Battleship Richelieu

Battleship Richelieu arriving in New York City, February 1943
Note missing gun barrel on second turret.

Battleships are kind of weird-cool. Big, impressive, zillions of tons of steel and armor, giant steam turbine engines driving them through the seas at break-neck speeds, they were the apex of the development of gun based warships. Now they are museum pieces, if they haven't been broken up for scrap.

This one caught my eye because, hey! Battleship! But then I see the name and I realize I know almost nothing about French battleships. I know about American (Missouri, Iowa, Arizona, etc.), British (Hood, um, mumble, mumble) and German (Bismarck, Graf Spee), but nothing about the French version, so I go a Googling.

The Richelieu's history is a little checkered. She left France in 1940 to avoid being captured by the Germans and sailed to Dakar on the West Coast of Africa. But then France fell, the Vichy government came to be and Dakar and the Richelieu came under Vichy / German control.

Dakar, looking West

The Allies mounted Operation Menace in an attempt to liberate Dakar. The Allied attack failed, but the Richelieu suffered considerable damage, some of it from strikes by Allied weapons, but one big injury was self inflicted:

On 24 September [1940], when Richelieu opened fire against British battleships with her 380 mm (15.0 in) guns, she suffered severe damage to three barrels of her No. 2 turret, due to premature explosion of the shells. This was first traced to the use of the propellant (SD19 powder) from Strasbourg powder charges reconditioned at Dakar. However, during 1941, an inquiry commission, whose chairman was Admiral de Penfentenyo de Kervéréguen, concluded that a premature explosion of the shells was the result of a flaw in the design of the shell base. - Wikipedia

Reminds me of a story from Stephenson's Baroque Cycle Trilogy. Some miscreants working in a lab grind up a bunch of gunpowder very fine and then contrive to insert it into the powder magazine of one of the Royal Navy's warships. The warship goes to war and starts firing its guns. Eventually one of the guns is charged with the finely ground gunpower, and since this powder explodes with more force (or more rapidly) than the regular powder, it bursts the gun killing and injuring several people. I think the whole point was to cast doubt on the quality of the guns. I am pretty sure of this story, but I can't find anything about it.