WI: Germany manages to keep the French fleet in 1940?

I know its not what the OP asked, but what if the POD is a security leak tipping of the French. They are ready, mines are laid, they can draw in aircraft and fight ferouciously. The British Lise ships, more of the French survive.
Might Vichy not join the axis then and we got the French fleet not in german hands, but on the same side.

still maintain further losses on French side would have prompted more collaboration rather than a better showing by RM. just sticking to historical events the RN pursued Strasbourg across the Med, if sunk all the capital ships would have been damaged, destroyed, or captured?

for French to operate their submarine fleet and super destroyers would have been more acceptable to Germany and more feasible? cede the dozen or so auxiliary cruisers over to Axis side and open some of far flung bases to KM (on clandestine basis)

of course Axis side needs a different scenario than to allow Japanese occupation of Indochina? not sure Germany would ever favor French interests over Japan?
 
Possibly the relabelling issue is overstated. The French is within a limited vocabulary which can easily be mastered with a few task specific cheat sheets. Britain made a whole naval industry of selling off surplus warships to assorted non Anglophone countries and few foundered through a lack of English literate crews. Mind you the Imperial Iranian Navy allegedly took a Type 21 back to Iran but put out a distress call in the Bay of Biscay for an increasingly extreme list. It turned out that they were pulling all their oil from the port bunkers..... t least the Germans and French were both working in Metric not Imperial.
 
Possibly the relabelling issue is overstated. The French is within a limited vocabulary which can easily be mastered with a few task specific cheat sheets. Britain made a whole naval industry of selling off surplus warships to assorted non Anglophone countries and few foundered through a lack of English literate crews. Mind you the Imperial Iranian Navy allegedly took a Type 21 back to Iran but put out a distress call in the Bay of Biscay for an increasingly extreme list. It turned out that they were pulling all their oil from the port bunkers..... t least the Germans and French were both working in Metric not Imperial.

The labeling is a problem, but secondary to understanding the actual function & engineering. A analogy is a pair of local grain rendering plants. Built fifteen years apart by two different companies (Anheiser Busch & AE Staley), and then both purchased by a corporate raider. A effort of shift production, maintiance workers, and management back and forth failed as the hundreds of small difference in equipment operation left transferred workers and managers confused and usually useless. Typically it took 2-3 years to bring a new production operator up to speed and 5-6 for a maintiance technician, or a midlevel manager. Expecting a transferred worker from the other plant to snap in in a few days or weeks using a training manual or a online reference & tutorial proved a money looser (neither were up to date or detailed enough). Still the corporate management in the UK insisted for several years and regularly fired local senior management for not making goals.

Even ships of the same class, built from the same original pattern have significant differences & crew moving from one cruiser or destroyer to a sister ship have a break in period.
 
There is a story, possibly an "urban legend" about a US aircraft carrier of the 27C class. A chief petty officer who had served on this class before happened to want something done by a machine shop, and went to where one had been on his old ship and found a blank wall. He had actually been on a couple of the same class and all had had a machine shop (not the only one on the ship) in that location. Long story short he induced the cutting of a small hole in the bulkhead, and sure enough on the other side was a machine shop full of tools that somehow had ended up "walled in" during construction. I heard this back in about 1971.
 
The Germans may be able to use veterans of the large High seas Fleet from the First World War to man the ships. They used Great War veterans in the army.
 
The youngest veterans of the HSF would, in 1940 be 39-40 years old. Those would be those who were very young at the end of the war, and therefore with little actual "sailor" experience. HSF veterans in their 40s would probably be the most valuable, however skills will have become rusty, unless they stayed in the merchant fleet, and how many of the HSF veterans with good experience who are now in their mid/late 40s going to be in physical condition, or capable of getting fit, to serve in a warship. Bottom line, while some of these veterans will be useful and be a leavening, the numbers compared to the needs are small.
 
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