French Battleship Jean Bart (1911)

French Battleship Jean Bart (1911)

Jean Bart was the second ship of the Courbet-class battleships, the first dreadnoughts built for the French Navy. She was completed before World War I as part of the 1910 naval building programme. She spent the war in the Mediterranean and helped to sink the Austro-Hungarian protected cruiser Zenta on 16 August 1914. She spent most of the rest of 1914 providing gunfire support for the Montenegrin Army until she was torpedoed by the submarine U-12 on 21 December. Even with three compartments flooded, she was able to steam to Malta on her own for repairs that required three and a half months. Upon her return she spent the remainder of the war participating in the Otranto Barrage, in the Adriatic.

After the end of World War I she and her sister ship France were sent to the Black Sea to support Allied troops in the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. Jean Bart's crew mutinied out of sympathy for the Bolsheviks, but the mutiny was put down and she returned to the Mediterranean in 1920. She was partially modernized twice during the 1920s, but was deemed in too poor condition to be refitted again in the 1930s. Therefore she was renamed Océan, disarmed and hulked in 1936 and became a harbour training ship in Toulon. The Germans captured her intact when they occupied Toulon in 1942 and used her for testing large shaped charge warheads. She was sunk by Allied bombing in 1944, but was raised and scrapped in 1945.