ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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The Richelieu was a battleship of the French National Navy built from 1935, named in honour of Cardinal Richelieu, for the founding role of this minister in the creation of a first French naval power at the beginning of the 18th century.

The first French battleship of the Richelieu class, with a displacement equal to the maximum permitted at the time by the naval arms limitation treaties (), it was intended to counter Italian battleships of the Littorio class.

It was a more powerful version of the Dunkirk class, with its specific arrangement of the main artillery in two quadruple turrets at the front, but this time with the calibre of .

The Richelieu, escaped from Brest in June 1940 under difficult conditions in front of the German advance, was then involved on the side of the Vichy authorities against the British forces in 1940, in Dakar, where he was torpedoed on , and where he escaped with slight damage, to a joint attack by the British and the Free French Forces from 23 to .

After the Allied landings in North Africa, he moved on to the Allied side in . Modernized in the United States in 1943, the Richelieu operated in the Indian Ocean in 1944-1945, under British command, against the Japanese, and then participated in the return of French troops to Indochina.

Background

When the Dunkirk was put on hold on , it was almost nineteen years ago that a French battleship was no longer under construction, and the decision just taken was made after a period of procrastination of almost six years.

In the late 1920s, the most powerful battleships were ships armed with eight main artillery pieces, in four double turrets, equally distributed between the front and rear, either from (Queen Elizabeth, Revenge), or from (Maryland, or Japanese Mutsu), which were designed before the Washington Treaty, and whose speed reached a maximum (with the Queen Elizabeth class) or (Mutsu class). The two Nelson class battleships, with three triple turrets of , all at the front, inspired by the plans of British battle cruisers G3, dating from 1921, but with a reduced tonnage of nearly a third, hence a less long and less hydrodynamic hull, with less space for the machines and a speed of only. In European waters, three British vessels, designed before 1918, had a speed higher than , in accordance with Lord Fisher's ideas. He saw speed as a more important defence than shielding. These are the two Renown class battle cruisers, armed with six pieces in three double turrets, and a third, the , armed with eight pieces in four double turrets. The HMS Hood is then the largest, heaviest, and fastest of all waterline buildings.

Untapped projects of the 1920s

The French Admiralty at the end