Thiaria: Other People's ships

Hello again!

The next are redraws of one of my very first posts, complete with new names and backstories.

Bévéziers class battlecruisers

Although the French had for a long time prioritized the building of armoured cruisers at the expense of battleships, this trend turned around when the six Danton-class battleships were ordered. The next ten big ships for the French Navy were all slow battleships. Various large cruiser designs were studied, but none materialized. Delays in development and testing of the new 340mm guns for the upcoming Provence class battleships however made slipway space available for two large ships, one in 1911 and one in 1912. To keep up the newly gained momentum in their capital ship production, the French navy proposed two battlecruisers mounting the proven 305/50 gun, and in March 1911, a design dating back to mid-1910 was selected. Although there were reservations about the design's length - at 190m, they were the longest warships ever built for France at that time, and there was only a single docking facility in all of France which could service them - construction was approved in June 1911, with two available docks to be lengthened in 1913 or 1914. Design-wise, the battlecruisers were a straightforward stretched Courbet-class, without the wing turrets to keep their beam narrow enough for the specified speed. As the French had always mounted relatively small caliber guns to their armoured cruisers, eight 305mm guns were considered enough, especially as contemporary German battlecruisers were no more heavily armed as well. Designed to form the spearhead of the French Battle Fleet, the ships emphasized protection over speed and gunnery. Neither were their eight 305mm guns a very powerful armament for their age, nor were they particularly fast at 26 knots design speed. Their protective scheme however equalled that of the Courbet-class, plus an armoured torpedo bulkhead which Courbet lacked due to the placement of her wing turrets. The ships had very active careers in both world wars and repeatedly withstood heavy punishment; they were however vulnerable to plunging shells due to their three thin armoured decks.

Both ships were named for French naval victories over the British respectively the Spaniards in the 17th century. Although Beveziers was laid down one year earlier, both commissioned within two months of each other, in October and December 1914, respectively. The Picture shows Agosta as commissioned.
[ img ]

Beveziers performed a foray into the Adriatic together with three armoured cruisers early in 1915, while Agosta was still on her shakedown cruise. Beveziers nearly was caught by the whole Austrian fleet, which had sortied with nine battleships. A french armoured cruiser was sunk with heavy loss of life, but Bévéziers managed to blow up the small Austrian pre-Dreadnought SMS Erzherzog Friedrich, and both sides disengaged. After seven months of repairs, Bévéziers and her newly commissioned sister joined the Dardanelles campaign, which was on the verge of being cancelled. On November 14th, the allied fleet made a final attempt to force the straits and totally surprised the Turks, who believed they had already won and withdrawn most of their mobile batteries. Desperate, the Turks committed their fleet, which they previously had not dared to do due to the submarine threat, and drove the allies off a final time; both Agosta and Beveziers were hit by Turkish battleship guns fired from behind a land mass using land-based spotting, and two allied pre-dreadnoughts were sunk. After another round of repairs, both were operational again in March 1916, but saw little action; during the Allied intervention in Greece in November 1916, they stayed well offshore and did not participate. The picture shows Beveziers at the beginning of 1917.
[ img ]

After an uneventful year 1917, both french battlecruisers were the only allied ships in the Aegean fast enough to come to the aid of the British when the Turkish fleet made its first and last sortie in January 1918 with three battleships, a battlecruiser, four light cruisers and 14 destroyers. After sinking a large British Monitor and a Greek ironclad, the Turks came under fire from Agosta and Beveziers and lost their flagship Kanuni Sultan Suleiman. As the other Turkish ships maneuvered to engage the new threat, they ran into a minefield, lost a light cruiser and very nearly their battlecruiser. Chased by the French battlecruisers, the Turks then retreated. The Yavuz Sultan Selim was very heavily damaged and only barely made it; her damage was never repaired and she was scrapped in the 1920s. The Battle of Imbros turned out to be France's most comprehensive naval victory since the Bay of Chesapeake.

After the war, both battlecruisers were modernized with the two forward and the two aft funnels trunked together and a tripod mast with new fire contol gear was added. The picture shows Agosta after that modernization.
[ img ]

Agosta soon became a training ship and was not modernized again as she was slated to be scrapped after Dunkerque was commissioned; although in very poor shape, she was still available in 1940 and pressed into service, only to run afoul of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off Norway and be sunk by plunging gunfire from up to 20.000 meters distance without being able to fight back effectively; against modern German 350mm guns, her protection was useless. Bévéziers received another, more thorough modernization from 1930 through 1933. A new tripod similar to that of the heavy cruiser Foch was erected, all existing funnels were replaced by two new ones, and a heavy catapult and a hangar for four seaplanes was added amidships, similiar to the arrangement on Lorraine. The picture shows her after she re-entered service in 1933.
[ img ]

After the war started, Bévéziers was busy hunting German commerce raiders in the Atlantic prior to the collapse of France and joined the British fleet that attacked Thiaria in March 1940. She was present when the Thiarian battleships Crionna and Tuama were sunk by British carrier planes, and she later took part in sinking a Thiarian heavy cruiser. When France collapsed, she escaped to Dakar, where she was fitted with a French Air-search radar system smuggled out of France in 1942; she also landed her 138mm guns and received two additional 100mm twins on each side. Her crew joined the Allies in March 1943, and despite her age and condition, she was selected for modernization in the USA due to her symbolic value as the only existing French capital ship that ever sunk an enemy battleship with her guns. She re-entered service in March 1944 and served in the Mediterranean from then on, taking part in several shore bombardment missions around Italy and southern France. Bévéziers became an accomodation ship in 1947 and lingered till she was scrapped in 1960. The picture shows her after her modernization in the US, where she received six 40mm quads, two dozen Oerlikons and surface search and fire control radars.
[ img ]

Greetings
GD

Shipbucket

Who is online