Courbet class

2023-02-01 -

COURBET

Courbet was the lead ship of her class of dreadnoughts, the first built by France. Like many other pre-World War I dreadnoughts, by the interwar period she was becoming obsolete, despite efforts to update her. She spent much of the 1930s as a gunnery training vessel, but following the German invasion of France in 1940 she was reactivated and her crew augmented to bring them up to wartime establishment. She was assigned the duties of offering gunfire support for the defence of French coastal towns. On 19 June 1940 she provided gunfire support to the defenders of Cherbourg, including firing on the advancing 7th Panzer Division. After this she covered the evacuation of the town and then sailed for Portsmouth the next day. The following month, as part of a co-ordinated operation to prevent

French warships from sailing and being surrendered to German forces, the old battleship was seized by British troops. Shortly afterwards she was handed to the Free French who manned her anti-aircraft guns in defence of Portsmouth when it came under attack by the Luftwaffe. She was finally disarmed in March of 1941 for use as an accommodation ship. This should have been the end of her career, but in 1943 she was moved to Loch Striven to be used as a target for tests of the new Highball bouncing bomb, a smaller version of the more famous Upkeep used in the Dambuster raids. After further service as both depot and target ship her final wartime role was to come as part of the Normandy landings in 1944. Courbet returned to her native France and she was scuttled off Sword Beach as part of the breakwaters to protect the landings. She was scrapped in situ after the war, the wreck not finally being cleared until 1970.

JEAN BART

The Jean Bart was ordered in 1910 and completed in 1913 in time for World

War I. The Courbet class were France’s first modern battleships with a single type of main armament and the design of the ship compared favourably to that of other nations. She was equipped with 12 x 305mm guns in four twin turrets, two forward and two aft. Jean Bart had an eventful war, being torpedoed by an Austro-Hungarian submarine and spending much of the conflict in the Greek Islands. During the interwar years the ship was refitted twice in an attempt to keep her up to date. The first in 1923 saw her boilers updated and new anti-aircraft guns, rangefinders and fire control equipment were fitted. The second refit in 1929 was more extensive with the remaining coal fired boilers replaced with oil fired examples and again her fire control and anti-aircraft armament was updated. A large Royal Navy style tripod mast was also fitted, altering the appearance of the ship dramatically. These refits only delayed the inevitable however, and she was in a poor state by 1937. She was hulked and her armament removed before being relegated to accommodation ship status in Toulon. At the same time she was renamed Océan to free up the name for the new Richelieu class battleships under construction.

She was captured intact by the Germans in 1942 when they occupied Vichy

France. The ship was then used by the Germans for experiments on new shaped charged warheads to be dropped by Mistel composite aircraft with an equivalent charge to the warhead being detonated in front of her main guns. Even with an additional 10mm of armour, the charge