French battleships in world of warships10/4/2023 ![]() The French also had a greater number of bureaucracies that had input into ship design and ship approval, which meant they made their decisions more slowly, less decisively, and less coherently than other countries. (Their docks tended to be smaller than needed to keep up, which was part of the problem but they also worried a lot about the shallow Baltic, since Germany was their chief target.) As the authors point out, that makes the French ships appear to "bristle with guns" as compared to the British. A consistent theme in their pre-dreadnoughts was cramming a lot of guns onto a ship with smaller displacement than their rivals were using. They chose not to build everything for the North Atlantic, and that imposed endless compromises. France needed to be able to operate in three different realms: the Mediterranean, the Baltic-North Sea complex, and the North Atlantic (and beyond to the rest of the world, like most Imperial powers). When battleship fever hit the world, the French had the most difficult design decisions of all the major powers. French battleship design was somewhat idiosyncratic, so it's nice to have a large number of pictures of those ships, all in one place. It covers a subject thoroughly, exhaustively, and with a wealth of detail. This is the kind of solid reference book that is the heart of my naval history reference shelf. ![]()
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