We've never had a real ship called Thunderchild (though i hope our first space warship will be named as such) but what are the closest names real warships have come to Thunderchild?
Had USS United States been completed, how long do you think she would have been in service? would she have outlasted the Midways or would she have been gone relatively soon?
Bearn was too slow to be effective as an aircraft carrier, along with other issues with her. What is the sweetspot speed a carrier must achieve to best support flight operations? How has that speed changed over time?
on one hand, she never did launch aircraft in anger, however, for a pre-WW1 hull, managing to survive into the 1960s is still nothing less then impressive.
Weirdest part of the whole ship, imo- even the coal bunkers have a line of logic behind them (albeit bad). But even if the French were planning on her getting into surface combat like the Lexingtons or Graf Zeppelin, what are 4 single torpedoes going to do?
Give the captain, assuming he survived, a bone to throw at his court martial? "Messieurs, we were attempting to get into torpedo range!" The coal bunkers are just a WTF moment. Aside from being deadweight and -space that could have been used to make the ship faster, coal bunkers tend to self-ignite. The decision to include them on a ship that not only didn't need them, but also carried large stores of highly flammable aviation gasoline, just boggles the mind.
Only thing that "makes sense" is to fire a spread defensively in an attempt to convince any attacking ships to alter course. However given her slow speed, I don't think she would be able to escape any pursuit.
Maybe it's me, but I think if you're aircraft carrier gets close enough to an enemy to use torpedo tubes, you are doing something really, really wrong.
@@RCAvhstape Sure, they didn't have to copy them, but they did and with great enthusiasm. The captured ships served as the blueprint to makes copies from. For instance, the Valiant-class 74 gun ships of the line were direct copies of the captured French ship Invincible. The Ajax-class was an upgraded version of the Valiant-class design. The British built 8 Courageux/Carnatic-class from the captured French ship Courageux. The America-class was copied from the French ship America, ect ect.
Oh no, it actually looks much better than the comment section suggested! The greenhouse-like bulge under the funnel may be nonsense, but to me it looks nice.
I know it sounds funny but coal was used up the sides of ships in narrow, upright bunkers, to soak up a weapons energy. Coal is dense & heavy. A more modern version of that, used in oil-burning warships, substituted capped & sealed steel tubes for the coal.
0:52 The photo of Bearn's construction looks like a map from an early 2000's game with a background so low detail, it's almost like an impenetrable fog. ^^
The photo was taken before color was invented. This is why old TVs were not called "black and white" but just "televisions" or "magic picture telegraphs." Video games had the same evolution.
I mean, Ranger, being a purpose build, not a conversion, gives her an advantage over Bearn since it implemented some lessons learned from Langley and the Lexingtons.
Yes she served well but would be a liability it in the Pacific theater. So much so that mister I don't like the British Admiral King begged the same British to give him a fleet carrier. Yea I do like the Ranger. The CVEs also performed well in thier function
Plus, if you don't mind me latching off of your comment, Admiral King did ask for a Fleet Carrier to hold things over due to Enterprise being severely damaged and needed repair/full overhaul and the Essex and Independence class Carriers weren't fully operational yet.
On paper her long life means that France always had at least one aircraft carrier all the way to the Clemenceau-class. It's a Schrödinger ship - France has aircraft carrier, but at the same time France doesn't have any.
I like this answer, its perfect! Government: "Well, do we have an aircraft carrier?" Navy minister: "I don't know, we'll have to open the box. Lets take her out to sea. If she launches and lands planes one day, we have a carrier. If she can't handle planes the next day, we don't have a carrier."
The thing to remember about early developments like this - is that no one knew what they were doing with these things yet. It was from these early designs that they learned what to do and as importantly - what not to do, as well. .
The handsome bird is a Potez 52, the added five designates that it had a hook for use on this carrier. It was made out of fabric and plywood and seated six and two pilots. A great engineer, Henri Potez designed all the planes for his factories in Les Mureaux from 1930 to 1955. This plane's direct designer was Louis Coroller, a discreet and cheerful man and great burner of archives.
Thanks Drach, you solved an ancient mystery for me. When in high school in around 1975, I learned of the existence a a French carrier stationed in the French Indies during the war. This was a "WTF?" moment for me. Historical research in the libraries in Mobile, Ala. was mostly focused on the American Civil War and I gave up looking further. I forgot about it until just now. Many thanks!
My grandfather served aboard the USAT J. T. McDaniel, which is the ship that the Bearn collided with. Thirty-something US troops were killed in the incident and the McDaniel was so badly damaged that it had to limp back to Philadelphia out of convoy for repairs.
@Drachinifel Wow, you just hit 300 Drydocks & your closing in on having made 400 ship guides. Not to mention all the special videos that have been done. And your about to become a father or you already are a father. Either way, I'm sure that it's really excellent and exciting for you!!! I would like to just congratulate you & your wife, & thank you for all the great videos that you have produced. You have taught me so much stuff that I didn't know previously & a lot of the stuff you have covered have really been things that my mind had been curious about but never sought to have answered. Like navigation during the age of sail & the manufacturing of the sea clock. And the HMS Revenge pulling off the "first stealth Battleship attack!" Even though most of the time you have pictures & video when you can, I'm usually more content to just listen to you tell a story. Like for example, the "Just Nuisance AB" video. Which brought back a lot of the memories of my younger years & some of the animals we had. Chevis, a black Labrador Retriever that we had that was an incredibly smart dog. Imagine a dog so smart & spoiled that I was sitting & eating Oreo cookies. I'd, of course, dip them in milk for a min before eating. When Chevis came up to beg for one, I just handed him one without dipping it in the milk. And he wouldn't eat it. He took it from me & looked at me all sad & set it on the floor! And, of course, I gave in & dipped one in milk & gave it to him & he was happy as can be. The one I didn't dip just sat there on the floor. It was hilarious. You could talk to him like a person & he definitely understood. Him & my step-dad, Billy were digging a water line when my Mom noticed that one of his nails on his paw was cracked & bleeding. She said "C'mon Chevis let's go soak that in some Epsom Salts. They went inside & Mom put water in a large bowl with some Epsom Salts, put it on the floor & told Chevis "C'mon & put your paw in here." And he walks over & put his paw in it. And I mean he knew he was waiting for her to do that. No complaints, no having to coax him to do it or anything like that. I've got several other stories about Chevis but I'll spare you, this time. Looking forward to your next videos! As well as getting to hear about Baby Drach & whether ya'll get a daughter or a son! Hoping you and wifey have a great summer, if summer is the same time there as here. Oh, and if you rub your wife's belly with coconut oil it helps her to NOT develop stretch marks. And if she wants to breast feed but also wants to work or be away from the child during the day, it's usually better to rent the milk express machines from the hospital cuz they are a lot stronger and just work better than the small ones available for sale. AND, I know the grocery store has "disposable diapers" like in unbelievable quantities. But cloth diapers help A LOT and keep them from getting diaper rash. And a baby with diaper rash is NOT a happy & quiet baby, so do your ears & there bottom a favor. Not sure if the UK has diaper services but if not you can buy & wash yourself. Hoping ya'll have a great time becoming new parents. And more importantly want to wish ya'll a happy & safe delivery as well. I'll be praying 🙏 for the 3 of you!!!
This ship is such a meme, that even in World of Warships the most common build for it is a meme build involving interceptors, which is extremely rare to see
Tbf it's not surprising that interceptor builds are so common when WeeGee has decreed that Bearn be "interceptors, the ship". You'd be foolish to try anything else.
In the prologue of ‘To Have and Have Not’ ( Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall), the port of Martinique is shown in a drawing. The drawing does a show an aircraft carrier, presumably the Bearn
One wonders why the French armed forces - all branches - were so oddly equipped with ships, aircraft, tanks etc. that zigged while everybody else, zagged. From the 1860’s until perhaps the 1970’s they marched to their own tune. Only in then did they seem to return to design sanity. A characteristic of the national personality at the time, perhaps? Or something else? Perhaps a deeper exploration of this on the subjects and period the channel covers, please?
"The French copy no-one, and no-one copies the French". Sometimes this is a good thing, e.g. the Char 1 b tank, possibly the best tank in service in 1940. Othertimes, not so good, e.g. Bearn.
@@alexandermonro6768 Wasn't the Char B1 a tank crippled by the French insistence on one-man turrets? Wikipedia suggests 'crippled' is too strong a word.
Imagine doing a torpedo attack run in an *aircraft carrier.* Surely an aircraft carrier has better things to do than launch torpedoes at the enemy fleet?
I guessing the logic is more if she's surprised at close range, during night or storm, by enemy heavy forces a big spread of torpedoes might be the only thing that could save her (or at least take some enemy with her).
Retaining the coal bunkers on an oil fired ship because they thought it'd provide more protection... That is one of the most ridiculous ideas I've ever heard.
It's really quite beautiful in its laziness. " shouldn't you retrofit all of that?" "uh.....no it's better how it um...is already because uh....it's like a buffer?"
This ship had a long career after many retrofits. I wonder how those in charge decided to keep throwing good money at this vessel? Cost versus benefit is not an easy calculation to make on a future conflict in the inter war years. Thank you Dratch❤
CV or vapeur de cheval is NOT a metric horsepower. It is a value for taxation. For instance Citroen 2 CV has more than 9 horses powering its proceeding on roads or across fields.
Actually we say "Chevaux Vapeur" The Horse part is plural hence Chevaux instead of the singular Cheval . If you get asked why not chevals , it's because when they reformed the grammar and changed many of the "aux" plural words to a simple added "s" they decided ( correctly ) that chevals sounded awful when used in the spoken language so Chevaux was saved !
No pix of Bearn's last mission before France's surrender, picking up aircraft in Canada? Interesting pix of French sailors, in uniform, helping wheel SBCs down a country road. Then the SBCs and Curtis Hawks, moldering away on a hillside in Martinique.
Do you think so? I would expect the two _Independence_- class and the _Colossus_-class carriers they operated postwar to have had more influence on the development of the _Clemenceau_-class and the _Charles de Gaulle._
@@matthewlok3020 In some ways. But Langley was a collier, a ship built to haul coal. She was an auxiliary vessel, an easy choice to convert to a carrier, and experiment with. I would say Langley, although slower and smaller than the Bearn, was better.
"....having never deployed an aircraft in anger." Well golly, I've heard of some hard luck ships but that sort of takes the cake aside from not being sunk.
I was engrossed in a project with RUclips playing sort of in the background, looked up at the TV and initially read "Mr. Bean". Looking at the ship within that second or two of confusion I thought that maybe it was a nickname.
I recommend you do a video on the Aconit (formerly HMS Aconite) was one of the nine Flower-class corvettes. And one on Canadas only aircraft carrier HMCS Magnificent, the Magi
The modern US carriers have a system called ATTDS which includes CAT (Countermeasure Anti-Torpedo) which is just a small torpedo that homes in and destroys incoming torpedoes. Those anti-torpedoes are fired from a mount of six small above water torpedo tubes mounted on the sides of the carrier. I would say those count as a torpedo tube even though they are not for the normal purpose of what torpedoes are used for.
So...the French put torpedo tubes on an aircraft carrier, designed probably the worst elevators ever put on a carrier, had coal bunkers on an oil fired ship for...dubious reasons...and the thing was so slow that a particularly motivated canoer could probably catch her. I do wonder if Joffre would have actually been an improvement from Bearn or just a even bigger loose collection of perplexing design decisions this ship was.
Plus, the coal onboard could be used to refuel her escorts underway . . . The entire 12 torpedo tube arrangement should have been kept, they would have been an excellent close-in defense system
How I see the Bearn happening: French Engineer: So, we kept the Coaling spaces, and plan on retaining coal within them as a type of life vest for the ship. French Captain: But, isn't coal Dust explosive? Any round entering that space would blow out half the hull! French Engineer: Drag that man out of here! He must be a German spy! French Captain struggling : You will kill us all! After things clear out, the engineer smiles, sending a message to Der Fueher: "The mission is a success, the Bearn will never pose a threat to us."
My grandfather was in the USN in WWII. He actually interacted with crew of the Bearn. They played soccer, or "football" as the Europeans call it. My grandfather's crew were playing the game according to American football rules which involved a great deal of tackling. The French protested, but my grandfather's crew "didn't understand".
I have to stop watching these videos in the wee hours of the morning. I read the name as Mr. Bean. Then, after watching the video, I'm thinking that maybe I wasn't so far off after all.
I've always wondered what the story was on Bearn. Sad story, grateful for the information. Is it just a coincidence that it was posted on the anniversary of the Glorious First of June?
This 1st try at an aircraft Carrier by the French May not have been great but Neither was the Uk's Royal Navys but both Learned lessons From it. The Royal Navy had one of the bigest budgets in the World so France with limited budget had a good 1st Try and beat Germany and Italy to operate a Carrier.
Lots of early carriers were slower than _Kaga,_ including HMS _Eagle,_ HMS _Argus,_ and USS _Langley._ If anything, _Kaga_ was one of the *better* carrier conversions, behind only _Akagi_ and the _Lexingtons._
If they gave her a full set of turbines got rid of the casemate guns got rid of the clam shell hanger doors she probably would have made a pretty decent carrier for the French navy.. She would probably would carry properly under 40 aircraft depending on what type..
At least she's faster than the Langley. If France had followed up with purpose built carriers, we'd probably think fondly of the Bearn. There. I said something positive about the Bearn.
In the movie "The Avengers" there was a supercarrier with double-decker flight decks, which of course I thought was cool. As it turns out there's a history to this idea, the Japanese navy tried it once before abandoning it, maybe rightly, and might make an interesting episode. Has any navy reconsidered the concept since then?
Well, there goes my position on Bearn. First Dr Clarke tears her a new one, then Drach does likewise. I can no longer live under the delusions of her capabilities. 😅
So happy I voted for this one, it’s been a punch line on this channel for ages and it was fun to hear her story. Bearn still managed to be more of an aircraft carrier than Graf Zeppelin-cry some more, Wehraboos!
If the only thing you knew about RN an MN naval aviation was their pre-war carrier development it would be hard predict that the French would become better at carrier based aviation than the Royal Navy.
Pinned post for Q&A :)
We've never had a real ship called Thunderchild (though i hope our first space warship will be named as such) but what are the closest names real warships have come to Thunderchild?
Did Imperial Germany ever find out about Hood’s construction, and if so, how did they react?
How would Bearn compare to Eagle if she had been converted with only turbines instead of VTEs and turbines?
Had USS United States been completed, how long do you think she would have been in service? would she have outlasted the Midways or would she have been gone relatively soon?
Bearn was too slow to be effective as an aircraft carrier, along with other issues with her. What is the sweetspot speed a carrier must achieve to best support flight operations? How has that speed changed over time?
The statement that she never launched an aircraft in anger is wrong! The pilots hated her and every time they took off they were very angry!
How do you think they got in the air?
I regret that I have but one like to give.
on one hand, she never did launch aircraft in anger, however, for a pre-WW1 hull, managing to survive into the 1960s is still nothing less then impressive.
They really didn't have a choice they didn't get proper carriers until after World War 2..
The other impressive ones would be the Mikasa and the Aurora
@@matthewlok3020 You forgot USS Texas and USS Olympia
@@WhiteWolf-gx8ll I will concede to that but my ones are even pre 1900
@@matthewlok3020 USS Olympia was commissioned in 1895 so it would also be pre 1900
"And four above-water Torpedo Tubes":
Delivering that line in such a deadpan manner is truly impressive.
Weirdest part of the whole ship, imo- even the coal bunkers have a line of logic behind them (albeit bad). But even if the French were planning on her getting into surface combat like the Lexingtons or Graf Zeppelin, what are 4 single torpedoes going to do?
Give the captain, assuming he survived, a bone to throw at his court martial? "Messieurs, we were attempting to get into torpedo range!"
The coal bunkers are just a WTF moment. Aside from being deadweight and -space that could have been used to make the ship faster, coal bunkers tend to self-ignite. The decision to include them on a ship that not only didn't need them, but also carried large stores of highly flammable aviation gasoline, just boggles the mind.
Only thing that "makes sense" is to fire a spread defensively in an attempt to convince any attacking ships to alter course. However given her slow speed, I don't think she would be able to escape any pursuit.
if only Glorious had them too
Maybe it's me, but I think if you're aircraft carrier gets close enough to an enemy to use torpedo tubes, you are doing something really, really wrong.
😒 *"Ah, **_Bearn..._** we knew we'd have to get to her eventually."* 😮💨
Talk about damning with faint praise! 😹🤣😂
There is Bearn, I suppose I Will have to go and Say hello.
What will he say about Joffre?
To quote a certain analyst of Elbonian weapons: "The French copy nobody, and nobody copies the French."
I love French design. Normal, normal, normal, WTF for the love of god WHY?, normal....
Except the British loved copying French ships, especially the 74 gun ship of the line.
@@Edax_Royeaux The British didn't have to copy them, they just took the originals from the French.
@@RCAvhstape Sure, they didn't have to copy them, but they did and with great enthusiasm. The captured ships served as the blueprint to makes copies from. For instance, the Valiant-class 74 gun ships of the line were direct copies of the captured French ship Invincible. The Ajax-class was an upgraded version of the Valiant-class design.
The British built 8 Courageux/Carnatic-class from the captured French ship Courageux. The America-class was copied from the French ship America, ect ect.
@@Edax_Royeaux Capturing is not copying :)
I think this may be the only guide where my immediate reaction to seeing the ship was "oh no".
The Massena and Kamchatka guides:
Oh no, it actually looks much better than the comment section suggested!
The greenhouse-like bulge under the funnel may be nonsense, but to me it looks nice.
3:26 "Captain, we have been hit"
"It's alright, the coal will protect us"
I know it sounds funny but coal was used up the sides of ships in narrow, upright bunkers, to soak up a weapons energy. Coal is dense & heavy. A more modern version of that, used in oil-burning warships, substituted capped & sealed steel tubes for the coal.
“Captain, the coal is now on fire”
“Put that out, the coal will not protect us from that”
Finally, a carrier that makes HMS _Eagle_ look like a capable and efficient fleet unit by comparison!
Took years for Bearn to win the Patreon vote!!
Well, as we have just seen, the Bearn was not the swiftest ship in the French navy
Everyone is vulnerable to an occasional moment of weakness it seems....
Get ready to feel the Bearn
Bearn, baby, Bearn...
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh . . . .
0:52 The photo of Bearn's construction looks like a map from an early 2000's game with a background so low detail, it's almost like an impenetrable fog. ^^
Haha, yeah some of those games are just imitating low detail photos from that time period. :D
The photo was taken before color was invented.
This is why old TVs were not called "black and white" but just "televisions" or "magic picture telegraphs."
Video games had the same evolution.
The ship that makes the Ranger look really good. Poor girl
I mean, Ranger, being a purpose build, not a conversion, gives her an advantage over Bearn since it implemented some lessons learned from Langley and the Lexingtons.
And unlike Bearn, Ranger was a menace in the Atlantic.
Yes she served well but would be a liability it in the Pacific theater. So much so that mister I don't like the British Admiral King begged the same British to give him a fleet carrier. Yea I do like the Ranger. The CVEs also performed well in thier function
@GrantWaller.-hf6jn blud, your nation conquered the world for spices and never used them
Plus, if you don't mind me latching off of your comment, Admiral King did ask for a Fleet Carrier to hold things over due to Enterprise being severely damaged and needed repair/full overhaul and the Essex and Independence class Carriers weren't fully operational yet.
On paper her long life means that France always had at least one aircraft carrier all the way to the Clemenceau-class. It's a Schrödinger ship - France has aircraft carrier, but at the same time France doesn't have any.
I like this answer, its perfect! Government: "Well, do we have an aircraft carrier?" Navy minister: "I don't know, we'll have to open the box. Lets take her out to sea. If she launches and lands planes one day, we have a carrier. If she can't handle planes the next day, we don't have a carrier."
@@corbfisher😁😁😁
The thing to remember about early developments like this - is that no one knew what they were doing with these things yet. It was from these early designs that they learned what to do and as importantly - what not to do, as well.
.
Another example (but less.. horrible ?) is the M3 lee.
My great grandad served on it in the 30´s. We still have some tissue belonging to one of her plane.
The fact that Bearn even survived WWII is remarkable.
Sitting in port for 5 years helped
The handsome bird is a Potez 52, the added five designates that it had a hook for use on this carrier. It was made out of fabric and plywood and seated six and two pilots. A great engineer, Henri Potez designed all the planes for his factories in Les Mureaux from 1930 to 1955. This plane's direct designer was Louis Coroller, a discreet and cheerful man and great burner of archives.
Thanks Drach, you solved an ancient mystery for me. When in high school in around 1975, I learned of the existence a a French carrier stationed in the French Indies during the war. This was a "WTF?" moment for me. Historical research in the libraries in Mobile, Ala. was mostly focused on the American Civil War and I gave up looking further. I forgot about it until just now. Many thanks!
My grandfather served aboard the USAT J. T. McDaniel, which is the ship that the Bearn collided with. Thirty-something US troops were killed in the incident and the McDaniel was so badly damaged that it had to limp back to Philadelphia out of convoy for repairs.
She took the role of aircraft CARRIER to heart. That's all she ever did, just carry the aircraft around XD.
Drach and Bearn… this ought to be good!
I think she’s a nice looking ship love the glazed section very art deco!
It was a ship that looked...nice. Then you start hearing about her features and it is a hard swipe left.
Shows that looking right(ish) doesn't necessarily mean it is right.
Been waiting years for this to make it to the top of the list.
@Drachinifel Wow, you just hit 300 Drydocks & your closing in on having made 400 ship guides. Not to mention all the special videos that have been done. And your about to become a father or you already are a father. Either way, I'm sure that it's really excellent and exciting for you!!! I would like to just congratulate you & your wife, & thank you for all the great videos that you have produced. You have taught me so much stuff that I didn't know previously & a lot of the stuff you have covered have really been things that my mind had been curious about but never sought to have answered. Like navigation during the age of sail & the manufacturing of the sea clock. And the HMS Revenge pulling off the "first stealth Battleship attack!" Even though most of the time you have pictures & video when you can, I'm usually more content to just listen to you tell a story. Like for example, the "Just Nuisance AB" video. Which brought back a lot of the memories of my younger years & some of the animals we had. Chevis, a black Labrador Retriever that we had that was an incredibly smart dog. Imagine a dog so smart & spoiled that I was sitting & eating Oreo cookies. I'd, of course, dip them in milk for a min before eating. When Chevis came up to beg for one, I just handed him one without dipping it in the milk. And he wouldn't eat it. He took it from me & looked at me all sad & set it on the floor! And, of course, I gave in & dipped one in milk & gave it to him & he was happy as can be. The one I didn't dip just sat there on the floor. It was hilarious. You could talk to him like a person & he definitely understood. Him & my step-dad, Billy were digging a water line when my Mom noticed that one of his nails on his paw was cracked & bleeding. She said "C'mon Chevis let's go soak that in some Epsom Salts. They went inside & Mom put water in a large bowl with some Epsom Salts, put it on the floor & told Chevis "C'mon & put your paw in here." And he walks over & put his paw in it. And I mean he knew he was waiting for her to do that. No complaints, no having to coax him to do it or anything like that. I've got several other stories about Chevis but I'll spare you, this time. Looking forward to your next videos! As well as getting to hear about Baby Drach & whether ya'll get a daughter or a son! Hoping you and wifey have a great summer, if summer is the same time there as here. Oh, and if you rub your wife's belly with coconut oil it helps her to NOT develop stretch marks. And if she wants to breast feed but also wants to work or be away from the child during the day, it's usually better to rent the milk express machines from the hospital cuz they are a lot stronger and just work better than the small ones available for sale. AND, I know the grocery store has "disposable diapers" like in unbelievable quantities. But cloth diapers help A LOT and keep them from getting diaper rash. And a baby with diaper rash is NOT a happy & quiet baby, so do your ears & there bottom a favor. Not sure if the UK has diaper services but if not you can buy & wash yourself. Hoping ya'll have a great time becoming new parents. And more importantly want to wish ya'll a happy & safe delivery as well. I'll be praying 🙏 for the 3 of you!!!
This ship is such a meme, that even in World of Warships the most common build for it is a meme build involving interceptors, which is extremely rare to see
Tbf it's not surprising that interceptor builds are so common when WeeGee has decreed that Bearn be "interceptors, the ship". You'd be foolish to try anything else.
In the prologue of ‘To Have and Have Not’ ( Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall), the port of Martinique is shown in a drawing. The drawing does a show an aircraft carrier, presumably the Bearn
Serious question - when do you sleep? Multiple videos per week, research, travel, and a Drachlet. Incredible.
Spectacularly French! It never gets better than this.
One wonders why the French armed forces - all branches - were so oddly equipped with ships, aircraft, tanks etc. that zigged while everybody else, zagged. From the 1860’s until perhaps the 1970’s they marched to their own tune. Only in then did they seem to return to design sanity. A characteristic of the national personality at the time, perhaps? Or something else? Perhaps a deeper exploration of this on the subjects and period the channel covers, please?
"The French copy no-one, and no-one copies the French". Sometimes this is a good thing, e.g. the Char 1 b tank, possibly the best tank in service in 1940. Othertimes, not so good, e.g. Bearn.
Too much Perrier water....😏
@@alexandermonro6768 Wasn't the Char B1 a tank crippled by the French insistence on one-man turrets?
Wikipedia suggests 'crippled' is too strong a word.
Something about "polishing a turd", or "spending good money after bad", comes to mind.
Imagine doing a torpedo attack run in an *aircraft carrier.* Surely an aircraft carrier has better things to do than launch torpedoes at the enemy fleet?
And at a top speed of 21 knots...
*The slowest and yet most Gallic torpedo boat that ever boated aboot.*
I guessing the logic is more if she's surprised at close range, during night or storm, by enemy heavy forces a big spread of torpedoes might be the only thing that could save her (or at least take some enemy with her).
Torpedo tubes wouldn’t have saved HMS Glorious
Bluff... the enemy would be looking *up* for torpedo bombers, not *down* for torpedoes already in the water...
Retaining the coal bunkers on an oil fired ship because they thought it'd provide more protection... That is one of the most ridiculous ideas I've ever heard.
It wouldn't be French without some bizarre decisions, wouldn't it?
@@Tuning3434 At least the crew never thought they saw torpedo boats.
It's really quite beautiful in its laziness.
" shouldn't you retrofit all of that?"
"uh.....no it's better how it um...is already because uh....it's like a buffer?"
french logic
In theory it's brilliant, saves effort *and* improves protection. Ah theory.
Been around since the channel dash...500k very cool that many people care about naval history. Great work over the years 👍👍
Drach's favorite thing to dunk on.
considering the way he talks about it when it comes up in drydock questions, I was expecting this to be longer, to be honest
Not really, Bearn didn't really do much overall.
@@UchihaPercy oh I get that, I just thought it might be a bit more detailed.
This ship had a long career after many retrofits. I wonder how those in charge decided to keep throwing good money at this vessel? Cost versus benefit is not an easy calculation to make on a future conflict in the inter war years. Thank you Dratch❤
CV or vapeur de cheval is NOT a metric horsepower. It is a value for taxation. For instance Citroen 2 CV has more than 9 horses powering its proceeding on roads or across fields.
Vapeur de cheval…horse farts?
@@CorePathway thats gonna need some odd pipework to feed it into the turbines...
Should have used PS rather than CV. The CV value is about as useful as RAC HP which is totally useless.
Might have run faster with a 2cv engine in it.
Actually we say "Chevaux Vapeur" The Horse part is plural hence Chevaux instead of the singular Cheval . If you get asked why not chevals , it's because when they reformed the grammar and changed many of the "aux" plural words to a simple added "s" they decided ( correctly ) that chevals sounded awful when used in the spoken language so Chevaux was saved !
Time to see just how bad this thing was.
Points for effort maybe?
@@prussianhilldefinitely a lower case “e” 🥲
My thought exactly.
No. Regardless of effort results still matter. The results involve so many negative points the final score is divided by zero...
Been waiting for this one for a few years
I literally went 'I wonder if Drach has a video on Bearn?' two days ago! 😊
Thank you.
I've been waiting for this one for a few years
It has been a long time coming, but we got there.
Go easy on Her guys.
An unusually pretty conversion.
No pix of Bearn's last mission before France's surrender, picking up aircraft in Canada? Interesting pix of French sailors, in uniform, helping wheel SBCs down a country road. Then the SBCs and Curtis Hawks, moldering away on a hillside in Martinique.
Thanks Drach
Boy. The Bearn is a good example of how not to build a carrier. But it did lead the way to build better French carriers.
Like USS Langley for the Americans
Do you think so? I would expect the two _Independence_- class and the _Colossus_-class carriers they operated postwar to have had more influence on the development of the _Clemenceau_-class and the _Charles de Gaulle._
@@Philistine47 They definitely did, but Bearn was probably compared to them, and the french were like, Ok, Don't use Bearn as the example.
There were "better" French carriers?
@@matthewlok3020 In some ways. But Langley was a collier, a ship built to haul coal. She was an auxiliary vessel, an easy choice to convert to a carrier, and experiment with. I would say Langley, although slower and smaller than the Bearn, was better.
I've been looking forward to this.
Omg it's here!
Thanks drachif
Poor Bearn
It could have been worse Drach, someone might have asked for more information on the French pre Dreadnoughts 😀
Long awaited indeed! Some of us had been waiting since before there were drysock episodes!
I can't wait for them to make a new port so you can give us a visit! In San Luis, Arizona!
I feel that the current Russian carrier pilots would be envious of such a fine ship 🙂
They would be envious of the ARGUES
So not really hard to do
I feel like the only harmfull Spirits on the Bearn would be in the Wine Cellar.
Being a Russian Naval aviator has got to be a very odd career?
@@WALTERBROADDUS i bet they mostly operate from land based airfields
Or as an extra airfield (not moving)
@@harryjohnson9215 but the lack of a ship to practice from, means their skills are atrophying.
"....having never deployed an aircraft in anger."
Well golly, I've heard of some hard luck ships but that sort of takes the cake aside from not being sunk.
I am suffering third degree Bearns…sorry.🤣
I was engrossed in a project with RUclips playing sort of in the background, looked up at the TV and initially read "Mr. Bean". Looking at the ship within that second or two of confusion I thought that maybe it was a nickname.
I recommend you do a video on the Aconit (formerly HMS Aconite) was one of the nine Flower-class corvettes. And one on Canadas only aircraft carrier HMCS Magnificent, the Magi
Why not change to 5 minutes Drachipedia. 😂. Thanks for sharing your hard work
Is it the only aircraft carrier to ever have torpedo tubes?
The modern US carriers have a system called ATTDS which includes CAT (Countermeasure Anti-Torpedo) which is just a small torpedo that homes in and destroys incoming torpedoes. Those anti-torpedoes are fired from a mount of six small above water torpedo tubes mounted on the sides of the carrier.
I would say those count as a torpedo tube even though they are not for the normal purpose of what torpedoes are used for.
That high deck might also be good for launching boarding actions.
So...the French put torpedo tubes on an aircraft carrier, designed probably the worst elevators ever put on a carrier, had coal bunkers on an oil fired ship for...dubious reasons...and the thing was so slow that a particularly motivated canoer could probably catch her.
I do wonder if Joffre would have actually been an improvement from Bearn or just a even bigger loose collection of perplexing design decisions this ship was.
I still remember the "for the crime.of being `Bearn`... "
ive been waiting years for this: and...she floated, so she wroked as a ship, until she didnt
I have waited years as well
It's still better than the Russian carrier
So it's not in last place in terms of best carrier
@@harryjohnson9215 true honestly, Bearn was at least useable (even if for not much), for most of her life unlike Admiral Breakdown over here
@@c.h.s9022 😂😂😂😂
@@harryjohnson9215 True. Bearn has't spent as much time being on fire as has the Kuznetzov.
i thought Drach would open the video with the line from the SMS Nassau guide "this ship makes me angry, really angry "
Thanks for reminding me about that! I had to go re-watch the Nassau guide at once and it is glorious!
Thanks!
1:47 beautiful Hanriot aircraft!
Plus, the coal onboard could be used to refuel her escorts underway . . . The entire 12 torpedo tube arrangement should have been kept, they would have been an excellent close-in defense system
Bearn is "if youre gonna suck, at least look good while doing so" in ship form
I find it hysterical that they kept the coal bunkers as "cross-your-fingers" armor, when they switched to oil as fuel.
Less threatening than the Kamchatka. WOW.
Finally! Been waiting for this one!
Would have been interesting if she's bumped into Graf Spee in 39
And they sunk each other to the mutual relief of both navies.
At last, the bearn video.
How I see the Bearn happening:
French Engineer: So, we kept the Coaling spaces, and plan on retaining coal within them as a type of life vest for the ship.
French Captain: But, isn't coal Dust explosive? Any round entering that space would blow out half the hull!
French Engineer: Drag that man out of here! He must be a German spy!
French Captain struggling : You will kill us all!
After things clear out, the engineer smiles, sending a message to Der Fueher: "The mission is a success, the Bearn will never pose a threat to us."
My grandfather was in the USN in WWII. He actually interacted with crew of the Bearn. They played soccer, or "football" as the Europeans call it. My grandfather's crew were playing the game according to American football rules which involved a great deal of tackling. The French protested, but my grandfather's crew "didn't understand".
I have to stop watching these videos in the wee hours of the morning. I read the name as Mr. Bean.
Then, after watching the video, I'm thinking that maybe I wasn't so far off after all.
And now they have got their De Gaulle. A piece of homework well done. 👍🇵🇱🇨🇵♍
I've always wondered what the story was on Bearn. Sad story, grateful for the information. Is it just a coincidence that it was posted on the anniversary of the Glorious First of June?
This 1st try at an aircraft Carrier by the French May not have been great but Neither was the Uk's Royal Navys but both Learned lessons From it. The Royal Navy had one of the bigest budgets in the World so France with limited budget had a good 1st Try and beat Germany and Italy to operate a Carrier.
For some reason, I'd thought this had already been covered.
When Kaga says I'm not the Slowest Carrier
Lots of early carriers were slower than _Kaga,_ including HMS _Eagle,_ HMS _Argus,_ and USS _Langley._ If anything, _Kaga_ was one of the *better* carrier conversions, behind only _Akagi_ and the _Lexingtons._
There were probably more CVs that were slower than Kaga in existence by the end of WW2...all those escort carriers were all Bearn like in speed.
True other carriers might have been slower but few were battleship conversions which is where my joke sprang from
@@Archie2c HMS _Eagle_ was.
If they gave her a full set of turbines got rid of the casemate guns got rid of the clam shell hanger doors she probably would have made a pretty decent carrier for the French navy..
She would probably would carry properly under 40 aircraft depending on what type..
Even if you did all that, she's still pretty obsolete by 1940.
Is the Bearn the only carrier that had triple expansion engines (excepting the CVE's).
There's the two paddle-wheel carriers of the USN; Sable and Wolverine.
She still fared better than most Japanese ships in WWII. Most of those histories end with some variant of, "...and lost with all hands."
Actually only ONE Japanese carrier went down with ALL hands, the Chiyoda. ♍
At least she's faster than the Langley. If France had followed up with purpose built carriers, we'd probably think fondly of the Bearn. There. I said something positive about the Bearn.
Bearn looks like her plans were drawn with a crayon on a lunchroom napkin.
In the movie "The Avengers" there was a supercarrier with double-decker flight decks, which of course I thought was cool. As it turns out there's a history to this idea, the Japanese navy tried it once before abandoning it, maybe rightly, and might make an interesting episode. Has any navy reconsidered the concept since then?
“Look, MN, you have been dithering around making Bearn into an aircraft carrier for years. Crap or get off the pot.”
“ … can we do both?”
You say nobody learns from the French. Well the Russian Admiral Flota Sovetskogo Soyuza Kuznetsov appears to be aping her boiler output cleanliness.
I first read it as Mr Bean ;)
He would have built a carrier like the Bearn. And Austin Powers would have tried to turn it around in a narrow tunnel.
Always liked the Bearn. A perfect mix of laissez-faire, money pinching and the ocassional Wibault fighter slamming too hard on the deck.
Well, there goes my position on Bearn. First Dr Clarke tears her a new one, then Drach does likewise. I can no longer live under the delusions of her capabilities. 😅
So happy I voted for this one, it’s been a punch line on this channel for ages and it was fun to hear her story. Bearn still managed to be more of an aircraft carrier than Graf Zeppelin-cry some more, Wehraboos!
If the only thing you knew about RN an MN naval aviation was their pre-war carrier development it would be hard predict that the French would become better at carrier based aviation than the Royal Navy.
Every time I hear someone say Bearn, I hear Dr. Clarke's voice saying it while sounding exasperated.
The Floating Baguette
Im dead
They left the 6" casements? Where they planning to deploy her in line of battle like HMS Formidable almost did in Cape Matapan?
FINALLY