Some were destroyed in battle,
others weren’t completed.
Some are laid up, and can only dream about battles…
But now they’re getting a new lease of life!
We recreate ships accurately,
according to their historical blueprints,
and send them into battle!
World of Warships: Dry Dock
If the International Bureau of Weights and Measures had had suitable storage,
Richelieu would have been placed there as a battleship standard
of the end of the 1930s.
Richelieu was designed in response to the Italian Littorio-class ships,
and this French ship embodied a successful mix of balanced
performance characteristics and revolutionary design ideas.
She featured 380 mm main guns housed in two quadruple turrets on the bow;
a powerful secondary battery that utilized 152 mm guns
as dual-purpose ones for the first time
thanks to their impressive elevation angles;
and an elaborate torpedo protection system
that had the greatest depth among all other ships in the world.
The armor protected vital parts of the battleship,
met the highest requirements,
and was comparable to Yamato's armor,
primarily due to the better quality of the French armor.
Boilers of a completely new type worked reliably
and provided sufficient power for the ship to travel at speeds of more than 30 knots.
Even though Richelieu was inferior to American battleships
built in the 1940s in terms of her artillery caliber,
she had better armor and thus had decent chances
of at least making her enemies flee from battle
if she didn't manage to destroy them.
The only crucial weak spot of the French battleship was her AA defenses.
By the end of the war, the ship's light AA defenses had been significantly enhanced
by installing numerous Bofors and Oerlikon guns.
However, her long-range 100 mm AA guns
were still noticeably inferior to similar Allied, German, and Japanese AA weaponry.
At the same time, her 152 mm guns didn't have a sufficient firing rate
or enough mobility to counter dive bombers.
However, one of the two largest French battleships
didn't have a chance to prove or disprove all these assumptions
in a real decisive duel against other battleships.
The defeat of France in June 1940
forced Richelieu, which was undergoing trials at that time,
to hide in the Western African port of Dakar.
While there, she survived attacks of British torpedo bombers in July
and then a squadron attack in September.
While the battleship took damage of varying degrees of severity,
she still managed to fend off her former allies,
who were trying to prevent the ship from falling into German hands.
After France joined the Anti-Hitler Coalition,
Richelieu headed to New York,
where she underwent repairs and upgrades in 1943.
The ship didn't only receive enhanced AA defenses
but also new radio location systems, and her main guns were adjusted
to accommodate 381 mm British shells.
From the spring of 1944 until the end of the war,
the battleship was involved in conducting warfare against Japan.
She then returned to her home country, where she served as a flagship
of the Mediterranean Fleet until 1956.
After that, Richelieu was remade into a training ship,
but just few years later, she was sent into the reserve.
The ship was scrapped in 1968.
In World of Warships, Richelieu is a French Tier VIII battleship.