Bouvet was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the French Navy that was built in the 1890s. She was a member of a group of five broadly similar battleships, along with Charles Martel, Jauréguiberry, Carnot, and Masséna. She suffered from design flaws that reduced her stability and contributed to her loss in 1915. Only 75 men were rescued from a complement of 718.
About French battleship Bouvet in brief
Bouvet was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the French Navy that was built in the 1890s. She was a member of a group of five broadly similar battleships, along with Charles Martel, Jauréguiberry, Carnot, and Masséna, which were ordered in response to the British Royal Sovereign class. Bouvet proved to be the most successful design of the five, and she was used as the basis for the subsequent Charlemagne class. She suffered from design flaws that reduced her stability and contributed to her loss in 1915. She struck a mine and sank within two minutes; only 75 men were rescued from a complement of 718. The ship was the only vessel of her group of 5 half-sisters still in service at the outbreak of World War I in July 1914. She participated in a series of attacks on the Ottoman fortifications guarding the Dardanelles, where she was hit approximately eight times by shellfire but was not seriously damaged. The disaster convinced the Allies to abandon the naval campaign in favor of an amphibious assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula. In 1907, Bouvet was withdrawn from front-line service in 1907 and thereafter used as part of the training fleet. She also served as a guard ship at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal from November to late December, and was used to patrol for contraband shipments in the central Mediterranean. In 1913, she was the last vessel of the group to be built, and her design was based on that ofCharles Martel.
She had a top speed of 18 knots, which made her one of the fastest battleships in the world at the time. The general similarity of the ships led some observers to group them together as a ship class, though the authors of Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships point out that the vessels had sufficient differences to prevent them from being considered as one class. The basic design for the ships wasbased on the previous vessel, the battleship Brennus, but instead of mounting the main battery all on the centerline, the ships moved two of main battery guns to single turrets. Although the navy had stipulated that displacement could be up to 14,000 metric tons, political considerations led the navy to limit the displacement to 12,000 t. Charles Huin prepared the design for Bouvet, which was completed in 1894. He had also designed the ship for the naval command, which asked him to improve the plans for the ship. He asked Huin to improve an improved version of the ship, which he completed in 1897. The vessel was the first of the four squadron battleships that were built to different designs but met the same basic characteristics, including armor, armament, and displacement. The ships were used to escort troop convoys across to southern France. The first stage of the program called for a total of twenty-four \”cuirasses d’escadre\” and a host of other vessels, including coastal defense battleship, cruisers, and torpedo boats.
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This page is based on the article French battleship Bouvet published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 14, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
