The Dunkerque class had a designed displacement of 26,500 tons and displaced 35,000 tons at full load. They were less heavily armed and armored than existing battleships, as well as the new classes of Battleships being developed by other navies in the mid-1930s. The new Dunkerque class which the French termed Fast Battleships was more like a battle cruiser. but was limited by the Washington Treaty to just 70,000 tons which meant that in order to have a number of battleships that they would have to be smaller but still mount a significant armament. By the late 1920s it realized the need to develop a class of Fast Battleships to the large Italian Trento Class heavy cruisers and German Deutschland class Pocket Battleships. In the 1920s the French Navy concentrated on cruiser construction. The next articles will deal with the British King George V Class and American South Dakota Class. The German Bismarck, Japanese Yamato, British Vanguard and American Iowa Classes will be covered in a subsequent series. North Carolina Class. This article covers the French Dunkerque class and Richelieu class Battleships. The first three articles were about the German Scharnhorst Class, the Italian Vittorio Veneto Class, and the U.S. The treaty had an “escalation” clause that allowed 16” guns if a signatory was shown to be breaking the treaty. The London Treaties limited the size and armament of new battleships, 35,000 tons in displacement and a main armament of 14” guns. The Washington Treaty established limits on tonnage of battleships for the signatories, and instituted a ten year “holiday” on the production of new battleships but set no similar limits on cruisers. Thus these articles are about the first modern battleships that the combatants built since the end of World War One and its immediate aftermath. The series deals with battleships built under the provision of the Washington and London Naval Treaty limitations in the 1930s. Tonight I continue writing about the battleship classes developed by the Americans, British, Italians, French and Germans in the 1930s. I decided to take another night off from the insanity of President Trump, his response to the novel Coronavirus 19 Pandemic and the rest of the craziness. Richelieu in the 1950s © Photo Marius BAR – Toulon (France) site internet :
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