until 1942 the ships served Vichy — one, Le Triomphant, had joined the Free French in 1940 and fought on the Allied side from the start — and their careers ran through the awkward, painful sequence of French naval events after the armistice.

From late 1942 the survivors came over to the Allies, and several were refitted in United States yards with American anti-aircraft weapons and radar — the equipment the design had always lacked. Rearmed and re-equipped, they finally became what their speed had promised: in 1943–44 they ran raids and bombardments in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, using their pace to strike and be gone before a response could form.

What the refits produced was, briefly, the ship the designers had imagined. Working out of Mediterranean bases in 1943–44, Le Fantasque and Le Terrible ran night sweeps against German coastal traffic — closing the enemy shore in darkness, shooting up shipping and small convoys, and being far out to sea again before an air response could be organised in the morning.

That is a role in which forty knots is worth something concrete: the operating radius of a raid is set by how far you can get from the target before daylight. In the Ligurian and Adriatic sweeps the class did in eighteen months roughly what the contre-torpilleur concept had promised in 1930, under a flag its designers had not anticipated and with American radar telling it where to go.

By one measurement Le Fantasque and her sisters are the most extreme warships of the war, and the record is not a curiosity: it is the physical proof of what French naval architecture was willing to trade for performance, and it has stood since 1935.

As fighting ships they were a mixed proposition — light, thirsty, badly protected against aircraft, and built for a tactical problem that the war did not present in the form the designers expected. But of the six, five survived the war, and the ones that fought under Allied colours in 1943–45 did exactly the work the type had been drawn for. The equipment that made it possible was not French: US radar and anti-aircraft guns, fitted from 1943 in place of the outfit the original design had never carried.

• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).
• John Jordan & Jean Moulin, French Destroyers: Torpilleurs d’Escadre and Contre-Torpilleurs 1922–1956 (Seaforth Publishing).
• Vincent P. O’Hara, Struggle for the Middle Sea (Naval Institute Press).