Japanese aircraft attacked the fleet as it withdrew, but they were kept at bay by the carriers' fighters and heavy anti-aircraft fire from the ships. Her secondary armament consisted of nine 152 mm (6 in) /55 Mle 1930 guns mounted in three triple turrets, arranged on the rear superstructure. The two upper directors for the secondary battery on the foremast had 8- and 6 m (20 ft) rangefinders while the mack director also had a 6 m rangefinder. Because the compact Sural boilers allowed the machinery spaces to be shortened, the ships featured a very compact superstructure. This in turn allowed for a long forecastle that significantly improved seakeeping and helped to keep the bow dry in heavier seas. They had a beam of 33.08 m (108 ft 6 in) and a maximum draft of 9.9 m (32 ft 6 in). The plan for Operation Cockpit called for carrier strikes on the port of Sabang, Netherlands East Indies. Most of the command spaces in the tower were converted for other uses. Work on Clemenceau and Gascogne stopped after the Germans occupied France. The ship's original Anschütz gyrocompasses were replaced with Sperry models. [2][4], The contract for Richelieu was awarded to the Arsenal de Brest on 31 August 1935, and the keel for the new ship was laid down on 22 October in the No. The boilers were ducted into a single funnel. The mid-1939 Vanguard design had similar armour to King George V, although there is little data on how this might have performed.During the battle of the Denmark Strait in May 1941, Prince of Wales was hit by Bismarck… It was the greatest sea battle of World War Two. The guns were supplied with a total of 832 armor-piercing shells, which weighed 884 kg (1,949 lb) and had a muzzle velocity of 830 meters per second (2,700 ft/s). Pumps attached to the ship helped to control the flooding, but the hoses repeatedly pulled loose as Richelieu rose and fell with the waves. After the war, Richelieu took part in the initial campaign to restore control of French Indochina before returning to France, where she saw limited activity into the early 1950s. [43], Escorted by the destroyers USS Tarbell and Ellet, Richelieu departed the US on 14 October, nominally bound for Gibraltar. Six new 37 mm ACAD twin mounts would be added to supplement the 100 mm guns; four of these would be placed a deck higher and further inboard than the 100 mm guns aft and the other two would be placed on either side of the superfiring main turret. Darlan instructed him that the ship was to remain under French control, and if that proved to be impossible, he was to scuttle the ship or attempt to escape to the then-neutral United States. [21], The Project C variants all displaced close to 40,000 long tons (41,000 t) and thus were not seriously considered, as they exceeded the displacement limits by a wide margin. Operation Bishop, a strike against Japanese airfields in the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, was to cover British Army landings at Rangoon in Burma. 4 dock that had recently built Dunkerque. The ship conducted training and trials of South Africa before departing for Diego Suarez, ultimately arriving back in Trincomalee on 18 August, by which time Japan had surrendered. [69][70][71], Richelieu, Le Triomphant, and Le Fantasque took part in Operation Mapor at Nha Trang from 20 to 26 November, providing heavy fire support to soldiers fighting in the area. Richelieu was laid down in 1935 and was launched in 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II in Europe. During this period, the French Navy discussed proposals to complete Jean Bart or convert her into an aircraft carrier, ultimately settling on the former. The French sought to deploy an independent task force consisting of Richelieu, the four light cruisers still in service, and four destroyers, with a view toward reestablishing French control in Indochina. The plan called for Richelieu, Valiant, Queen Elizabeth, and Renown, supported by cruisers, to shell the port at longer range while the Dutch cruiser Tromp led a group of destroyers in a close-range attack. (In our wargame, Japan won.) For this operation, the target was the major base at Surabaya, which also had significant oil refinery facilities. [20][29][30], From 29 September, the battlecruiser HMS Renown and escorting destroyers were detached from Force H to patrol off Dakar, as the British believed Richelieu would be transferred to metropolitan France for repairs. Meanwhile, on 23 June, the British heavy cruiser Dorsetshire departed Freetown to observe Richelieu's activities in Dakar. While the British battleships were turning to unmask their rear guns, the submarine Bévéziers torpedoed and badly damaged Resolution. Richelieu was an excellent ship, but she didn't really do much. The starboard propeller shafts also required repairs: the mounting brackets were straightened, but the inboard shaft was too badly damaged and had to be replaced. The boiler blowers were not providing sufficient oxygen, so the boilers were not fully burning the fuel. Sold for scrap in 1968, she was broken up in Italy from 1968 to 1969. Richelieu is the best all-around BB on Team 1 (slightly edging out the Yamato), so ideally the Iowa would try to knock her out first before focusing on either Yamato or the KGV. The carrier aircraft achieved little, sinking a single freighter of 3,000 tons and damaging a repair ship while trading one of the Supermarine Seafire fighters for a German Bf 109 fighter. These were the same guns that had been adopted for Richelieu during construction, but the mounts were new, fully enclosed gun turrets compared to the open mounts aboard the earlier vessel. In his report on the attack and subsequent repairs, Marzin criticized faulty design and construction practices that hindered damage control efforts, including insufficient pumping equipment, poor quality control for the welding of bulkheads, and a failure to ensure that critical components like the turret trunks were watertight. The US Navy refused to transfer the latest radar equipment on the basis that it was too sensitive to be released. [27], Work on Richelieu was expedited as war with Germany became increasingly likely in 1939, and she was completed just days before the Germans won the Battle of France in June 1940. The main diesel generators were housed in their own compartment between the magazines for the main battery turrets, and they were only used while in port. Nevertheless, shipyard workers had repaired her hull damage by September 1943, and she spent the rest of the war as a training ship in the Mediterranean Sea. *Cover: Richelieu at sea in 1944 (as seen by the AA on the bridge and dark paint of the bridge). On 31 May, CV Merveilleux du Vignaux replaced Marzin as the ship's commander. All US Battleships were designed in such a way that they could easily pass under this bridge. By all standards, theirs was a very conservative design based on the arrangement of the Baden and Bayern of World War I, with the exception that the modern ships were more heavily protected, with improved grades of armor steel and had more speed. In return, the British ships inflicted only minor splinter damage before breaking off at 10:07. She also took aboard gold reserves from the Bank of France and 250 cadets from the École Navale (Naval Academy). The catapults were offset en echelon, with the starboard mount further forward than that on the port side. [38], Her 100 mm guns were retained, but her light anti-aircraft battery now consisted of fifty-six 40 mm (1.6 in) Bofors guns in quadruple mounts, all placed with their own Mk 51 gun director. France like other nations who signed the Washington Naval Treaty, was limited in battleship construction. Two ships were authorized on 2 May 1938 under the names Clemenceau and Gascogne. Barham avoided the torpedoes and opened fire, quickly straddling Richelieu and at 09:15, she scored a hit amidships that penetrated above the side armor, causing no casualties. By late August, a convoy had been assembled with five ships carrying weapons and supplies got underway, later rendezvousing with a second convoy of six troop ships carrying some 2,400 Free French soldiers and 4,270 British soldiers. She departed on 29 December and arrived in Toulon on 11 February 1946, thereafter taking part in the transport effort to send French soldiers back from France to North Africa. The British ships remained in the area until 1 October when it became clear the ship would not be moved. The barbettes that supported the turrets had 405 mm (15.9 in) thick armor above the main deck and reduced to 80 mm (3.1 in) below. After completing the refit, the ship underwent trials in November that involved firing nine rounds per gun from the main battery; this would be the last time Richelieu fired the 380 mm guns. [2], Initial studies by the design staff quickly demonstrated that a battery of 406 mm guns would be impossible if the other characteristics would be fulfilled within the allotted displacement. A series of proposals were submitted, ranging from effective repeats of the Richelieu design with minor improvements (the Project A series) to plans that shifted the superfiring main battery turret aft of the superstructure (the Project B series), to the nine-gun variants that kept two triple turrets forward and a third aft (the Project C series). Renamed Q432, she was condemned on 16 January 1968 and sold to the Genoa-based ship breaker Cantieri Navali Santa Maria in September. Secondary armament for the designs amounted to twelve 130 mm (5.1 in) guns in quadruple turrets as on the Dunkerques. Three shifts of workers, totaling some 2,000 men, worked on the ship twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for five months to rush the ship back into service. Under the terms of the armistice, Richelieu was to be returned to Toulon, where she would be demobilized, though the Germans later decided against permitting the move, as they feared the British would try to seize the ship during the passage through the Strait of Gibraltar; the British, meanwhile, were under the mistaken impression that the Germans sought to seize the French fleet for their own use. As a result, Richelieu was detached for other operations. A total of 150 complete charges for the main battery were created by remanufacturing the stockpile intended for Strasbourg. In addition, repairing and modernizing a ship the size of Richelieu would require significant resources that could be used for other purposes. For France, she was the only surviving modern battleship and thus a major symbol of national prestige, while the British had long sought to acquire the vessel to stiffen the Mediterranean Fleet, which at that time had just two new battleships to oppose their three Italian counterparts. Rearranging the primary and secondary batteries had several benefits, most significantly freeing up the sides of the ship for the anti-aircraft battery, where they would be further from the blast effects of the larger guns. The British had initially offered the floating dry-dock AFD-23, but Merveilleux du Vignaux believed that the dry-dock would not be able to accommodate a vessel the size of his ship (he proved to be correct when on 8 August, AFD-23 capsized with Valiant aboard). TL:DR - There was barely a sheet of tissue paper between them. [20][23][24], Richelieu returned fire at 09:40, but her No. German naval construction was at that time directed against France; the two Scharnhorst-class battleships had been laid down to counter the Dunkerques and the two Bismarck-class battleships had been ordered to match the two Richelieus. Two days later, Richelieu, Queen Elizabeth, and six destroyers steamed to Colombo to rest their crews. Wiring in the area was also cut by fragments and needed to be replaced. The ship, still missing most of its anti-aircraft guns, fled to Dakar in French West Africa to keep her under French control. The ship's belt armor was 330 mm (13 in) thick amidships, and the main battery turrets were protected by 430 mm (17 in) of armor plate on the faces. The French decision to lay down Richelieu in 1935 put the country in violation of the Washington Treaty, which was to expire on 31 December 1936, as the combined tonnage of the two Dunkerques and Richelieu exceeded the 70,000 long tons (71,000 t) that had been allotted to France during the moratorium on new battleship construction. At the same time, several French colonies in Africa defected to Free France, prompting the Vichy government to secure authorization from the German Armistice Commission to send several light cruisers and destroyers to reinforce their holdings in Africa, designated Force Y. Owing to the risk of encountering British vessels on the passage, the destroyers were temporarily left in Casablanca while the three cruisers, carrying supplies and additional men to crew the coastal batteries, raced south at high speed. The German Reichsmarine had ordered two units similar to the Deutschland, namely the Admiral Scheer and Admiral Graf Spee, which outgunned all existing heavy cruisers. On 3 June, the destroyer Le Triomphant arrived with spare equipment for Richelieu, which was sent to Durban for another refit. Besides, even if ten British battleships would have been sunk along with the Bismarck, Great Britain had another 30 battleships available. [5], Despite the fact that both vessels remained within the displacement limits, when construction of Richelieu began in October, France had violated the Washington Treaty. The shell handling equipment of both the primary and secondary guns was thoroughly overhauled, with wiring being replaced and the shell and propellant lifts being rebuilt—the latter had never been made to function correctly while the ship was in Dakar. British heavy cruiser Dorsetshire departed Freetown to observe Richelieu 's activities in Dakar the end of the.. 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