Episode 711
French battleship Courbet (1911)
Tue, 2019-Apr-16 01:48 UTC
Length - 2:40
Direct Link
Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.
The featured article for Tuesday, 16 April 2019 is French battleship Courbet (1911).
Courbet was the lead ship of her class of four dreadnought battleships, the first ones built for the French Navy. She was completed shortly before the start of World War I in August 1914. She helped to sink the Austro-Hungarian protected cruiser SMS Zenta that same month and spent the war in the Mediterranean. She spent the rest of the war providing cover for the Otranto Barrage that blockaded the Austro-Hungarian Navy in the Adriatic Sea and often served as a flagship. Although upgraded several times before World War II, she was not considered to be a first-line battleship by the 1930s and spent much of that decade as a gunnery training ship.
A few weeks after the German invasion of France on 10 May 1940, Courbet was hastily reactivated. She supported Allied troops in the defence of Cherbourg during mid-June, taking refuge in England shortly afterwards. As part of Operation Catapult, she was seized in Portsmouth by British forces on 3 July and was turned over to the Free French a week later. She was used as a stationary anti-aircraft battery and as an accommodation ship there. Courbet was disarmed in early 1941 and was used as a target ship in mid-1943. Her engines and boilers were removed in 1944 to prepare her for use as a breakwater during the Normandy landings (Operation Neptune) in June 1944. She was scrapped where she lay after the war.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:48 UTC on Tuesday, 16 April 2019.
For the full current version of the article, see French battleship Courbet (1911) on Wikipedia.
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This has been Kimberly. Thank you for listening to featured Wiki of the Day.
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