In this episode: Maillé-Brézé— the Evolution of French Destroyers.
In the French city of Nantes at a Loire River embankment,
destroyer Maillé-Brézé is moored.
She bears the name of the famous French admiral, a nephew of Cardinal Richelieu,
and she's the only French surface warship that is preserved as a museum ship.
Maillé-Brézé is a Surcouf-class squadron escort ship.
She's the last of an 18-ship series, built by the French Navy in the 1950s
to replace the flotilla leaders destroyed during World War II
and the scuttling of the French fleet in Toulon.
Three ships of this class
were constructed at the military shipyard in Nantes just in front of us.
They were Cassard, Tartu, and Guépratte.
Maillé-Brézé is one of the squadron escorts of the T 47 class,
which represents a development of fast escort ships of the World War II era.
They were extremely powerful and fast ships built primarily for convoy duty.
For this reason, the series to which Maillé-Brézé belongs
had the same mission and properties: a fast and powerful ship,
able to fight against air, surface, and submarine threats with equal efficiency.
General specifications of the T 47-class destroyer Maillé-Brézé
(as of its construction).
Total displacement: 3,740 tons.
Length: about 130 meters.
Beam: more than 12 meters.
Draft: more than 5 meters.
Power plant: two Parsons steam turbines and four water-tube boilers.
Power: 63,000 horsepower.
Each boiler room had two boilers; each boiler had four furnaces.
The furnaces were fed black oil heated to 100 degrees Celsius.
The heat resulting from the burning
warmed the water in the tubes thus creating steam.
Armament: six Model 1948 127-mm dual- purpose guns installed in three turrets.
Anti-aircraft artillery: three Model 1951 twin 57-mm guns,
four Oerlikon 20-mm autocannons.
Torpedo armament: four triple torpedo launchers with a caliber of 550 mm.
Torpedoes were fired at a distance of 6 meters off the ship's side
with the help of compressed air.
They were equipped with an electric motor,
which provided them with a speed of 25 knots and a range of 5 kilometers.
Maximum speed: 34 knots.
Cruising range: 5,000 miles at a speed of 18 knots.
At the beginning of the 20th century,
France had one of the largest navies in the world.
However, World War I showed that Marine Nationale
was in dire need of light forces—cruisers and destroyers.
For this reason, the French government made a decision
to reinforce their fleet with new ships.
Thus, according to the program of 1922, the first destroyer was laid down—
a classic French destroyer of the Bourrasque class.
Thereafter, these ships were improved; their maneuverability,
propulsive performance, and armament became better and better.
And the Surcouf-class ships
became the epitome of development of these classic French destroyers,
although they were built after World War II.
Thirty-one years of history separate Bourrasque-class destroyers
from Maillé-Brézé, which was officially designated a squadron escort ship.
The difference between them is obvious at first glance:
the latter is twice as large as Bourrasque in terms of displacement.
Maillé-Brézé has only one primary armament gun more,
but the weight of shells that she can fire at an enemy per minute
is five times greater than that of the 1920s destroyer.
Apart from this, the artillery of the ship commissioned in 1957 was dual-purpose
and allowed the crew to fire at both surface and airborne targets.
In addition, the Surcouf-class destroyers
had the most powerful torpedo armament among all French ships,
as they carried twice as many torpedo tubes as Bourrasque.
Italy was France's main adversary in the Mediterranean theater of operation
and, by the 1930s, Italy had constructed powerful destroyers
carrying impressive torpedo and artillery armament.
And the French needed an adequate answer to this.
Build destroyers? It didn’t make sense,
because it would be parity and they needed an advantage.
And they came up with their own unique ship—quite large
compared to the destroyers of possible adversaries and quite inexpensive…
We are now on the bridge of Maillé-Brézé.
The predecessors of this ship were destroyers and flotilla leaders
from the Hardi and Vauquelin classes.
Before World War II, in 1938-1939, the French Navy built
12 Hardi-class destroyers and 6 Vauquelin-class flotilla leaders.
The latter included a ship named Maillé-Brézé,
which tragically perished in the port of Greenock on April 30, 1940,
after one of its own torpedoes exploded.
The history of the French Navy knows many dramatic events.
Before the beginning of World War II,
the Republic's naval forces in Europe were inferior only to Great Britain's.
However, in 1940, France suffered defeat against Nazi Germany and surrendered.
In 1940, France and the French Navy found themselves in a tragic situation.
A puppet or collaborationist government was created in the town of Vichy,
headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain.
According to the peace treaty between the Vichy government and Germany,
the latter pledged not to use the French naval fleet in future hostilities.
However, in 1942, the Germans decided not to honor their part of the deal
and moved to capture the French warships
that were stationed in Normandy and Toulon.
The French weren’t going to surrender their Navy,
and I have to praise the heroism of the French sailors,
who were not afraid of the repercussions
and had the courage to fight for their homeland—they scuttled their ships.
In total, about 77 warships were sunk in 1942 by their own crews.
Those were battleships, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers.
After World War II, the French fleet basically had to be rebuilt from scratch.
New destroyers were designed to be adequate for modern challenges.
The primary mission of this ship
was to carry out torpedo attacks against surface targets.
At the same time, she was tasked with antiaircraft
and antisubmarine defense of larger ships that she escorted,
such as aircraft carriers and helicopter carriers.
For this reason, the ship was armed with torpedoes of various ranges,
as well as guns with calibers of 127 and 57 millimeters.
She also carried different radar and hydroacoustic equipment.
We are now in the Combat Information Center—the nerve center of the ship.
In this room, information about the position of airborne targets
provided by radars was displayed and analyzed.
We are passing through the antisubmarine defense control station,
which includes the screens for underwater surveillance
based on the data coming from sonars,
as well as different systems controlling the antisubmarine armament—
rockets, torpedoes, and Malafon missiles.
Here you can see the screens for the bow and towed sonar arrays.
They allow the crew to determine the type,
position, and speed of a discovered submarine.
For the crew to quickly get to their action stations,
it was the first time in the French Navy’s history
that a naval tradition had been broken on T 47-class fleet escort ships.
This tradition had existed since the sailing ship era—
officers' cabins were accommodated on the stern,
and crew quarters were accommodated on the fore…
They started to arrange officers' cabins close to the action stations,
so, in case of a general quarter, the officers could get out of their cabins
and be immediately close or already at their action stations.
As such, both the crew quarters and the officers' cabins
were located evenly across the ship… 120218OUESTLESHIP
At the same time, the crew accommodation on Maillé-Brézé
was quite comfortable for destroyers.
All the living quarters were air-conditioned;
there was a latrine for every 11 persons
and a shower bath for every 17 persons on the ship.
Surely, it was very difficult to serve on all Surcouf destroyers,
and on Maillé-Brézé in particular. Even those were postwar ships,
nevertheless, they had difficulties with food provision and supplies.
However, all Surcouf destroyers, Maillé-Brézé in particular,
had wine—sufficient wine for all the officers and sailors
that were serving on these destroyers…
Initially, all sailors on Maillé-Brézé slept in hammocks—
it was a naval tradition that was embraced by many navies around the world.
This system was preserved until the 1960s
when the hammocks were replaced with stationary bunks
that, by the way, were hardly the favorites among all sailors…
What’s special about a hammock? First of all, it's lightweight.
The second feature of a hammock
is that it flows with the motion of a ship during stormy passages,
rocking, various surges of the sea, heaving from side to side;
so a sailor can sleep pretty much comfortably.
That's the beauty of it.
The disadvantage of a hammock
is that it's difficult to get out of during general quarter.
Metal bunks were welded dead to the deck
so they couldn't protect sleeping sailors from the motion of the ship.
Such cases could happen when a sailor during some storm
could experience, for example, his legs above his head or something else.
Even special ledges were made for the bunks
to prevent sailors from falling out of them.
Hammocks don't have such ledges because they moved with the ship's motions.
However, regardless of such discomfort,
a sailor can easily get out of a bunk and run for their action station.
In the French Navy, hammocks were replaced with metal bunks
only on Surcouf-class ships, on Maillé-Brézé in particular…
The next 10 years, from the end of the 1950s,
Maillé-Brézé had been on station in various regions,
circumnavigated the globe,
and taken action in the Algerian Crisis as a constraining factor.
Next, in 1968-1970, the destroyer underwent a significant modernization.
First of all, new main battery guns were mounted.
This 100-mm gun has a dual purpose—
defense against airborne and surface targets.
The primary armament is effective for coast bombardments as well.
Its firing range is 12 km for surface targets and 6 km for airborne targets.
The rate of fire is approximately one shot per second.
Firing efficiency is ensured by a computer and radar complex,
and a range-finder mounted directly above the bridge.
In the course of the modernization, 127 and 57 mm guns were dismounted:
the guns were outdated— the era of missile armaments began…
Destroyers fulfilled the usual missions:
aircraft carriers appeared in the French Navy—
destroyers fulfilled missions on escorting aircraft carriers,
in other words, they were a part of carrier task forces.
Coastal security missions and amphibious operations remained.
All the missions fulfilled by World War II destroyers
were the same as the missions executed by postwar and modern destroyers.
There's a slight difference though— the firing range has increased
due to the introduction of shipborne missile armaments.
We're now standing in front of a 375-mm missile launcher.
It appeared on the ship in 1968 and constituted the ship's armaments
until the moment the ship became a museum in Nantes.
It's a rapid-fire weapon capable of firing one shot per second.
Its shells weighed 300 kg and were 215 cm long.
This is a close-range weapon with a firing range of approximately 1,500 m.
The weapon is capable of hitting a submarine
in both submerged and surfaced conditions.
Special attention should be paid to the Malafon anti-submarine missile system—
an exclusively French design…
The first thing is that the missile system was produced in France,
because you couldn't even imagine
purchasing military equipment abroad at that time.
The main reason for this is a security matter,
because armaments produced in other countries weren’t worse,
and were maybe even better than ours.
I think it was a specific French feature:
we needed all the equipment to be produced domestically.
We're now in the Malafon missile compartment.
Malafon is an anti-submarine missile.
It represents a glider-delivered version of the L4 torpedo;
it launches with the aid of solid booster rockets.
This compartment houses 13 torpedoes;
initially, those torpedoes are attached with wings using a hydraulic system,
and then they are moved to the launcher at the quarter deck.
Malafon launches 200 m high
and then reaches the submarine’s location using radio control;
the submarine’s location is specified
by a whole system of shipborne radars, sonars and computers.
Following that, a torpedo releases from a glider thanks to two parachutes
and falls down into the water.
Using its own sonar apparatus, the torpedo could locate a target
and destroy it at a 25-30 knot speed within a 5-6 km radius.
The modernization allowed the destroyer to serve in the French Navy
until the end of the 1980s.
It wasn’t until 1988 that Maillé-Brézé was removed from the French Navy;
afterward she became a museum— the only surface ship-museum in France…
Five long years we have struggled to have a ship in our museum.
And at last we were told,
“You're going to receive Maillé-Brézé that has just returned to the port.”
We had to establish an association
because such a project can only exist for donations.
Soon, the museum life of Maillé-Brézé will be longer than her Navy service.
She had served the Navy for 31 years,
and next year she will turn 30 serving as a museum.
Moreover, we have obtained historical monument status,
so now the ship is considered as part of the National Heritage,
which guarantees her preservation.