The Ships of Brawling Battleships Steel: France Battleship Jean Bart

Laid down on November 15, 1910, launched on September 22, 1911 and commissioned on June 15, 1913, Jean Bart carried a main armament of twelve 12 inch main guns mounted two per turret; two centerline superfiring forward, two centerline superfiring aft and one wing turret on each side that could be fired to its side and forward and aft. Jean Bart was part of the four-ship Courbet battleship class and was powered by coal-fired turbine engines with supplementary oil burners. The plans for these all-big-gun ships, the first French "dreadnoughts," had actually been in the planning stages for some time but the thrifty French, who were allied to the British Royal Navy in any event, wanted to await developments before they actually diverted money from their army. Despite the delay in building and the effort devoted to this class, they were no better than the earliest British and German designs, and became obsolescent rapidly. The ship was named in honor of Jean Bart (or "Barth″) (1651–1702), an outstanding French privateer who captured many British merchantmen and raided Newcastle during the wars of King Louis XIV. In 1694, in an amazing feat of arms, facing a superior Dutch fleet, he recaptured 96 wheat ships. A real swashbuckler, he was later captured and held in Plymouth, England but escaped in a small fishing boat. In July 1914, Jean Bart carried French President Poincare on a visit to Russia. During the war, she was stationed in the Mediterranean Sea and was damaged by two torpedoes from Austrian submarine U-12 in the Strait of Otranto on December 21, 1914, limping into Malta with over 1,000 tons of water on board. The British Grand Fleet could hold the German Fleet in the North Sea, so the French Navy’s primary missions were to escort troops from North Africa to France and, later, to support the Italian Navy against the Austrian Navy and conduct operations against the Dardanelles. In 1919 she was in the Black Sea and bombarded Odessa as part of France’s intervention during the Russian Civil War. After slight conversions in 1922–1923 and 1928–1929, Jean Bart was used as a training ship through the 1930s. In 1937, she was renamed Ocean. As a stationary training ship hulk, Ocean was scuttled in Toulon Harbor when the Germans entered the city on November 27, 1942. The Germans used the sunken hulk as a target and she was hit by an Allied bomb. Ocean was raised in 1944 and scrapped in 1945. Some confusion exits because there was also a newer battleship named Jean Bart with 15 inch guns. She was unfinished in 1940 and sent to Casablanca, where she engaged the U. S. S. Massachusetts on November 8, 1942 and was knocked out of action. Finally completed in 1946–1949, the second Jean Bart was part of the Anglo-French force sent to Suez in 1956. By the time she was scrapped in 1969, she was the last battleship in Western Europe, signaling the end of an era.

See other battleship articles: Introduction, Bretagne, Lorraine