The Belgian Navy and the Belgians in the Royal Navy

1940: no navy

What Belgium had in 1939 was called the Corps de Marine, and it was not a navy but an army unit, with officers who were seafarers in civilian life. On 15 September 1939 it was partly mobilised to enforce neutrality: a few State Marine pilot vessels, requisitioned trawlers and assorted harbour craft, mostly working out of Ostend.

Before the German advance those ships withdrew to France, reached Lorient by 13 June, moved further south and finally crossed to Portugalete near Bilbao, where they were interned. With the capitulation the corps ceased to exist. One vessel had been given different orders and did reach England: the pilot boat MLB16, which as HMS Kernot became the examination vessel for ships entering Liverpool.

Victor Billet

That a Belgian navy came about at all is one man’s doing. Victor Billet was an officer of the State Marine; in July 1940 his ferry Prince Philippe lay at Southampton. He believed Belgium ought to raise a naval force and put it to the government. The government was still in France, so he reached René Boël of the Belgian Shipping Advisory Committee in London instead. Boël first thought of re-establishing the Corps de Marine and was broadly in favour, but the government itself had little interest – and when it finally arrived in London in October 1940, that changed only moderately.

Billet tired of waiting and went to the British to ask whether Belgians might serve in the Royal Navy. Some three hundred and fifty were already willing. London could simply have directed them to the Belgian merchant navy, the army or the air force. It did not.

An arrangement without precedent

Admiral Gerald Dickens, the British officer responsible for liaison with the exile navies, accepted Billet’s proposal in late July 1940 and devised something with no precedent in the Royal Navy: not an independent Belgian navy, but a Belgian branch inside the Royal Navy itself. In September the proposal went to Boël, who in early October put it to Camille Gutt – minister of finance and of communications, and so the responsible man, since before the war seafaring belonged to Communications and not to National Defence.

The first volunteers began training at HMS Royal Arthur in Skegness as early as October 1940. On 3 April 1941 the Admiralty made it official with a fleet order creating the Royal Navy Section Belge and setting out how it would recruit, train, promote and pay. The name was chosen deliberately: Belgian Section would abbreviate to R.N.B.S. and look too much like the Royal Naval Patrol Service. Belgian ratings were administratively attached to the Devonport port division, without a depot of their own.

How unusual it was shows in what a British vice-admiral noted in January 1944: there had never before been a section within the Royal Navy composed entirely of foreigners.

Who served – and who was barred

The ratings came largely from the fishing fleet. Of the 507 requisitioned fishing vessels about half reached England; the Royal Navy took over a number of them, and the crews came with the boats. Some first served on Belgian craft tending barrage balloons or doing harbour work and moved across to the navy later.

Officers were harder. Several came from the State Marine after the Royal Navy requisitioned a number of Ostend–Dover ferries as troop carriers. A large group came from the sail training ship Mercator, which in May 1940 was on a training voyage in the South Atlantic and put in to the Belgian Congo. Her sailing list names twenty-eight cadets; a British telegram counted thirty in July 1940. They were sent to British officer courses and were eventually commissioned into the Royal Naval Reserve. Their story has a chapter of its own in the merchant navy story.

Nobody came from the merchant navy, and that was no accident. Crew of Belgian merchant ships were expressly forbidden to join, precisely to keep the merchant service at strength. Only in December 1942 did the government release the seamen serving in the army: about a hundred men, of whom the merchant mariners returned to the merchant service and the fishermen went to the navy.

At its height the branch numbered ninety officers and four hundred ratings. Prime Minister Pierlot appointed Georges Timmermans senior Belgian officer; in May 1940 he had been master of the ferry Prinses Astrid. Since he held appointments on British ships and shore stations rather than commanding the branch, the post was more symbolic than real.

The ships

It began small. The first ship with a largely Belgian crew was the former French submarine chaser HMS Quentin Roosevelt, working up in early 1941. Belgians also manned the patrol vessels Electra II, Phrontis, Raetia and Sheldon – former trawlers – and the Kernot. Most were at Liverpool at some point.

Real work needed bigger ships. As for most of the exile navies, the British provided Flower-class corvettes: small, simply built and not far removed from a trawler. HMS Godetia was given a Belgian crew in February 1942, HMS Buttercup in April. Both served as convoy escorts, first in the Caribbean and then for years in the North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Liverpool – the same crossing the ships in this database made. Godetia was off Normandy in June 1944. In December 1944 both reverted to British crews, not because they could be spared but because their men were more urgently needed to sweep Belgian waters and reopen the ports.

That last was the 118th Minesweeping Flotilla: motor minesweepers working out of Aberdeen and then Harwich, which moved to Ostend in September 1944. They cleared Belgian waters through 1944 and 1945, and off the Dutch coast as well. Other men of the branch reopened the ports, Antwerp among them, which the Allied armies were waiting for.

And the Belgian Marine?

Here a distinction is easily missed. Alongside the Royal Navy Section Belge there was a second Belgian armed force at sea: the Belgian Marine. It was something else entirely.

Merchant ships were given guns, and the guns had to be worked. The Dutch and the Norwegians drew their gunners from their navies. Belgium had none, and in November 1940 chose its own answer: the army loaned the men. They took six weeks’ training in the Belgian section of the British D.E.M.S. centre at Liverpool, were assigned in detachments of ten to a Belgian merchant ship, and wore British naval uniform with a Belgian Marine cap tally and BELGIUM shoulder titles. The unit was disbanded at the end of the war.

The Belgian Marine was therefore not a navy but the army at sea, for the merchant ships’ guns alone. It is not the forerunner of the Belgian Navy; the Royal Navy Section Belge is. And because the Belgian Marine did sail aboard our ships, it is the force you meet in this database.

Dieppe

Billet, who had thoroughly antagonised his own government in getting the branch established, served as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve, among others aboard the destroyer HMS Brilliant and in motor torpedo boats. After transferring to Combined Operations he took part in the disastrous raid on Dieppe on 19 August 1942 as naval liaison officer to a Canadian army unit aboard Landing Craft Tank 159. He did not come back.

In the whole war the branch lost six men: Billet, another officer, a warrant officer and three ratings. Some were lost afloat, others killed by enemy fire in Belgium.

1 February 1946

In the first week of September 1944 Brussels, Antwerp and Ostend were liberated; on 2 November Belgium was declared liberated. That same month Belgian naval personnel moved from the Devonport barracks to a shore base of their own at Ostend, HMS Royal Edmund II, and after the liberation of Antwerp HMS Royal Athelstan was added. In November 1945 the government decided to recruit a further twelve hundred men.

In late January 1946 the Council of Ministers approved a decree law establishing a Belgian navy. On 1 February 1946 the Force Navale was officially established; a hundred and sixty men transferred at once. On 19 February Georges Timmermans became its first commodore. In late March 1946 the Royal Navy Section Belge ceased to exist.

The navy Belgium has today therefore begins not with a pre-war fleet, but with fishermen who had no naval experience and ferry officers in British service.

Where it touches our lists

Rarely, which makes sense: the two worlds were kept apart. Traces remain in this database all the same.

The crew list of the Belgique, one of the three Belgian ships that took part in Overlord, carries seventeen men as deck personnel, R.N. and R.N.R. That of the Persier carries a Royal Naval Reserve man whose body was never recovered.

The gunners you meet elsewhere in the lists – 176 in all, eighty-two of them recorded as British – belong not to the Royal Navy Section Belge but to the Belgian Marine and to the British D.E.M.S. organisation. Two of them can be seen in the photograph of the Emile Francqui survivors, recognisable by their cap tallies.