(4) The battle with JEAN BART led to a big internal Navy investigation as to why several of its shells had not detonated (more shells that missed JEAN BART were also found undetonated). This was a big deal, as these new base fuzes were the most damage-resistant ever used by the Navy and had to be literally crushed or hit at such a high angle that the forward motion of the firing pin was jammed by the greater sideways motion during ricochet for these fuzes to fail. During many tests they had over 90% success under most impact conditions, including almost all of those when fired at JEAN BART. Not so in the battle. What was wrong? Microscopic examination of the internal parts of failed and, when found, fully-functional fuze pieces, eventually found the culprit and, relatively quickly thereafter, a complete solution to the problem. As with the US torpedo pistol failures, there was a design issue, but unlike that fiasco, BuORD wanted answers IMMEDIATELY OR SOONER. The new fuze had a complex system that unlocked it after firing so that it was armed for impact. This system was somewhat more complex than previous base fuzes and was a possible cause of some of the failures, but not the major one since such unlocking techniques had been used in prior fuzes with no apparent problems. It also had a new innovation: It was designed as a highly-damage-resistant version of the Mark 19 Base Detonating Fuze (note spelling here) used with the HC shells and the base-fuzed Common shells used with such things as submarine deck guns and in the older cruisers before being replaced by the new 8" Mark 19 AP Projectile when the new heavy cruisers got the super-heavy 8" Mark 21 AP Projectile, both of which also used the Mark 21 base fuze, which of course made a solution even more important. The Mark 19 did not originally use a delay element and did not have the damage-resistant modifications, giving only a 0.003-second average impact delay (same as WWI British pre-Jutland APC shells and US WWI AP shells). As no enemy heavy armor was expected with these smaller older ships or against destroyers, this delay was adequate for internal damage to the smaller ship targets usually being fired at. When the HC shells of the battleships were introduced, the very short fuze delay became a problem and a modified version of the MOD 19 type of fuze was used with a 0.01-second delay added, though not any hardening add-ons used by the Mark 21 design. These fuzes had no problems with duds, other than the regular manufacturing failures always occurring. All of this pointed to the damage-resistant mods for the Mark 21 design. The damage-resistance modifications in the Mark 21 AP-projectile delay-action base fuze, which had a 0.033-scond average delay (from many tests; I think 0.035 was the original spec, but 0.033 was considered good enough). This meant that as in the phrase "there is many the slip between the cup and the lip" damage to the shell had several ways of duding the shell before the delay element set off the fuze after the shell had been bounced around during its path through the expected thick armor. To minimize this, what the fuze designers wanted was that the initial impact not only hit the firing pin onto the primer, beginning the shell detonation chain, but rigidly lock everything into as compact and fool-proof a package so that the forces from the armor penetration could not interrupt the explosive chain without literally destroying the fuze, once set off by the initial impact inertia shock. As a result, not only was the firing pin free to move when the shell abruptly slowed on impact and the firing pin hit and exploded the small and super-sensitive explosive primer, which immediately sent a jet of blast into the near side of the black-powder-pellet delay element which caused most of the delay (other than that 0.003-second or so even with no delay), the primer blast pushed the entire delay element structure, the more powerful small detonator that was set off after the delay pellet burned through and its fire touched the detonator's sensitive explosive, and the blast of the detonator which slammed into the near end of two tubes, each filled with TNT that detonated and their bazooka-like blast hit the near ends of the two rocket-nozzle-shaped tetryl boosters, one on each side of the upper end of the fuze, which finally shot needle-shaped jets of blast in two redundant explosions to reliably set off the extremely hard-to-detonate Explosive "D" main filler change (these fuzes in effect had two detonators, a tiny one hit by the firing pin that just set off the delay pellet and pushed the structure containing the delay element and detonator into its locked "now firing" position and its TNT-filled tubes on the far side of the detonator that set off the two boosters). US base fuzes were usually very reliable in WWII other than this mysterious problem found in 1942. What was the problem? It turned out that these AP-shell-only base fuzes were made TOO RELIABLE with very narrow tolerances in the interlocking of the damage-resistant structure to its final "am-firing" position during the fuze delay time!! This meant that things in the fuze when they worked properly were tightly locked and, as mentioned, the fuze had to be virtually destroyed to keep it from working. But what if it never got into its final locked position? Then the fuze would fail of, if partly armed, cause only one of the two booster to detonate and this greatly lowered the chance of properly setting off that near-inert explosive filler. And this is exactly what had been happening. Why? Older fuzes did not have such tight tolerances so moving parts inside them were not bothered by slight irregularities in the surface smoothness as they moved under impact (firing pin) and they never had to move anything else but the safety pins and such after firing and before reaching the target, which had been perfected over decades. The primer-blast-moving interlock during the start of the delay element time was brand new and, it turned out, the surfaces that moved under the primer blast to lock the delay pellet and post-delay detonator to the am-firing position COULD NOT SLIDE UNLESS THE SURFACES WERE NEARLY GLASS-SMOOTH!! The problem: Explosive "D" reacts with several metals chemically, which is why all metal surfaces it might contact, in the inside of the shell, the inner face of the base plug and the outside of the base fuze were coated in lacquer to prevent any EXTERNAL PROBLEM. But what about an INTERNAL FUZE PROBLEM? The fuze designers did not make the fuze air tight and neither did that lacquer coat, so fumes from the ammonium picrate explosive filler slowly seeped into the fuze and caused a small amount of surface corrosion, which in older fuzes had not had any effect. BUT IT DID HERE, BIG TIME!!! After about 6 months of exposure to these fumes, the corrosion started jamming them a large part of the time. The solution: When finally understood, in 1943 Bakelite plastic coatings were put all over the fuze portions touching the base plug and filler and this sealed the fuzes and no more problem. Sherlock Holmes could not have done a better job...
Having that partition in the main turrets, making them essentially two twins paired together instead of one continuous quad battery probably prevented the loading issues that the UK experienced with the King George V class. And it should be noted that at the time of the invasion of North Africa, only one of Jean Bart's turrets was operational.
The French also simply had more experience operating quad turrets thanks to Dunkerque and their own design studies. Oddly, France never built a triple turret for battleship guns and jumped directly from twins to quads.
I have A LOT of interesting details concerning the RICHELIEU Class battleships, which only the IOWAs come close to, in the JEAN BART, looking more like race cars than tanks. I will include some of them in several comments here. (1) The turret and barbette armor of the these two ships, RICHELIEU and JEAN BART, was nearly as thick as SOUTH DAKOTA and IOWA Classes, which, other than YAMATO, was about the thickest armor ever used in this type of warship. Also, the French KC-type side armor -- and I assume the homogeneous, ductile type used as its basis -- was basically a much-improved form of the original Krupp Cemented armor developed in 1894 in that it had about the same face depth (35% of the entire plate thickness, I think a constant for all thickness plates of this type, though I cannot be sure) and all of the metallurgical and heat treatment improvements (in hardening and in post-hardening tempering for added toughness/crack resistance) introduced since then. The US Crucible Steel Company made a set of AP rounds for RICHELIEU when it was overhauled in the US after escaping the Germans at the start of WWII, which were designed as enlarged, 380mm-sized AP shells -- shaped, balanced, and weighing the same as the original French AP shells -- made to the same superior standard as the US 14" Mark 16 MOD 8 AP rounds just introduced at that time for the older US battleships and which was the best naval AP projectile ever made up to that time -- the later 14" Mark 16 MOD 9 and MOD 10 AP shells and 16" Mark 9 MOD 6 AP shells (introduced in 1944) also had to meet the this design standard since the US Navy kept upping its test specs whenever a better shell was developed (the armor test specs had reach REVISION "J" by the end of WWII and they were not, I think, past REV "F" or so at the start of WWII -- nobody else did this, to my knowledge, except to reduce them when raw materials became scarce, as with Germany). After WWII the French did a test using one of their RICHELIEU Class armor belt plates at a 30-degree angle from right-angles (= 0 degrees), the typical armor test spec angle for most plates during WWII by all nations, with one of the US Crucible projectiles. They fired several shots, both penetrating and not to find what the US Navy called its "Naval Ballistic Limit" (NBL), the minimum striking velocity (with tolerances of course) that one could expect such a plate to just barely allow the shell to get through with minimum exit/remaining velocity afterwards (this minimum would be about zero for a hit at around right-angles, but as the angle increased and more and more of the resistance was due to glancing forces, especially above 45 degrees angles, the shell will never be stopped unless broken into pieces by the impact and will either ricochet off or, at a moderate exit velocity that got higher and higher as the angle of impact increased, punch through the plate). The calculated NBL test result I got using my FACEHARD Armor Penetration Computer Program and inputting the shell data for the French shell (size and weight) but otherwise the using the US 14" Mark 16 MOD 8 shell type selection and a generic, fully-optimum KC armor selection (35% face with every improvement in my program applied), my estimate of the French 13" (if I recalled correctly) KC belt plate, gave EXACTLY (to four digits!!!!!) the test result that the French got using this same test standard. I thought my program was good, but sometimes it is better than good, it seems. The reason I chose this armor type is that I knew that the French had used the classic KC armor formula in WWI-era battleships; were, in their Schneider et Cie. steel-maker, second to none in metallurgical skill (they introduced steel armor in the first place and then nickel-steel armor, making all previous plates obsolete both times); and, having analyzed the latest Krupp plates from those surrendered German battleships after WWI just like the US and Britain had, now had any improvements made to German armor since 1894 to add to their own considerable expertise. I thought that if anybody could make armor steels with "the kitchen sink" of improvements thrown into them, it would be the French and I seem to have been correct. US WWII armor was also set at this level, though it had in the WWII "thick Chill" Class "A" face-hardened plate an armor with a 55% face thickness to try to damage those damage-resistant new-type US Navy AP shells, which was somewhat a problem against the larger battleship AP shells due to scaling effects from the hard, brittle face, but gave superior results in more moderate cruiser thicknesses against scaled-down guns firing at these classes of warships, which were, after all, by far the majority of US armored warships in WWII.
(3) The French turret was noted in this video for three features: If you jammed or knocked out one turret, you lost half of your weapons immediately; internally the turrets were divided by a rather thick (that is, against blast and fragments) centerline bulkhead dividing each quadruple turret essentially into two mini-turrets side-by-side on one rotating barbette structure; and the fact that the aft 80 degrees or so could only be covered by the three triple 152mm gun turrets back there (the two amidships 152mm gun turrets were never fitted and the space used for more 100mm AA gun mounts (lots of US 20mm and 40mm mounts in RICHELIEU after its US overhaul), just like the Japanese did the same to YAMATO later in WWII to get more 127mm AA guns). The next two never-built ships in this four-ship design effort were to move the super-firing forward 380mm turret to the rear of the ship level with the front turret for all-round firing, causing an 80-degree arc at each end of the ship reachable by only one turret, but eliminating the aft arc with no big guns whatsoever. When firing against MASSACHUSETTS, JEAN BART never hit it, though it did some damage to other US targets, I think. It only had one gun turret that was finished and ready to fire (under local control I think) and it was tied up to its dock. One of the US 16" Mark 8 AP shells bounced off of its turret roof and ended up, unexploded in the city behind the dock -- the extremely high impact angle that caused the shell to skip off the thick turret roof also caused the base to be flattened when it slammed down on to the armor as the nose went back upward and this squeezed and crushed the base fuze, though the fuze might have been non-functional anyway due to a problem discovered during this battle (see (4), below). Some other hull hits, all on the armored deck at very high obliquity angles (through the upper side hull above the side belt armor) penetrated all of the deck armor and went into the lower hull. They punched holes in the hull (not sure if those exploded) and flooding through those holes into the ship, which did not have all of its watertight doors and hatches sealed, caused the ship to sink into the mud below it, though the weather deck remained above water and the sealed turret and its magazines kept right on shooting the four big guns. One shell blew up in a secondary gun magazine, but it was empty so only rather minor damage occurred to the ship. One shell hit the upper hull, then the thick deck armor even with the upper edge of the belt, then the 40mm inner fragmentation deck, which at its sides was bent down at about 45 degrees ("turtleback") to touch the lower edge of the belt (similar to, but much thinner than and less sloped than BISMARCK's similar sloped inner side hull protection) and then went through several internal bulkheads to end up stopped on the 4th deck (using the weather deck as the 1st deck, as in US terminology), with its filler on fire and smoke pouring out of the hole where the base fuze had been, indicating that the base fuze had not functioned properly and its explosive train had only partially worked to start a fire inside the Explosive "D", not a detonation, as designed. This was one of the main clues that something was wrong with the Mark 21 base fuzes that was not a problem with any other base fuzes used previously or with then-current non-AP shells (such as the then-new US Navy High Capacity (HC) large filler "HE" shells for shore bombardment and, if the situation warranted it, against lightly-armored enemy warships, which could use both nose and base fuzes, the latter always there and the nose fuzes removable for a solid steel nose plug or for exchange among several nose fuze type). The penetrating deck impacts, even when the angle of fall was rather shallow, indicated that deck armor even of appreciable thickness (including the on the shooting MASSACHUSETTS and on the IOWAs) was inadequate to stop the new super-heavy US 16" AP shells, capped or not. (MONTANA had thicker armor everywhere to try to handle these new shells.) Also during this battle between battleships, a shell from the MASSACHUSETTS did the exact low-probability hit that was mentioned in this video: The 16" shell hit the upper edge of the barbette at the crease along its side edge where it was slightly extended beyond the covering armor of the turret (US turrets did not do that, extending the turret armor to overlap the barbette upper edge forming an overhang at the turret lower front corners). The turret side armor was hit at its lower edge at an extremely high angle sideways and downward and was gouged slightly as the shell ricocheted off the turret and again ended up intact, more-or-less, in the city, but the upper edge of the face-hardened barbette acted differently. The face was only 35% deep so some of the soft back was also exposed by this narrow turret "under-hang" and the shell hit this back material, gouged it down and sideways, cracking the upper edge face of the armor outward in a cracked bulge and bulging up the soft armor back so that it locked the lower edge of the turret in place like a hardened piece of gum jammed into a crack at a rotating wheel bearing. This jammed the turret and the turret crew had to go out and find a cutting torch and then set up and slowly cut away the bent barbette armor to free the turret. By then the battle was over and the French and Germans, if any, had lost. As with the HOOD, the best laid plans "oft gang aglet", but, it seems, not so with the worst things that can happen...
Pretty bold coming from someone whose country probably sunk the Surcouff and tried to sink the Richelieu and the Jean Bart (assuming you are British or American)
I'd have to go with the Roma. Clean with a gorgeous profile. Richelieu looks like its missing a small aircraft deck aft, it a gorgeous stern but its missing something imo. Honestly I'd prefer King Geroge V's over the Dunkurques, aesthetic wise.
(2) The US Crucible Steel Company 380mm Mark 1 MOD 0 AP Projectiles for RICHELIEU Class battleships were made in the few months after the RICHELIEU started it overhaul (some other shells for smaller French guns were also made, but not AP). I assume that enough shells were made to fill that ship's magazines with some extra shells for replenishment. I do not know if JEAN BART ever carried any of these shell when completed after WWII. Externally, these shells looked virtually identical to the extremely long and streamlined (including a tapered, pinched-in base, an extreme form of the "boat-tailed" base shape, to get the minimum possible drag and maximum possible range for a given muzzle velocity). This retention of the ballistic qualities allowed the use of the existing setting in the ship's fire-control calculators (otherwise an extensive set of US test firings would have had to be done and new range tables created, for just that one shell for that one ship). Internally and in the nose and AP cap hidden by the long, sheet-metal, pointed windscreen, as much as possible of the US 14" Mark 16 MOD 8 AP shell design was retained. The shell AP cap was very much the 14" shell's design with changes only for where the windscreen screwed on. The AP cap was soldered and crimped to the nose just like a US Navy AP shell. The projectile nose was a compromise, being longer and more pointed than the 14" shell, but rounded with no point at the tip, as with the oval-nosed US 14" shell. The body shape and internal cavity shape and size was formed like the French shell, more-or-less, for weight and balance purposes, including a pinched-in, smaller base plug to conform to the narrowed, streamlined base shape mentioned above. The shell had a cavity almost twice as large as the 1.5% explosive-filler-weight used in US Navy post-1930 AP shells, more in line with British WWII APC shells and looked like a long, narrow tear drop with the blunt end at the bottom where the base plug screwed in. The base plug, other than its narrower size, was just like that used with the 14" projectile and the base fuze was the standard US Navy Mark 21 used with all US Navy AP shells since about 1940/41 -- giving a 0.033-second fuze delay after impact shock on the nose went down the length of the shell and caused the firing pin to jump forward and fire the first stage of its several-step process for setting off the main filler, which was US Army/Navy Explosive "D" (ammonium picrate), the most insensitive-to-impact, though slightly low-powered compared to the TNT standard, filler used during WWII, not the French near duplicate of British "Shellite". That French filler was 80% "Mélinite" (their name for British "Lyddite" or picric acid or trinitrophenol WWI excessively-sensitive filler) and 20% a much less sensitive, less powerful explosive similar to, though not identical to, the British use of the cousin of Lyddite, dinitrophenol, in their Shellite. The US was NEVER going to allow anybody to make anything involving picric acid in its explosive manufacturing plants! As mentioned in (1), these shells seem to be just as damage resistant as the 14" AP shells they were based on. I am not sure how strong the French AP shells were, but I also assumed that they were pretty good, though their thin, contoured AP caps had essentially no sharp corner at the edge of the face and, like the British WWII Hadfield AP cap design, did not gain any benefit other than its added shell weight when hitting homogeneous, ductile (deck and roof) armor at a high angle, unlike the US AP cap, both US and on these US-made 380mm French gun shells, which, when applicable, gained a sudden drop of 12% in the needed penetration velocity as the cap edge cut a notch into the armor's face on impact and allowed the cap to begin to fold up the plate surface in front of the shell, impeding ricochet and thinning the plate to make penetration easier in front of the shell.
one of the unforseen drawbacks of the "ebonite mousse" (aka rubber) was that if the ship took damage and the rubber was doused in fuel oil and then set on fire it was almost impossible to extinguish completely, as happened to richelieu in dakar.
(5) French projectiles were odd in a couple of ways: (a) The 380mm APC shells for RICHELIEU and JEAN BART had a rather problematic modification not made to previous shells that was not actually used in practice but caused some major problems initially. This was the two deep holes drilled into the base plugs to insert POISON GAS CAPSULS which would of course open up when the shell exploded and make the smoke of the shell even more toxic than it usually was (which was pretty bad already, considering the chemicals used in these HE fillers). This was supposed to not affect the shells in any other way, but it turned out that they had made a fatal design error when implementing the drilling of the holes: THEY WERE TOO DEEP. When the gun was fired, the propellant blast in a large number of cases would go into these holes when not blocked by the reinforced poison capsules (which had been made to withstand the blast of firing the gun) and blow open their far end due to not enough steel thickness there, blasting into the filler and blowing up the shell while still in the barrel. This happened to RICHELIEU and cause it to lose a gun and to not be able to fire its guns with their existing ammunition. One reason for the new US Crucible AP shells for those ships. JEAN BART did not suffer from this problem and I think it was that they found out about it (not sure how) and, if i remember correctly, they welded thick steel buttons onto the inner faces of each shell's base plug over the two holes to make sure it would not happen. No more premature explosion problems, to my knowledge, ever happened with either ship. Inadequate testing again raises its ugly head. Seems like a vinyl record skipping again and again, doesn't it? (b) The long, pointed windscreen of the original French 380mm APC shells (I do not think this was used with the 330mm SAPC shells) in the later versions had a unique method of identifying hits and misses from each ship if more than one was firing on the same target (as it turned out this never became a real problem for French warships, but they were thinking ahead, obviously). Some navies ignored the problem, including, for some unknown reason since they had a real problem here, the British Navy, which was found to be a significant problem during the fight with the ADM GRAF SPEE by those British cruisers, who several times mixed up whose shells were whose and messed up their aiming until they sorted it out. The US Navy used small dye bags of different colors of powdered dye, each ship getting its own color during an assignment, in the windscreens of its battleship and, perhaps some cruiser, AP shells, with triangular slots cut into the tip of the windscreen and circular holes made into the bottom edge just above the screw-on threads, in both cases with sealing plates/plugs covering the holes that could resists the forces of blast and air flow as they existed the gun barrel and flew to the target, with the sudden slam of the shell into the water, making a huge splash with the bright dye coloring the splash as it tore out the covered holes and jetted into the splash to allow everybody to see which ship made that impact. One problem with this was that it only worked during the day (the fuze delay caused the shell to explode underwater well away from the splash, even if the blast had been visible) and during good visibility (what happened during two of the WWII battles at Narvik in Norway show that you could not even see an entire ship moving next to you, much less a shell splash at a distance in poor weather). Also, rather counter-productively, a direct hit would not be visible since it did not make a splash unless the target had a major explosion (and you still would not know who caused it!). The Japanese, in their Type 91 AP shells, did not need holes in their windscreens since on water impact the windscreen was designed to break off the shell nose, taking the Cap Head with it, to increase the stability of the shell underwater and give it a short-range torpedo effect. Otherwise, it worked just like the US dye bag system. Not so the French. THEIR shells would have a visible color-dye-bag function during day or night and it the shell hit the target or the ocean nearby; only poor visibility would defeat it. To do this they needed something that would ALWAYS make something eye-catching when the shells impacts on or near their targets, even at night. They also used a dye-bag in the windscreen, but a somewhat larger one and one held by a support structure inside the windscreen just below the tip of the windscreen point. At the tip was a threaded socket into which the impact nose fuze of an HE shell was screwed in, including the booster usually there to set off the main filler charge of the projectile, but here to provide the main explosion all by itself. On impact, the nose fuze would instantly detonate, causing a bright colored flash and smoke cloud, splash or no splash, hit or miss, as long as the target point was visible. To support this rather heavy weight, the bottom of the windscreen was screwed into a rigid platform braced on and screwed into the AP cap. This braced platform would also act like a flat nose of the shell when the windscreen blew apart and given the French shells an underwater trajectory just like the Japanese Type 88 and later Type 91 AP shells when these Japanese shells lost their Cap Heads due to water impact. However, there is no indication that an extra-long delay in the face fuze of French shells existed (or equivalent modification) to allow a long underwater run. I would like to know more about French 1930s naval shell fuzes. Note that after RICHELIEU escaped, the British discovered this French dye-bag system, which the French and, also, the British called a "K" shell and the British added it to several of its APC shells later in WWII (some versions of 14" and 15" I know of, but not sure about any other British shells).
As much as the internet brings all sorts of garbage, it also enables things like scrolling the TH-cam comments to see detailed and extremely informative comments from one of the world’s experts in this subject. Thank you so much for posting this, do you have any plans to ever publish TH-cam videos of your own? I’m sure you have a lot of fascinating information to share on this platform
@@NickPoeschek No. I am not a good video maker and am getting too old to boot. I have a section of my own at the web site NAVWEAPS.COM with a number of articles (some rather dated), but my BASIC computer programs related to armor penetration are all up-to-date. BASIC is much like English in its syntax and is usually rather easy to understand when a few of the less obvious instructions are understood, so following its internal logic, especially with my many notes in the source code, while intricate in some places, is logical and you can see my thinking on any given subject I have created a program for. I still have some areas of importance that I do not have enough data yet, if I ever will, such as the details on the effects of nose shape for rounded or pointed AP projectiles from hemispheres (cannon balls) to long points like on the US Army 0.5" M2 AP bullet cores, which depend strongly on the plate thickness, with half-caliber being a rough balance point in these effects, with thin plating having worse effects with the blunter projectiles and thicker plate having worse effects on longer-point projectiles (depends on how much the steel can dent before being torn open -- thinner plates are much better at this -- and whether a sharp nose will dip into the plate bending it upward into a curved-back spur like a wood plane makes in front of the shell that impedes ricochet -- thick plates are better at this -- or if the nose cuts the plate like a ship's sharp prow, folding it sideways so that the nose is free to tilt upward and glance off). My HCWCLC program for mid-hardness homogeneous, ductile armor uses a near-middle nose shape for the US Army 76mm M79 AP Shot projectile (no windscreen or AP cap), with optional windscreen and AP cap logic for some US Army and Navy AP projectiles included (not any others at this time, unfortunately). My FACEHARD program for almost every kind of face-hardened naval armor and most AP projectile types individually calibrated (50 years of work!) is much more detailed in its results (you can even select any projectile/armor combination and then use another projectile's size and various weight values to see how changing its metallurgical and design criteria would have affected its effectiveness as an anti-armor weapon).
I love that image of the Richilieu, coming into NYC with one of her Gun Barrels missing. Handsome vessel. EDIT - USS Massachusetts now there was a vessel.
The G3/N3 designs were started prior to the Naval treaties . So the all forward or midships main battery was a weight saving attempt prior to the treaty.
I wished they'd did save Jean Bart. She would've made a good museum at Brest. But the real tragedy is the ending of HMS Warspite a decorated WW1 and WW2 Big Beauty that got cucked by HMS Belfast.
Warspite was in really bad shape after the war... they never repaired the missile hit properly, instead just pouring concrete to seal the hole. Queen Elizabeth or Valiant would have made a good substitution. While worn out, they were still structurally sound.
Post-War it would have been interesting if the two 'Richelieu Class' ships had be refitted with Terrier AA missile battery stern-side replacing the 6-inch guns, as in the stern battery of Boston/Canberra and the forward battery of the USS Long Beach. Good NATO convoy escort for dealing with both Soviet surface raiders and air force bombers. Or converting the stern for helicopter operations for commandos or anti-submarine work would have been another good alternative. Image these two ships with a 1980s Iowa-class makeover, of all the WW2 battleships I think the Richelieus with their forward mounted main battery were the best suited for post-war upgrading with either missiles, helicopters, or both.
Actually i like most of these ww2 designs, be it Littorio, Yamato, Bismarck or Iowa. They all were beautiful and powerful ships. If i had to choose i would throw my hands into the air and give up. ❤😂
@@MrRandomcommentguy if I could say Bismarck looks like its superstructure is moved a bit forward if you see it in angle or maybe its trick of the eye . I think it made it look unique . But I agree Richelieu was sexy
All guns front is only a good idea if you have the speed advantage... but that goes to the Iowas. If you want to run away (what ever causes this decision) and the enemy can close in, you get reared. And i still think, they should have ripped out turret #3 on the Iowas and dropped Polaris nuclear missiles in the hole. Plus they would have had a replacement for Iowas turret #2 which became inoperable after an incident.
To be honest, I don't see the rear turret as an asset. One of the reason HMS Hood was destroyed was because she could only chase Bismarck with half her firepower, so she was compelled to make a turn and unmask her rear turrets which exposed the ship. The all-forward turret arrangement with generous firing arcs offered freedom of movement plus you get the perks of being lighter and having thicker armor. And having a light cruiser's worth of firepower strapped to the rear is nothing to sneeze at either.
My understanding is that concentrating the engines and power train in the rear of the ship, generally led to slower ships. You had less space for your power plants. HMS Nelson and Rodney were quite slow for that reason. However, once Bismark was stuck making slow circles in the water. Rodney got into position to the shoot the living daylights of Bismark. One advantage of having a rear turret is that you could keep firing while making lots of turns. It's like a submarine having aft torpedo tubes.
@@barryguerrero7652 Bismarck never landed a single hit in her last battle, so I still don't see the point of being able to fire your gun if you can't achieve results. To achieve accuracy with the main battery, you need to use all of your guns to get the range on target. Just having 2 or 4 guns leaves you at a tremendous disadvantage.
one of the disadvantage of a head-on attack is the narrow base of the range finder versus using the long base of the forward and rear range finders so your accuracy will suffer.
@@stevepodleski This can easily be offset by having the ship adopt a parallel course with the fleeing ship, so the turrets still turn 10-15 degrees, but the enemy ship does not gain any distance from a parallel course or get to use their forward turrets without deciding to stand and fight.
C'est malheureux de n'avoir pas gardé le Richelieu en bateau musée,les américains sont formidables d'avoir gardé leurs bateaux, nous n'avons aucun souvenir en France,c'est triste.
Au sortir de la guerre on était ruinés alors que les Américains profitaient de leur outil industriel tout neuf et des remboursements du lend/lease et du plan Marshall. Mais c'est vrai que c'est triste.
These were really good battleships I mean the only battleship on the allied side that had a thicker belt was the King George V and let's just say you put a Richelieu in place of the Bismarck during its Chase and destruction you have a ship with a thicker belt 13 in versus 12.6 and most importantly you have 17 inch thick gun turrets versus the almost scandalously thin 14-in turret faces of the bismarcks which is a case of no wonder why Rodney and King George v had little or no problem silencing the bismarck's main battery I know a lot of people give the French crap when it comes to their military but there are a couple of weapon systems which if the French would have had a little bit more time to implement or perfect would have kept the Germans out and I believe if all four of the planned ships in this class had been completed by the outbreak of world war II along with one of the newer French fighter aircraft and last but not least the MAS-44 some automatic battle rifle Germany wouldn't have gotten its foot in the door during the Battle of France
I will respectfully suggest a future entry. What was the best capital ship built within the Washington Treaty limitations, or at least plausibly pretending to adhere to them?
@@adamtruong1759 Only KGV was a true treaty Battleship. The others cheated with bigger guns. 14" guns were the treaty regs. Richelieu was well over 35,000 tons anyway. SoDak class also had their issues. Bad vibration problems and electrical failures were the norm at least in their early years. They had very short hulls and were cramped to say the least. KGV's had the best protection concerning the vitals and the best quality armour. However the quad turrets were problematic but not the gun or shell itself. The shell was in fact a tremendous boon with a massive bursting charge bigger than any other 14" or 15" shell. All these treaty ships had their advantages and disadvntages. It's personal to each which order you think are the best.
Scharnhorst was a battleship she was meant to have 15 inch guns but they decided to launch her before they were ready so just used 11 inch guns what they already had then refit with 15's later.
wonder if it is possible to produce a video the process of loading the main Mark 7 16 inch guns on the New Jersey - from where the powder bags were stored to the loading one of the 16 inch gun barrel? Also, how well or poorly would the New Jersey stand up in a traditional naval engagement with a German Deutschland class pocket battleship?
I love the smoke stack. Jean bart the beutiful pirate is my second favorite ship in warships. After my iowas. Missouri is my friend. But i rate it at same. But i love that tied smokestack. Imagine if iowa class had it.
Richelieu is pronounced "Rih-shell-yeuh" not "Rai-Cheloo" nor "Roy-Cheloo". I have heard far too many people including our dear Ryan butchering the name, I get the spelling seems odd but its not that hard, on behalf of France I ask very nicely to say it right. Thank you to Ryan Szmanski and the Battleship New Jersey museum for making a video on the pride of the Marine National.
both refer to the back of the ship, the stern is a broader term, the fantail is more of a large area at the back of the ship, in our case, the flight deck and aft of turret iii
The pre-dreadnought French battleships were ............bizarre. They had their hulls sloped opposite to conventional hulls, which meant that the crew could only be berthed above the deck.........in multi tiered decks...........which gave them the appearance of 'floating hotels'.
The Richelieu served in the Indian Ocean for the last year and more of World War II and towards the very end; in the weeks after the Japanese surrender she reached Singapore and was entering the Pacific Ocean which was impressive. I wish France saved these ships
I dont agree that reducing armoured area is a good idea. When the Jean Bart went against the USS Massachusetts she suffered quite badly in the unarmoured areas and that would have meant months out of action and did i suppose. The Yamato's were the same , it was found that if you put the hits all into the bow or stern end then the poorly armoured areas would let in flooding and pull the ship down . Their deck armour was good but the amount of port holes showed the lack of armour in many places. Even though i love the Nelson's , i am not a fan of the all main guns in one end of the ship. But i have to admit they and the Richelieu's did look good. In terms of guns , if memory serves right ? the Italian ships had better ranged and heavier 15 inch shells and 9 instead of 8 . But the Richelieu was better armoured. But again i think both types were poor on torpedo protection as was proved at Taranto when Carrier Swordfish scored hits with 18 inch torpedo's . In my opinion neither French nor Italian designs were as good as the Bismarck . Bismarck took an enormous pounding and many torpedo's to sink . I doubt very much the others would have taken anywhere near that pounding even if they were as heavy as Bismarck. And Richelieu was only slightly shorter than Bismarck though 10 feet smaller in beam.
Reducing armored area is good because it means you need less weight to protect vital ship functions (or can protect those same functions better). An armored citadel is meant to protect the engines, magazines, and enough buoyancy to stay afloat even if everything else is flooded. Protecting more space is simply wasting steel and adding undesirable weight. The armoring of non-vital spaces is a significant portion of why Bismarck displaced so much more than Richelieu and was no more capable for that weight. Portholes would only be placed above the armored belt and would not compromise armor protection. Bismarck's own protection was actually astoundingly poor despite her considerable bulk and it's just rather difficult to motivate 50,000 tons of steel to sink if you don't blow the magazines open and are too close to punch holes below the waterline. By any measurable metric, Bismarck had a weaker deck than any final generation battleship except Littorio, the weakest belt of any of them period, and a torpedo defense system that was only better than King George V's.
Littorios were Better armoured than Richelieu, and theyr guns could penetrate Richelieu armor far away than the later could penetrate littorios armor. But Richelieu could have showed a smaller profile with her all front guns. Both ships were pretty even imho.
@@Balmung60 , The fact still remains that Bismarck was hit by hundreds of shells and around 8 Torpedo's , Bismarck's armour wasn't the best but i think the only real reason Bismarck was sunk in that action was the 3 Propellers instead of 4. That made it very hard to steer when the rudders were put out of action by just using engines. But anyway i prefer armour everywhere to a point but most where its needed most. Having many areas unarmoured risks to much flooding and damage that eventually broke Bismarck's stern off . Yamato and Musashi were sunk largely due to to much flooding at the bow and stern. I think the Iowa's would be in a similar situation with thin bows , and that could be risky with hits in the area with magazines closer to the side of the ship. Looks like the only perfect Battleships were the ones that were never built.
I would bet my money on a Richelieu than a Bismarck if they fought. And so what was wrong with KGV's TDS? Some sources say that it was bad in general, and others say that it was good, but the Type 91s that sank PoW hit everything but that, with one exception that was repulsed as intended. Very conflicting and confusing.
The design number 4 was superior to the chosen design number 1 and the number 1 design was only chosen because of speed and displacement consideration which made no sense since the speed of the number 4 design was very much sufficient for a flight against any treaty or later battleships anyways, with 3 triple 15 inch turrets forward, less superstructure and one more gun. Unfortunately the french didn't choose the fast nelson copy design which would have been superior to any other European battleship by a fair margin.
Good afternoon, What would have happened if Admiral Lee had met the Yamato or her sister at “lead bottom sound” instead of the Japanese battle cruisers. Do you think that the Washington would have been able to retreat along with South Dakota or would the Japanese defeated both ships and the US forces on land would also been defeated? In my mind,the Japanese would have gained at least 1- 2 yrs of life and maybe even won the war. Bad bad thoughts but what do you think? Forever in His service
It might be possible to send a letter to the French Government or their equivalent of the US National Archives and find out what reports exist in their files. The US National Archives has MANY US Navy documents, as does the US Navy Document Center (I think that is its name) in Suitland, Maryland, that has old Ordnance Pamphlets and the like, copies of those actually issued to the warships that used them, so the French might have similar files that can be accessed. You would need to know French very well and French naval technical terminology, too, to read such things. If they exist, all sorts of interesting things will be found in them, just like with the US files. A potential bonanza of information!
Massachusetts accomplished very quickly what it was asked to do which was to knock out Jean Bart's Main Battery with 16" Shells. Jean Bart's Main guns were a serious threat to the invasion fleet. Once completed Massachusetts moved on to its next priority.
@@jafr99999 If not for her conspicuous good fortune seeing her through, Augusta getting hit by Jean Bart after Massachusetts "defeated" the latter would have definitely put a damper on Massachusetts' combat debut. Ranger was on hand to put a more definitive end to the threat Jean Bart posed.
@@MalfosRanger Like I stated.... Massachusetts was tasked to knock out Jean Bart's Main Battery and move on while other ships mopped up. Mission Accomplished!
(4) The battle with JEAN BART led to a big internal Navy investigation as to why several of its shells had not detonated (more shells that missed JEAN BART were also found undetonated). This was a big deal, as these new base fuzes were the most damage-resistant ever used by the Navy and had to be literally crushed or hit at such a high angle that the forward motion of the firing pin was jammed by the greater sideways motion during ricochet for these fuzes to fail. During many tests they had over 90% success under most impact conditions, including almost all of those when fired at JEAN BART. Not so in the battle. What was wrong?
Microscopic examination of the internal parts of failed and, when found, fully-functional fuze pieces, eventually found the culprit and, relatively quickly thereafter, a complete solution to the problem. As with the US torpedo pistol failures, there was a design issue, but unlike that fiasco, BuORD wanted answers IMMEDIATELY OR SOONER. The new fuze had a complex system that unlocked it after firing so that it was armed for impact. This system was somewhat more complex than previous base fuzes and was a possible cause of some of the failures, but not the major one since such unlocking techniques had been used in prior fuzes with no apparent problems. It also had a new innovation: It was designed as a highly-damage-resistant version of the Mark 19 Base Detonating Fuze (note spelling here) used with the HC shells and the base-fuzed Common shells used with such things as submarine deck guns and in the older cruisers before being replaced by the new 8" Mark 19 AP Projectile when the new heavy cruisers got the super-heavy 8" Mark 21 AP Projectile, both of which also used the Mark 21 base fuze, which of course made a solution even more important. The Mark 19 did not originally use a delay element and did not have the damage-resistant modifications, giving only a 0.003-second average impact delay (same as WWI British pre-Jutland APC shells and US WWI AP shells). As no enemy heavy armor was expected with these smaller older ships or against destroyers, this delay was adequate for internal damage to the smaller ship targets usually being fired at. When the HC shells of the battleships were introduced, the very short fuze delay became a problem and a modified version of the MOD 19 type of fuze was used with a 0.01-second delay added, though not any hardening add-ons used by the Mark 21 design. These fuzes had no problems with duds, other than the regular manufacturing failures always occurring. All of this pointed to the damage-resistant mods for the Mark 21 design.
The damage-resistance modifications in the Mark 21 AP-projectile delay-action base fuze, which had a 0.033-scond average delay (from many tests; I think 0.035 was the original spec, but 0.033 was considered good enough). This meant that as in the phrase "there is many the slip between the cup and the lip" damage to the shell had several ways of duding the shell before the delay element set off the fuze after the shell had been bounced around during its path through the expected thick armor. To minimize this, what the fuze designers wanted was that the initial impact not only hit the firing pin onto the primer, beginning the shell detonation chain, but rigidly lock everything into as compact and fool-proof a package so that the forces from the armor penetration could not interrupt the explosive chain without literally destroying the fuze, once set off by the initial impact inertia shock. As a result, not only was the firing pin free to move when the shell abruptly slowed on impact and the firing pin hit and exploded the small and super-sensitive explosive primer, which immediately sent a jet of blast into the near side of the black-powder-pellet delay element which caused most of the delay (other than that 0.003-second or so even with no delay), the primer blast pushed the entire delay element structure, the more powerful small detonator that was set off after the delay pellet burned through and its fire touched the detonator's sensitive explosive, and the blast of the detonator which slammed into the near end of two tubes, each filled with TNT that detonated and their bazooka-like blast hit the near ends of the two rocket-nozzle-shaped tetryl boosters, one on each side of the upper end of the fuze, which finally shot needle-shaped jets of blast in two redundant explosions to reliably set off the extremely hard-to-detonate Explosive "D" main filler change (these fuzes in effect had two detonators, a tiny one hit by the firing pin that just set off the delay pellet and pushed the structure containing the delay element and detonator into its locked "now firing" position and its TNT-filled tubes on the far side of the detonator that set off the two boosters). US base fuzes were usually very reliable in WWII other than this mysterious problem found in 1942. What was the problem? It turned out that these AP-shell-only base fuzes were made TOO RELIABLE with very narrow tolerances in the interlocking of the damage-resistant structure to its final "am-firing" position during the fuze delay time!! This meant that things in the fuze when they worked properly were tightly locked and, as mentioned, the fuze had to be virtually destroyed to keep it from working. But what if it never got into its final locked position? Then the fuze would fail of, if partly armed, cause only one of the two booster to detonate and this greatly lowered the chance of properly setting off that near-inert explosive filler. And this is exactly what had been happening. Why? Older fuzes did not have such tight tolerances so moving parts inside them were not bothered by slight irregularities in the surface smoothness as they moved under impact (firing pin) and they never had to move anything else but the safety pins and such after firing and before reaching the target, which had been perfected over decades. The primer-blast-moving interlock during the start of the delay element time was brand new and, it turned out, the surfaces that moved under the primer blast to lock the delay pellet and post-delay detonator to the am-firing position COULD NOT SLIDE UNLESS THE SURFACES WERE NEARLY GLASS-SMOOTH!! The problem: Explosive "D" reacts with several metals chemically, which is why all metal surfaces it might contact, in the inside of the shell, the inner face of the base plug and the outside of the base fuze were coated in lacquer to prevent any EXTERNAL PROBLEM. But what about an INTERNAL FUZE PROBLEM? The fuze designers did not make the fuze air tight and neither did that lacquer coat, so fumes from the ammonium picrate explosive filler slowly seeped into the fuze and caused a small amount of surface corrosion, which in older fuzes had not had any effect. BUT IT DID HERE, BIG TIME!!! After about 6 months of exposure to these fumes, the corrosion started jamming them a large part of the time.
The solution: When finally understood, in 1943 Bakelite plastic coatings were put all over the fuze portions touching the base plug and filler and this sealed the fuzes and no more problem. Sherlock Holmes could not have done a better job...
You need more likes
Fascinating, thank you!
Very informative! Thank you for sharing!
Tldr
Wait... BuORD gave a crap about weapons not working before late 1943?
Having that partition in the main turrets, making them essentially two twins paired together instead of one continuous quad battery probably prevented the loading issues that the UK experienced with the King George V class. And it should be noted that at the time of the invasion of North Africa, only one of Jean Bart's turrets was operational.
The French also simply had more experience operating quad turrets thanks to Dunkerque and their own design studies. Oddly, France never built a triple turret for battleship guns and jumped directly from twins to quads.
@@Balmung60 Bretange straight to Normandie
I have A LOT of interesting details concerning the RICHELIEU Class battleships, which only the IOWAs come close to, in the JEAN BART, looking more like race cars than tanks. I will include some of them in several comments here.
(1) The turret and barbette armor of the these two ships, RICHELIEU and JEAN BART, was nearly as thick as SOUTH DAKOTA and IOWA Classes, which, other than YAMATO, was about the thickest armor ever used in this type of warship. Also, the French KC-type side armor -- and I assume the homogeneous, ductile type used as its basis -- was basically a much-improved form of the original Krupp Cemented armor developed in 1894 in that it had about the same face depth (35% of the entire plate thickness, I think a constant for all thickness plates of this type, though I cannot be sure) and all of the metallurgical and heat treatment improvements (in hardening and in post-hardening tempering for added toughness/crack resistance) introduced since then. The US Crucible Steel Company made a set of AP rounds for RICHELIEU when it was overhauled in the US after escaping the Germans at the start of WWII, which were designed as enlarged, 380mm-sized AP shells -- shaped, balanced, and weighing the same as the original French AP shells -- made to the same superior standard as the US 14" Mark 16 MOD 8 AP rounds just introduced at that time for the older US battleships and which was the best naval AP projectile ever made up to that time -- the later 14" Mark 16 MOD 9 and MOD 10 AP shells and 16" Mark 9 MOD 6 AP shells (introduced in 1944) also had to meet the this design standard since the US Navy kept upping its test specs whenever a better shell was developed (the armor test specs had reach REVISION "J" by the end of WWII and they were not, I think, past REV "F" or so at the start of WWII -- nobody else did this, to my knowledge, except to reduce them when raw materials became scarce, as with Germany). After WWII the French did a test using one of their RICHELIEU Class armor belt plates at a 30-degree angle from right-angles (= 0 degrees), the typical armor test spec angle for most plates during WWII by all nations, with one of the US Crucible projectiles. They fired several shots, both penetrating and not to find what the US Navy called its "Naval Ballistic Limit" (NBL), the minimum striking velocity (with tolerances of course) that one could expect such a plate to just barely allow the shell to get through with minimum exit/remaining velocity afterwards (this minimum would be about zero for a hit at around right-angles, but as the angle increased and more and more of the resistance was due to glancing forces, especially above 45 degrees angles, the shell will never be stopped unless broken into pieces by the impact and will either ricochet off or, at a moderate exit velocity that got higher and higher as the angle of impact increased, punch through the plate). The calculated NBL test result I got using my FACEHARD Armor Penetration Computer Program and inputting the shell data for the French shell (size and weight) but otherwise the using the US 14" Mark 16 MOD 8 shell type selection and a generic, fully-optimum KC armor selection (35% face with every improvement in my program applied), my estimate of the French 13" (if I recalled correctly) KC belt plate, gave EXACTLY (to four digits!!!!!) the test result that the French got using this same test standard. I thought my program was good, but sometimes it is better than good, it seems. The reason I chose this armor type is that I knew that the French had used the classic KC armor formula in WWI-era battleships; were, in their Schneider et Cie. steel-maker, second to none in metallurgical skill (they introduced steel armor in the first place and then nickel-steel armor, making all previous plates obsolete both times); and, having analyzed the latest Krupp plates from those surrendered German battleships after WWI just like the US and Britain had, now had any improvements made to German armor since 1894 to add to their own considerable expertise. I thought that if anybody could make armor steels with "the kitchen sink" of improvements thrown into them, it would be the French and I seem to have been correct. US WWII armor was also set at this level, though it had in the WWII "thick Chill" Class "A" face-hardened plate an armor with a 55% face thickness to try to damage those damage-resistant new-type US Navy AP shells, which was somewhat a problem against the larger battleship AP shells due to scaling effects from the hard, brittle face, but gave superior results in more moderate cruiser thicknesses against scaled-down guns firing at these classes of warships, which were, after all, by far the majority of US armored warships in WWII.
(3) The French turret was noted in this video for three features: If you jammed or knocked out one turret, you lost half of your weapons immediately; internally the turrets were divided by a rather thick (that is, against blast and fragments) centerline bulkhead dividing each quadruple turret essentially into two mini-turrets side-by-side on one rotating barbette structure; and the fact that the aft 80 degrees or so could only be covered by the three triple 152mm gun turrets back there (the two amidships 152mm gun turrets were never fitted and the space used for more 100mm AA gun mounts (lots of US 20mm and 40mm mounts in RICHELIEU after its US overhaul), just like the Japanese did the same to YAMATO later in WWII to get more 127mm AA guns). The next two never-built ships in this four-ship design effort were to move the super-firing forward 380mm turret to the rear of the ship level with the front turret for all-round firing, causing an 80-degree arc at each end of the ship reachable by only one turret, but eliminating the aft arc with no big guns whatsoever.
When firing against MASSACHUSETTS, JEAN BART never hit it, though it did some damage to other US targets, I think. It only had one gun turret that was finished and ready to fire (under local control I think) and it was tied up to its dock. One of the US 16" Mark 8 AP shells bounced off of its turret roof and ended up, unexploded in the city behind the dock -- the extremely high impact angle that caused the shell to skip off the thick turret roof also caused the base to be flattened when it slammed down on to the armor as the nose went back upward and this squeezed and crushed the base fuze, though the fuze might have been non-functional anyway due to a problem discovered during this battle (see (4), below). Some other hull hits, all on the armored deck at very high obliquity angles (through the upper side hull above the side belt armor) penetrated all of the deck armor and went into the lower hull. They punched holes in the hull (not sure if those exploded) and flooding through those holes into the ship, which did not have all of its watertight doors and hatches sealed, caused the ship to sink into the mud below it, though the weather deck remained above water and the sealed turret and its magazines kept right on shooting the four big guns. One shell blew up in a secondary gun magazine, but it was empty so only rather minor damage occurred to the ship. One shell hit the upper hull, then the thick deck armor even with the upper edge of the belt, then the 40mm inner fragmentation deck, which at its sides was bent down at about 45 degrees ("turtleback") to touch the lower edge of the belt (similar to, but much thinner than and less sloped than BISMARCK's similar sloped inner side hull protection) and then went through several internal bulkheads to end up stopped on the 4th deck (using the weather deck as the 1st deck, as in US terminology), with its filler on fire and smoke pouring out of the hole where the base fuze had been, indicating that the base fuze had not functioned properly and its explosive train had only partially worked to start a fire inside the Explosive "D", not a detonation, as designed. This was one of the main clues that something was wrong with the Mark 21 base fuzes that was not a problem with any other base fuzes used previously or with then-current non-AP shells (such as the then-new US Navy High Capacity (HC) large filler "HE" shells for shore bombardment and, if the situation warranted it, against lightly-armored enemy warships, which could use both nose and base fuzes, the latter always there and the nose fuzes removable for a solid steel nose plug or for exchange among several nose fuze type). The penetrating deck impacts, even when the angle of fall was rather shallow, indicated that deck armor even of appreciable thickness (including the on the shooting MASSACHUSETTS and on the IOWAs) was inadequate to stop the new super-heavy US 16" AP shells, capped or not. (MONTANA had thicker armor everywhere to try to handle these new shells.)
Also during this battle between battleships, a shell from the MASSACHUSETTS did the exact low-probability hit that was mentioned in this video: The 16" shell hit the upper edge of the barbette at the crease along its side edge where it was slightly extended beyond the covering armor of the turret (US turrets did not do that, extending the turret armor to overlap the barbette upper edge forming an overhang at the turret lower front corners). The turret side armor was hit at its lower edge at an extremely high angle sideways and downward and was gouged slightly as the shell ricocheted off the turret and again ended up intact, more-or-less, in the city, but the upper edge of the face-hardened barbette acted differently. The face was only 35% deep so some of the soft back was also exposed by this narrow turret "under-hang" and the shell hit this back material, gouged it down and sideways, cracking the upper edge face of the armor outward in a cracked bulge and bulging up the soft armor back so that it locked the lower edge of the turret in place like a hardened piece of gum jammed into a crack at a rotating wheel bearing. This jammed the turret and the turret crew had to go out and find a cutting torch and then set up and slowly cut away the bent barbette armor to free the turret. By then the battle was over and the French and Germans, if any, had lost. As with the HOOD, the best laid plans "oft gang aglet", but, it seems, not so with the worst things that can happen...
I'll never forgive France for not preserving at least one of these magnificent vessels in museum
Pretty bold coming from someone whose country probably sunk the Surcouff and tried to sink the Richelieu and the Jean Bart (assuming you are British or American)
@@parodyclip36 Do we really want to go down the road of what country sank the most French ships?
@@ArtietheArchon I mean, in the case of the Richelieu and the Jean Bart it certainly wasn't the Germans or the Japanese
I love the Richelieu class. They were the most beautiful class of battleship to ever be built in my opinion.
I'll go with Vittorio Venetto for sexiest looking. Both were good that way.
@Chris George i like what you say but hood wasnt a battleship
@Chris George yes because he is a american and they always called her a fast battleship. But the british called her a battlecruiser
I'd have to go with the Roma. Clean with a gorgeous profile. Richelieu looks like its missing a small aircraft deck aft, it a gorgeous stern but its missing something imo. Honestly I'd prefer King Geroge V's over the Dunkurques, aesthetic wise.
@@MC-bb8hx use too be.
(2) The US Crucible Steel Company 380mm Mark 1 MOD 0 AP Projectiles for RICHELIEU Class battleships were made in the few months after the RICHELIEU started it overhaul (some other shells for smaller French guns were also made, but not AP). I assume that enough shells were made to fill that ship's magazines with some extra shells for replenishment. I do not know if JEAN BART ever carried any of these shell when completed after WWII. Externally, these shells looked virtually identical to the extremely long and streamlined (including a tapered, pinched-in base, an extreme form of the "boat-tailed" base shape, to get the minimum possible drag and maximum possible range for a given muzzle velocity). This retention of the ballistic qualities allowed the use of the existing setting in the ship's fire-control calculators (otherwise an extensive set of US test firings would have had to be done and new range tables created, for just that one shell for that one ship). Internally and in the nose and AP cap hidden by the long, sheet-metal, pointed windscreen, as much as possible of the US 14" Mark 16 MOD 8 AP shell design was retained. The shell AP cap was very much the 14" shell's design with changes only for where the windscreen screwed on. The AP cap was soldered and crimped to the nose just like a US Navy AP shell. The projectile nose was a compromise, being longer and more pointed than the 14" shell, but rounded with no point at the tip, as with the oval-nosed US 14" shell. The body shape and internal cavity shape and size was formed like the French shell, more-or-less, for weight and balance purposes, including a pinched-in, smaller base plug to conform to the narrowed, streamlined base shape mentioned above. The shell had a cavity almost twice as large as the 1.5% explosive-filler-weight used in US Navy post-1930 AP shells, more in line with British WWII APC shells and looked like a long, narrow tear drop with the blunt end at the bottom where the base plug screwed in. The base plug, other than its narrower size, was just like that used with the 14" projectile and the base fuze was the standard US Navy Mark 21 used with all US Navy AP shells since about 1940/41 -- giving a 0.033-second fuze delay after impact shock on the nose went down the length of the shell and caused the firing pin to jump forward and fire the first stage of its several-step process for setting off the main filler, which was US Army/Navy Explosive "D" (ammonium picrate), the most insensitive-to-impact, though slightly low-powered compared to the TNT standard, filler used during WWII, not the French near duplicate of British "Shellite". That French filler was 80% "Mélinite" (their name for British "Lyddite" or picric acid or trinitrophenol WWI excessively-sensitive filler) and 20% a much less sensitive, less powerful explosive similar to, though not identical to, the British use of the cousin of Lyddite, dinitrophenol, in their Shellite. The US was NEVER going to allow anybody to make anything involving picric acid in its explosive manufacturing plants! As mentioned in (1), these shells seem to be just as damage resistant as the 14" AP shells they were based on. I am not sure how strong the French AP shells were, but I also assumed that they were pretty good, though their thin, contoured AP caps had essentially no sharp corner at the edge of the face and, like the British WWII Hadfield AP cap design, did not gain any benefit other than its added shell weight when hitting homogeneous, ductile (deck and roof) armor at a high angle, unlike the US AP cap, both US and on these US-made 380mm French gun shells, which, when applicable, gained a sudden drop of 12% in the needed penetration velocity as the cap edge cut a notch into the armor's face on impact and allowed the cap to begin to fold up the plate surface in front of the shell, impeding ricochet and thinning the plate to make penetration easier in front of the shell.
Hello, I am the last carpenter (quarter master) of the battleship Richelieu, until her end in November 1967.
This is the best looking battleship class.
one of the unforseen drawbacks of the "ebonite mousse" (aka rubber) was that if the ship took damage and the rubber was doused in fuel oil and then set on fire it was almost impossible to extinguish completely, as happened to richelieu in dakar.
(5) French projectiles were odd in a couple of ways:
(a) The 380mm APC shells for RICHELIEU and JEAN BART had a rather problematic modification not made to previous shells that was not actually used in practice but caused some major problems initially. This was the two deep holes drilled into the base plugs to insert POISON GAS CAPSULS which would of course open up when the shell exploded and make the smoke of the shell even more toxic than it usually was (which was pretty bad already, considering the chemicals used in these HE fillers). This was supposed to not affect the shells in any other way, but it turned out that they had made a fatal design error when implementing the drilling of the holes: THEY WERE TOO DEEP. When the gun was fired, the propellant blast in a large number of cases would go into these holes when not blocked by the reinforced poison capsules (which had been made to withstand the blast of firing the gun) and blow open their far end due to not enough steel thickness there, blasting into the filler and blowing up the shell while still in the barrel. This happened to RICHELIEU and cause it to lose a gun and to not be able to fire its guns with their existing ammunition. One reason for the new US Crucible AP shells for those ships. JEAN BART did not suffer from this problem and I think it was that they found out about it (not sure how) and, if i remember correctly, they welded thick steel buttons onto the inner faces of each shell's base plug over the two holes to make sure it would not happen. No more premature explosion problems, to my knowledge, ever happened with either ship. Inadequate testing again raises its ugly head. Seems like a vinyl record skipping again and again, doesn't it?
(b) The long, pointed windscreen of the original French 380mm APC shells (I do not think this was used with the 330mm SAPC shells) in the later versions had a unique method of identifying hits and misses from each ship if more than one was firing on the same target (as it turned out this never became a real problem for French warships, but they were thinking ahead, obviously). Some navies ignored the problem, including, for some unknown reason since they had a real problem here, the British Navy, which was found to be a significant problem during the fight with the ADM GRAF SPEE by those British cruisers, who several times mixed up whose shells were whose and messed up their aiming until they sorted it out. The US Navy used small dye bags of different colors of powdered dye, each ship getting its own color during an assignment, in the windscreens of its battleship and, perhaps some cruiser, AP shells, with triangular slots cut into the tip of the windscreen and circular holes made into the bottom edge just above the screw-on threads, in both cases with sealing plates/plugs covering the holes that could resists the forces of blast and air flow as they existed the gun barrel and flew to the target, with the sudden slam of the shell into the water, making a huge splash with the bright dye coloring the splash as it tore out the covered holes and jetted into the splash to allow everybody to see which ship made that impact. One problem with this was that it only worked during the day (the fuze delay caused the shell to explode underwater well away from the splash, even if the blast had been visible) and during good visibility (what happened during two of the WWII battles at Narvik in Norway show that you could not even see an entire ship moving next to you, much less a shell splash at a distance in poor weather). Also, rather counter-productively, a direct hit would not be visible since it did not make a splash unless the target had a major explosion (and you still would not know who caused it!). The Japanese, in their Type 91 AP shells, did not need holes in their windscreens since on water impact the windscreen was designed to break off the shell nose, taking the Cap Head with it, to increase the stability of the shell underwater and give it a short-range torpedo effect. Otherwise, it worked just like the US dye bag system.
Not so the French. THEIR shells would have a visible color-dye-bag function during day or night and it the shell hit the target or the ocean nearby; only poor visibility would defeat it. To do this they needed something that would ALWAYS make something eye-catching when the shells impacts on or near their targets, even at night. They also used a dye-bag in the windscreen, but a somewhat larger one and one held by a support structure inside the windscreen just below the tip of the windscreen point. At the tip was a threaded socket into which the impact nose fuze of an HE shell was screwed in, including the booster usually there to set off the main filler charge of the projectile, but here to provide the main explosion all by itself. On impact, the nose fuze would instantly detonate, causing a bright colored flash and smoke cloud, splash or no splash, hit or miss, as long as the target point was visible. To support this rather heavy weight, the bottom of the windscreen was screwed into a rigid platform braced on and screwed into the AP cap. This braced platform would also act like a flat nose of the shell when the windscreen blew apart and given the French shells an underwater trajectory just like the Japanese Type 88 and later Type 91 AP shells when these Japanese shells lost their Cap Heads due to water impact. However, there is no indication that an extra-long delay in the face fuze of French shells existed (or equivalent modification) to allow a long underwater run. I would like to know more about French 1930s naval shell fuzes. Note that after RICHELIEU escaped, the British discovered this French dye-bag system, which the French and, also, the British called a "K" shell and the British added it to several of its APC shells later in WWII (some versions of 14" and 15" I know of, but not sure about any other British shells).
As much as the internet brings all sorts of garbage, it also enables things like scrolling the TH-cam comments to see detailed and extremely informative comments from one of the world’s experts in this subject. Thank you so much for posting this, do you have any plans to ever publish TH-cam videos of your own? I’m sure you have a lot of fascinating information to share on this platform
@@NickPoeschek No. I am not a good video maker and am getting too old to boot. I have a section of my own at the web site NAVWEAPS.COM with a number of articles (some rather dated), but my BASIC computer programs related to armor penetration are all up-to-date. BASIC is much like English in its syntax and is usually rather easy to understand when a few of the less obvious instructions are understood, so following its internal logic, especially with my many notes in the source code, while intricate in some places, is logical and you can see my thinking on any given subject I have created a program for. I still have some areas of importance that I do not have enough data yet, if I ever will, such as the details on the effects of nose shape for rounded or pointed AP projectiles from hemispheres (cannon balls) to long points like on the US Army 0.5" M2 AP bullet cores, which depend strongly on the plate thickness, with half-caliber being a rough balance point in these effects, with thin plating having worse effects with the blunter projectiles and thicker plate having worse effects on longer-point projectiles (depends on how much the steel can dent before being torn open -- thinner plates are much better at this -- and whether a sharp nose will dip into the plate bending it upward into a curved-back spur like a wood plane makes in front of the shell that impedes ricochet -- thick plates are better at this -- or if the nose cuts the plate like a ship's sharp prow, folding it sideways so that the nose is free to tilt upward and glance off). My HCWCLC program for mid-hardness homogeneous, ductile armor uses a near-middle nose shape for the US Army 76mm M79 AP Shot projectile (no windscreen or AP cap), with optional windscreen and AP cap logic for some US Army and Navy AP projectiles included (not any others at this time, unfortunately). My FACEHARD program for almost every kind of face-hardened naval armor and most AP projectile types individually calibrated (50 years of work!) is much more detailed in its results (you can even select any projectile/armor combination and then use another projectile's size and various weight values to see how changing its metallurgical and design criteria would have affected its effectiveness as an anti-armor weapon).
Congrats on reaching the 1000 subscriber milestone.
Makes me wish we could have seen the Alsace built. French battleship designs in general stand out to me
I love that image of the Richilieu, coming into NYC with one of her Gun Barrels missing. Handsome vessel.
EDIT - USS Massachusetts now there was a vessel.
The G3/N3 designs were started prior to the Naval treaties . So the all forward or midships main battery was a weight saving attempt prior to the treaty.
I wished they'd did save Jean Bart. She would've made a good museum at Brest.
But the real tragedy is the ending of HMS Warspite a decorated WW1 and WW2 Big Beauty that got cucked by HMS Belfast.
Richelieu and/or Jean Bart because honestly both deserved to be museum ships
It would have been cool to have Jean Bart. We would have Jean Bart and Massachusetts. Like Mikasa and Aurora.
At least Warspite initially saved herself from going to the breakers, Drachinifel really described the whole event very well.
Warspite was in really bad shape after the war... they never repaired the missile hit properly, instead just pouring concrete to seal the hole. Queen Elizabeth or Valiant would have made a good substitution. While worn out, they were still structurally sound.
@@B52Stratofortress1 But neither of those ships shrugged off fire from THE ENTIRE HIGH SEAS FLEET.
Post-War it would have been interesting if the two 'Richelieu Class' ships had be refitted with Terrier AA missile battery stern-side replacing the 6-inch guns, as in the stern battery of Boston/Canberra and the forward battery of the USS Long Beach. Good NATO convoy escort for dealing with both Soviet surface raiders and air force bombers. Or converting the stern for helicopter operations for commandos or anti-submarine work would have been another good alternative. Image these two ships with a 1980s Iowa-class makeover, of all the WW2 battleships I think the Richelieus with their forward mounted main battery were the best suited for post-war upgrading with either missiles, helicopters, or both.
What about being into a carrier hybrid like the proposed refit for the Iowas, as Richellieu would have been perfect for a refit more than the Iowas
@@lt.x-02s-wyvern25 they kinda did that study with Jean Bart, albeit into full carrier. The study shown it was much more expensive than it worth
Richelieu was one of the best looking warships ever built
Actually i like most of these ww2 designs, be it Littorio, Yamato, Bismarck or Iowa. They all were beautiful and powerful ships. If i had to choose i would throw my hands into the air and give up. ❤😂
Bismarck looks good too
@@Khaled-tx5xj Bismarck looks boring IMO
@@MrRandomcommentguy if I could say Bismarck looks like its superstructure is moved a bit forward if you see it in angle or maybe its trick of the eye . I think it made it look unique . But I agree Richelieu was sexy
from what I read, the main battery had a very slow fire rate and the shell dispersing is concerning...is that true?
She had shell dispersing issues ,similar to the Italian Littorio's.
yea but the issue was solved with a delay of some milliseconds, and the rate of fire was rather high compared to other battleships.
@@clems3432 how fast?
@@熊掌波清波 around 30sec
I mean, for all those who play WoWs, you know the strength of jean bart having all guns up front....
All guns front is only a good idea if you have the speed advantage... but that goes to the Iowas. If you want to run away (what ever causes this decision) and the enemy can close in, you get reared. And i still think, they should have ripped out turret #3 on the Iowas and dropped Polaris nuclear missiles in the hole. Plus they would have had a replacement for Iowas turret #2 which became inoperable after an incident.
To be honest, I don't see the rear turret as an asset. One of the reason HMS Hood was destroyed was because she could only chase Bismarck with half her firepower, so she was compelled to make a turn and unmask her rear turrets which exposed the ship. The all-forward turret arrangement with generous firing arcs offered freedom of movement plus you get the perks of being lighter and having thicker armor. And having a light cruiser's worth of firepower strapped to the rear is nothing to sneeze at either.
My understanding is that concentrating the engines and power train in the rear of the ship, generally led to slower ships. You had less space for your power plants. HMS Nelson and Rodney were quite slow for that reason. However, once Bismark was stuck making slow circles in the water. Rodney got into position to the shoot the living daylights of Bismark. One advantage of having a rear turret is that you could keep firing while making lots of turns. It's like a submarine having aft torpedo tubes.
@@barryguerrero7652 Bismarck never landed a single hit in her last battle, so I still don't see the point of being able to fire your gun if you can't achieve results. To achieve accuracy with the main battery, you need to use all of your guns to get the range on target. Just having 2 or 4 guns leaves you at a tremendous disadvantage.
Plays world of warships once
one of the disadvantage of a head-on attack is the narrow base of the range finder versus using the long base of the forward and rear range finders so your accuracy will suffer.
@@stevepodleski This can easily be offset by having the ship adopt a parallel course with the fleeing ship, so the turrets still turn 10-15 degrees, but the enemy ship does not gain any distance from a parallel course or get to use their forward turrets without deciding to stand and fight.
Outstanding!
Beautiful ships. Also really nice in WoWs. :)
C'est malheureux de n'avoir pas gardé le Richelieu en bateau musée,les américains sont formidables d'avoir gardé leurs bateaux, nous n'avons aucun souvenir en France,c'est triste.
Au sortir de la guerre on était ruinés alors que les Américains profitaient de leur outil industriel tout neuf et des remboursements du lend/lease et du plan Marshall.
Mais c'est vrai que c'est triste.
These were really good battleships I mean the only battleship on the allied side that had a thicker belt was the King George V and let's just say you put a Richelieu in place of the Bismarck during its Chase and destruction you have a ship with a thicker belt 13 in versus 12.6 and most importantly you have 17 inch thick gun turrets versus the almost scandalously thin 14-in turret faces of the bismarcks which is a case of no wonder why Rodney and King George v had little or no problem silencing the bismarck's main battery
I know a lot of people give the French crap when it comes to their military but there are a couple of weapon systems which if the French would have had a little bit more time to implement or perfect would have kept the Germans out and I believe if all four of the planned ships in this class had been completed by the outbreak of world war II along with one of the newer French fighter aircraft and last but not least the MAS-44 some automatic battle rifle Germany wouldn't have gotten its foot in the door during the Battle of France
I will respectfully suggest a future entry. What was the best capital ship built within the Washington Treaty limitations, or at least plausibly pretending to adhere to them?
Probably SoDak, then followed by Richelieu, and then King George V.
@@adamtruong1759 plausible I would say.
@@adamtruong1759 Only KGV was a true treaty Battleship. The others cheated with bigger guns. 14" guns were the treaty regs. Richelieu was well over 35,000 tons anyway. SoDak class also had their issues. Bad vibration problems and electrical failures were the norm at least in their early years. They had very short hulls and were cramped to say the least. KGV's had the best protection concerning the vitals and the best quality armour. However the quad turrets were problematic but not the gun or shell itself. The shell was in fact a tremendous boon with a massive bursting charge bigger than any other 14" or 15" shell. All these treaty ships had their advantages and disadvntages. It's personal to each which order you think are the best.
@@fyorbane I mean, I like all of them a lot.
If the Dunkerques were cruiser-killers, and the Scharnhorsts were the response, does that make the Richelieus Scharnhorst-killers?
Scharnhorst was a battleship she was meant to have 15 inch guns but they decided to launch her before they were ready so just used 11 inch guns what they already had then refit with 15's later.
@@jackwardley3626 Fair point, I consider them battleships as well, mainly due to their protection.
wonder if it is possible to produce a video the process of loading the main Mark 7 16 inch guns on the New Jersey - from where the powder bags were stored to the loading one of the 16 inch gun barrel? Also, how well or poorly would the New Jersey stand up in a traditional naval engagement with a German Deutschland class pocket battleship?
This should answer the first half: facebook.com/BattleshipNJ/videos/676822553152521/
And we can do more on german battleships, stay tuned!
I love the smoke stack. Jean bart the beutiful pirate is my second favorite ship in warships.
After my iowas.
Missouri is my friend.
But i rate it at same.
But i love that tied smokestack. Imagine if iowa class had it.
After the 1943 refit, the Richelieu was very close to Bismarck both in size and weight.
the Richelieus had eight 15 inch baguette launchers
Richelieu, The "Modèle Sport" of Battleships
Just finished watching "Churchill's Darkest Decision" about the French fleet at Oran. Tragic, but an interesting BBC film on TH-cam.
Richelieu is pronounced "Rih-shell-yeuh" not "Rai-Cheloo" nor "Roy-Cheloo". I have heard far too many people including our dear Ryan butchering the name, I get the spelling seems odd but its not that hard, on behalf of France I ask very nicely to say it right. Thank you to Ryan Szmanski and the Battleship New Jersey museum for making a video on the pride of the Marine National.
Behind of a ship is called fantail or stern?
both refer to the back of the ship, the stern is a broader term, the fantail is more of a large area at the back of the ship, in our case, the flight deck and aft of turret iii
The pre-dreadnought French battleships were ............bizarre. They had their hulls sloped opposite to conventional hulls, which meant that the crew could only be berthed above the deck.........in multi tiered decks...........which gave them the appearance of 'floating hotels'.
The Richelieu served in the Indian Ocean for the last year and more of World War II and towards the very end; in the weeks after the Japanese surrender she reached Singapore and was entering the Pacific Ocean which was impressive. I wish France saved these ships
I dont agree that reducing armoured area is a good idea.
When the Jean Bart went against the USS Massachusetts she suffered quite badly in the unarmoured areas and that would have meant months out of action and did i suppose.
The Yamato's were the same , it was found that if you put the hits all into the bow or stern end then the poorly armoured areas would let in flooding and pull the ship down .
Their deck armour was good but the amount of port holes showed the lack of armour in many places.
Even though i love the Nelson's , i am not a fan of the all main guns in one end of the ship. But i have to admit they and the Richelieu's did look good.
In terms of guns , if memory serves right ? the Italian ships had better ranged and heavier 15 inch shells and 9 instead of 8 . But the Richelieu was better armoured.
But again i think both types were poor on torpedo protection as was proved at Taranto when Carrier Swordfish scored hits with 18 inch torpedo's .
In my opinion neither French nor Italian designs were as good as the Bismarck . Bismarck took an enormous pounding and many torpedo's to sink . I doubt very much the others would have taken anywhere near that pounding even if they were as heavy as Bismarck. And Richelieu was only slightly shorter than Bismarck though 10 feet smaller in beam.
Reducing armored area is good because it means you need less weight to protect vital ship functions (or can protect those same functions better). An armored citadel is meant to protect the engines, magazines, and enough buoyancy to stay afloat even if everything else is flooded. Protecting more space is simply wasting steel and adding undesirable weight. The armoring of non-vital spaces is a significant portion of why Bismarck displaced so much more than Richelieu and was no more capable for that weight.
Portholes would only be placed above the armored belt and would not compromise armor protection.
Bismarck's own protection was actually astoundingly poor despite her considerable bulk and it's just rather difficult to motivate 50,000 tons of steel to sink if you don't blow the magazines open and are too close to punch holes below the waterline. By any measurable metric, Bismarck had a weaker deck than any final generation battleship except Littorio, the weakest belt of any of them period, and a torpedo defense system that was only better than King George V's.
Littorios were Better armoured than Richelieu, and theyr guns could penetrate Richelieu armor far away than the later could penetrate littorios armor.
But Richelieu could have showed a smaller profile with her all front guns. Both ships were pretty even imho.
@@Balmung60 , The fact still remains that Bismarck was hit by hundreds of shells and around 8 Torpedo's , Bismarck's armour wasn't the best but i think the only real reason Bismarck was sunk in that action was the 3 Propellers instead of 4.
That made it very hard to steer when the rudders were put out of action by just using engines.
But anyway i prefer armour everywhere to a point but most where its needed most.
Having many areas unarmoured risks to much flooding and damage that eventually broke Bismarck's stern off .
Yamato and Musashi were sunk largely due to to much flooding at the bow and stern.
I think the Iowa's would be in a similar situation with thin bows , and that could be risky with hits in the area with magazines closer to the side of the ship.
Looks like the only perfect Battleships were the ones that were never built.
I would bet my money on a Richelieu than a Bismarck if they fought. And so what was wrong with KGV's TDS? Some sources say that it was bad in general, and others say that it was good, but the Type 91s that sank PoW hit everything but that, with one exception that was repulsed as intended. Very conflicting and confusing.
The design number 4 was superior to the chosen design number 1 and the number 1 design was only chosen because of speed and displacement consideration which made no sense since the speed of the number 4 design was very much sufficient for a flight against any treaty or later battleships anyways, with 3 triple 15 inch turrets forward, less superstructure and one more gun. Unfortunately the french didn't choose the fast nelson copy design which would have been superior to any other European battleship by a fair margin.
DUMP STAT!. Ryan's a role player!
Sounds like some French guy is shooting a 50mm mortar in the background.
France was going to build a third that would've had one main gun turret forward and one aft. That shil was not laid down.
Good afternoon,
What would have happened if Admiral Lee had met the Yamato or her sister at “lead bottom sound” instead of the Japanese battle cruisers. Do you think that the Washington would have been able to retreat along with South Dakota or would the Japanese defeated both ships and the US forces on land would also been defeated? In my mind,the Japanese would have gained at least 1- 2 yrs of life and maybe even won the war. Bad bad thoughts but what do you think?
Forever in His service
_Hon! Hon! Hon!_ Class Battleship
👍
I've read that Richelieu's quad mount turrets had lots of problems, and that they didn't work that great in practice. Any of that true?
It might be possible to send a letter to the French Government or their equivalent of the US National Archives and find out what reports exist in their files. The US National Archives has MANY US Navy documents, as does the US Navy Document Center (I think that is its name) in Suitland, Maryland, that has old Ordnance Pamphlets and the like, copies of those actually issued to the warships that used them, so the French might have similar files that can be accessed. You would need to know French very well and French naval technical terminology, too, to read such things. If they exist, all sorts of interesting things will be found in them, just like with the US files. A potential bonanza of information!
USS Ranger did much more damage to Jean Bart in Casablanca than Massachusetts ever did.
Massachusetts accomplished very quickly what it was asked to do which was to knock out Jean Bart's Main Battery with 16" Shells. Jean Bart's Main guns were a serious threat to the invasion fleet. Once completed Massachusetts moved on to its next priority.
@@jafr99999 If not for her conspicuous good fortune seeing her through, Augusta getting hit by Jean Bart after Massachusetts "defeated" the latter would have definitely put a damper on Massachusetts' combat debut. Ranger was on hand to put a more definitive end to the threat Jean Bart posed.
@@MalfosRanger Like I stated.... Massachusetts was tasked to knock out Jean Bart's Main Battery and move on while other ships mopped up. Mission Accomplished!
dissagree, kept hearign that they had issues with the quad main guns, hence why we never see that outside of the two frenchies and the KGV class ships
"our dump stat" lol.
Both had one of the best electrical systems of any battleship. Only Iowas were better.
what the hell is that banging???
But not the last ship build
Why
Why didnt we keep jean bart.
Shes so beautiful
We had her. We retrofited her. Why didnt we park her next to big mamie.
Can’t cross its T
Forget the guns, what about the mess and food? The French may not outright others. But they eat better....🍱🥣🍳😋
Fierce face
Lol your French pronunciation is way off. I heard it’s pronounced like rishilly-air
Rish-err-loo
@@mwnciboo Reesh-err-loo.
That banging in the in the background so ANNOYING !!!
Don't know what the banging/slapping sound was, but it makes the vid almost unwatchable.
Battle. Sorry. ...
Arms control sucks
Embarquer sur le. RICHELIEU. EN. 1965. AU SERVICE. DE. L AMIRAL CABANIER. TRES BON SOUVENIR. POUR. MOI.
.