The French Battleship Dunkerque was ordered in October of 1932 and her keel laid in Brest on 24 December 1932. She was launched on 2 October 1935 and commissioned 1 May 1937. Dunkerque was the result of the French Navy struggle to find an acceptable design to fill the 70,000 tons yet available to France in accordance to the Washington Treaty. The initial search in 1925 was focused on a design for a 17,500 ton heavy cruiser to counter the Italian Trento-Class Heavy Cruisers and thus enable France to secure its Mediterranean shipping lanes. All proposals were rejected and in 1929, the next contender to emerge was a 23,690 ton Protected Cruiser with a silhouette very similar to Dunkerque armed with 305mm guns, armored to withstand 8”guns and a speed of 29 knots.
In that same year, the French became aware of Germany’s Deutschland-Class Heavy Cruiser and French naval architects shifted their focus to designs to counter this new threat. First proposed with a 305mm main battery, the French Parliament rejected the plain only to finally accept the 330mm design that became the Dunkerque.
Dunkerque’s primary battery was eight 330mm guns arranged in two superfiring quadruple turrets forward. Her 130mm secondary armament was nine guns in three quadruple turrets aft with two dual wing turrets amidships. As commissioned in 1937 her planned AA battery was unavailable and she was sent to sea with four 37mm model 1925 single 37mm guns supplemented by four 13.2mm machine guns. Her unusual main battery distribution was an attempt to reduce the overall weight of the ship by shortening the armored citadel by placing the main battery and their commensurate armor closely together rather than at opposite end so the ship. This was to prove faulty as seen at Mers-el-Kébir when Dunkerque was moored facing the land and her main guns unable to bring the British ships to bear.
We begin this saga with Dunkerque as she appeared as she was commissioned in 1937:
![[ img ]](http://www.majhost.com/gallery/Latouche/Ships/Dunkerque/1937/france_bb_dunkerque-class_dunkerque_1937_4.png)
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