If one were to consider milestones of naval engineering and military strategy regarding the French Navy’s battleships, these would have to include the Richelieu and the Jean Bart. Ordered in response to the German Scharnhorst and the Italian Littorio, these vessels bridged a gap between battle cruisers and battleships by having powerful machinery with advanced armor.
The Richelieu-class battleships, in particular FS Richelieu and Jean Bart, were the first genuinely French fast battleships. The design was unique with the “mast-funnel” or “mack” configuration: it kept all superstructures in the center and gave scope for both rationalized protection and weight economies. It was exactly this design that made them respect the standards of the Washington Treaty while assuring them superior speed to that of many contemporaneous battleships.
The main armament consisted of two quadruple turrets forward, again a feature inherited from the Dunkerque class, to give the least possible silhouette about the maximum firepower. The secondary armament comprised triple turrets aft mounting semi-automatic, rapid-firing 152 mm pieces. Indeed, the anti-aircraft armament was weak, a fault shared with most navies at that particular time.
In 1943, the Richelieu was heavily refitted to US Navy standards. This refit included large numbers of 20 mm Oerlikon and 40 mm Bofors AA guns, which significantly improved the ship’s defensive abilities. She played a key role in various operations, including convoy escorts to Murmansk and several operations in the Far East, such as Operation Cockpit and Operation Transom.
Jean Bart was another representative of the Richelieu-class battleship, famous for extremely high speed and advanced anti-torpedo defense. State-of-the-art AA artillery systems installed on her completion in the late 1940s significantly enhanced defensive capabilities. Though having rather low health points for a Tier IX battleship, Jean Bart’s main battery guns gave a considerable plus in offensive power compared to Richelieu. Her guns also had a reload time of 26 seconds, with better grouping, and she had the special Main Battery Reload Booster consumable on hand, making her overall a quite powerful enemy.
The strategic deployment and technological advances by Richelieu and Jean Bart underline the fact that the nature of naval warfare was changing and new threats and technologies had to be faced. These ships worked not only as great symbols of the naval might of France but also played leading roles in different military operations throughout their service.