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French Battleships of World War One
When war broke out in August 1914 France had only two dreadnoughts in service, with a second pair running trials. The main body of the elite Armée Navale was made up of the eleven battleships of the Patrie and Danton classes, both of which were intermediate designs with two main gun calibers. Older ships included survivors of the notorious Flotte d'echantillons ('fleet of samples') of the 1890 program and their successors designed during the 1890s. This book traces the development of French battleships from 1890 to 1922, and also covers the extensive modifications made to the survivors during the interwar period. It is liberally illustrated throughout with line drawings and labelled schematics, plus photographs from the extensive Caresse collection, many of which are previously unpublished. This is the most comprehensive account of these ships published in English or French, and is destined be the standard reference for many years to come.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published June 15, 2017
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About the author
John Jordan
176 books5 followersJohn Jordan is a former teacher of modern languages. He is the author of two major books on the Soviet Navy, and has coauthored a series of books on the French Navy.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 26, 2018
This is the kind of solid reference book that is the heart of my naval history reference shelf. It covers a subject thoroughly, exhaustively, and with a wealth of detail. French battleship design was somewhat idiosyncratic, so it's nice to have a large number of pictures of those ships, all in one place.
When battleship fever hit the world, the French had the most difficult design decisions of all the major powers. France needed to be able to operate in three different realms: the Mediterranean, the Baltic-North Sea complex, and the North Atlantic (and beyond to the rest of the world, like most Imperial powers). They chose not to build everything for the North Atlantic, and that imposed endless compromises. A consistent theme in their pre-dreadnoughts was cramming a lot of guns onto a ship with smaller displacement than their rivals were using. (Their docks tended to be smaller than needed to keep up, which was part of the problem; but they also worried a lot about the shallow Baltic, since Germany was their chief target.) As the authors point out, that makes the French ships appear to "bristle with guns" as compared to the British.
The French also had a greater number of bureaucracies that had input into ship design and ship approval, which meant they made their decisions more slowly, less decisively, and less coherently than other countries. The result, systematically, was that they were always behind the trends, and the consistent outcome of all the classes of ship described in the book is that they were obsolescent the day they were finally commissioned. World War I also led to the cancellation of a whole generation of battleships, because the Army controlled the supply of guns, and also the manpower, and the ships couldn't be completed and couldn't be worked on or manned.
The good news, I guess, though the authors avoid being too critical or making this point: battleships were pretty much a complete waste of money, so the French wasted less than Britain or Germany or the US.
One reason that the French battleships don't get written about very much is that they saw very little action, and the only capital-ship-to-capital-ship action was when the British bombarded the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir, and the Americans bombarded Jean Bart in WWII. (In WWI, the French fleet concentrated in the Mediterranean, and neither the Austrians nor the Turks came out to fight.) The French fired back in both cases, and basically didn't hit anything. Instead they got hit, and mauled in both instances. It doesn't make for exciting history. Likewise with their participation in the disastrous WWI attempt to force the Dardanelles, which cost them ships for no benefit. Added to that are two battleships blowing up spontaneously, two being torpedoed and sunk, and one hitting an unmarked underwater rock and sinking outside a major home port.
Quibbles: There were some proofing problems that seem confined to the first half of the book. Random r's appeared in a few words, there was a double-printed phrase, things like that.
Also, it is a little odd that when a battle in the war histories is described and a post-WWI battleship is mentioned, the ultimate fate of that ship isn't given, while the subjects of this book are. For example, we get the grounding of Dunkerque and Provence at Mers el-Kabir, and the refloating of Provence is discussed, but Dunkerque is ignored. Then at the Toulon scuttling of the Vichy fleet, there's Dunkerque on the map in drydock, but only the scuttling of Provence is discussed, and we don't get a mention of the other 76 ships that were scuttled, because they weren't battleships from the previous World War.
When battleship fever hit the world, the French had the most difficult design decisions of all the major powers. France needed to be able to operate in three different realms: the Mediterranean, the Baltic-North Sea complex, and the North Atlantic (and beyond to the rest of the world, like most Imperial powers). They chose not to build everything for the North Atlantic, and that imposed endless compromises. A consistent theme in their pre-dreadnoughts was cramming a lot of guns onto a ship with smaller displacement than their rivals were using. (Their docks tended to be smaller than needed to keep up, which was part of the problem; but they also worried a lot about the shallow Baltic, since Germany was their chief target.) As the authors point out, that makes the French ships appear to "bristle with guns" as compared to the British.
The French also had a greater number of bureaucracies that had input into ship design and ship approval, which meant they made their decisions more slowly, less decisively, and less coherently than other countries. The result, systematically, was that they were always behind the trends, and the consistent outcome of all the classes of ship described in the book is that they were obsolescent the day they were finally commissioned. World War I also led to the cancellation of a whole generation of battleships, because the Army controlled the supply of guns, and also the manpower, and the ships couldn't be completed and couldn't be worked on or manned.
The good news, I guess, though the authors avoid being too critical or making this point: battleships were pretty much a complete waste of money, so the French wasted less than Britain or Germany or the US.
One reason that the French battleships don't get written about very much is that they saw very little action, and the only capital-ship-to-capital-ship action was when the British bombarded the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir, and the Americans bombarded Jean Bart in WWII. (In WWI, the French fleet concentrated in the Mediterranean, and neither the Austrians nor the Turks came out to fight.) The French fired back in both cases, and basically didn't hit anything. Instead they got hit, and mauled in both instances. It doesn't make for exciting history. Likewise with their participation in the disastrous WWI attempt to force the Dardanelles, which cost them ships for no benefit. Added to that are two battleships blowing up spontaneously, two being torpedoed and sunk, and one hitting an unmarked underwater rock and sinking outside a major home port.
Quibbles: There were some proofing problems that seem confined to the first half of the book. Random r's appeared in a few words, there was a double-printed phrase, things like that.
Also, it is a little odd that when a battle in the war histories is described and a post-WWI battleship is mentioned, the ultimate fate of that ship isn't given, while the subjects of this book are. For example, we get the grounding of Dunkerque and Provence at Mers el-Kabir, and the refloating of Provence is discussed, but Dunkerque is ignored. Then at the Toulon scuttling of the Vichy fleet, there's Dunkerque on the map in drydock, but only the scuttling of Provence is discussed, and we don't get a mention of the other 76 ships that were scuttled, because they weren't battleships from the previous World War.
March 14, 2021
Jordan’s French series are everything a type book should be. Design, service, line drawings and photos, it’s all there.
October 18, 2024
Another typically excellent work from Jordan. My only real concern was whether this would feel like a rehash of the material already published in "Warship," but such is not the case.
Originally written: July 12, 2020.
Originally written: July 12, 2020.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews