Belgian Navy

The Belgian Navy, officially the Naval Component (Dutch: Marinecomponent, pronounced [maːˈriːnəkɔmpoːˌnɛnt]; French: Composante marine, pronounced [kɔ̃pozɑ̃t maʁin]; German: Marinekomponente, pronounced [maˈʁiːnəkɔmpoˌnɛntə]) of the Belgian Armed Forces, is the naval service of Belgium.

The Belgian Navy was created as the Marine Royale (English: Royal Navy) on 15 January 1831. The force has operated in various forms throughout Belgian history.

When the country became independent after the Belgian Revolution of 1830, a Dutch squadron blocked the Scheldt estuary. To deal with this threat the Belgian Congress ordered two brigantines to be built, which bore the names Congrès and Les Quatre Journées. After the French Army, led by Marshal Count Gérard, captured the citadel of Antwerp in 1832, the captured Dutch gun boats were pressed into Belgian service. In 1840 the Belgian government bought the schooner Louise Marie and in 1845 the brig Duc de Brabant. Louise Marie participated in the Rio Nuñez Incident in 1849. In 1862, the Belgian government discarded its navy and pursued a minimalistic naval policy.

In April 1862 the existing royal navy was disbanded as an economy measure. The navy's personnel were transferred to a "state navy force" manning small vessels and employed in non-military functions such as the provision of ferry services, inspection of incoming vessels and charting research. The need for a proper naval service to provide coastal and port defence was raised periodically but did not progress beyond the retention as a reserve of four lightly armed gunboats, moored in the Port of Antwerp and crewed by members of the Belgian Army's Engineering Corps.

At the outbreak of World War I, Belgium had no navy (an impromptu force was assembled at the Battle for Lake Tanganyika) but the war caused this policy to change and a Corps of Destroyers and Sailors was created in 1917. The Belgian naval personnel served onboard French minesweepers and provided the artillerymen for Belgian merchant ships. The Treaty of Versailles allocated Belgium 11 torpedo boats and 26 minesweepers. For budgetary reasons, Belgium again abolished its navy in 1927.

In 1939, against the looming threat of a new war with Germany, Belgium once again resurrected its navy as the Naval Corps. This new navy, consisting mostly of small patrol vessels and coastal artillery units, lasted barely a year until the German invasion of May 1940. During the 18 days campaign, the trawler A4 evacuated much of the government's gold reserve to Britain, while several others helped at the Allied evacuation at Dunkirk.

During World War II many members of the Naval Corps, together with Belgian fishermen and merchant sailors, escaped to Britain with the explicit wish of fighting the German occupiers. The Royal Navy took advantage of this opportunity to enlist the Belgians into separate groups of more or less entirely Belgian-crewed ships. From 1940 to 1946, the Belgian Section of the British Royal Navy crewed two corvettes, (Buttercup and Godetia), a squadron of MMS minesweepers and three patrol boats (Phrontis [fr], Electra and Kernot). In 1946, Britain donated the ships to Belgium. These vessels became the backbone of the new Belgian Navy.

The Belgian Navy was expanded in the late 1940s and the 1950s with the transfer of former U.S., British, and Commonwealth warships. After Belgium became a member of NATO, the role of the Belgian Navy was to help secure the North Sea, the English Channel, and the Western Approaches in cooperation with other navies in northwestern Europe. The first major surface ships that Belgium received were six Algerine-class minesweepers from the United Kingdom. They also received the Agile and Adjutant minesweepers from the United States. Later developments occurred in the 1970s, when the natively designed Belgian Wielingen-class frigates were built, and in the 1980s when Belgium, France, and the Netherlands launched the Tripartite-class minehunters.