French Battleship Dunkerque
Dunkerque was the lead ship of the Dunkerque class of battleships built for the French Navy in the 1930s. The class also included Strasbourg. The two ships were the first capital ships to be built by the French Navy after World War I; the planned Normandie and Lyon classes had been cancelled at the outbreak of war, and budgetary problems prevented the French from building new battleships in the decade after the war. Dunkerque was laid down in December 1932, was launched October 1935, and was completed in May 1937. She was armed with a main battery of eight 330mm/50 Modèle 1931 guns arranged in two quadruple gun turrets and had a top speed of 29.5 knots (54.6 km/h; 33.9 mph).
Dunkerque and Strasbourg formed the French Navy's 1ère Division de Ligne (1st Division of the Line) prior to the Second World War. The two ships searched for German commerce raiders in the early months of the war, and Dunkerque also participated in convoy escort duties. The ship was badly damaged during the British attack at Mers-el-Kébir after the Armistice that ended the first phase of France's participation in World War II, but she was refloated and partially repaired to return to Toulon for comprehensive repairs. Dunkerque was scuttled in November 1942 to prevent her capture by the Germans, and subsequently seized and partially scrapped by the Italians and later the Germans. Her wreck remained in Toulon until she was stricken in 1955, and scrapped three years later.
Read more about French Battleship Dunkerque: Development, Service History, Footnotes
Famous quotes containing the word french:
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)