French battleship Justice

Justice was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the Liberté class built by the French Navy. She had three sister ships: Liberté, Vérité, and Démocratie. Justice was laid down in April 1903, launched in October 1904, and completed in February 1908, over a year after the revolutionary British battleship HMS Dreadnought (1906) made ships like Justice obsolete. She was armed with a main battery of four 305 mm guns, compared to the ten guns of the same caliber mounted on Dreadnought.

After her commissioning, Justice was assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet. In September 1909, she traveled to the United States for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, she was assigned to the 2nd Division of the 2nd Squadron of the Mediterranean Fleet. She covered troop convoys from North Africa to France in the first days of the war, and spent the rest based at Corfu and Mudros without seeing any action. After the war ended, she participated in the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, though a mutiny in the French fleet in April 1919 led to the fleet's withdrawal. Justice was sold for scrapping in 1922.

Design


Justice was laid down at the La Seyne shipyard in Toulon in April 1903, launched on 27 October 1904, and completed in February 1908, over a year after the revolutionary British battleship HMS Dreadnought (1906), which rendered the pre-dreadnoughts like Justice outdated before they were completed. The ship was 133.81 m long between perpendiculars and had a beam of 24.26 m and a full-load draft of 8.41 m. She displaced up to 14860 MT at full load. Justice had a crew of between 739 and 769 officers and enlisted men. The ship was powered by three vertical triple expansion engines with twenty-four Niclausse boilers. They were rated at 18500 ihp and provided a top speed of 19 kn. Coal storage amounted to 1800 MT.

Justice's main battery consisted of four Canon de 305 mm Modèle 1893/96 guns mounted in two twin gun turrets, one forward and one aft. The secondary battery consisted of ten Canon de 194 mm Modèle 1902 guns; six were mounted in single turrets, and four in casemates in the hull. She also carried thirteen 9-pounder guns and ten 3-pounders. The ship was also armed with two 450 mm torpedo tubes submerged in the hull. The ship's main belt was 280 mm thick and the main battery was protected by up to 350 mm of armor. The conning tower had 305 mm thick sides.

Service history
In September 1909, Justice, Liberté, and Vérité visited the United States for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. The three battleships, commanded by Admiral Jules le Pord, were the first foreign contingent to arrive. The ships departed from Brest and arrived New York seven days later, having run at an average of 16 kn; the performance of the ships' propulsion systems was regarded as satisfactory by contemporary naval experts, including the United States Naval Institute. In early 1911, the French Navy conducted experiments with wireless telegraphy, and used Vérité and Justice for the tests. The wireless transmitters could pick up messages as far as 72 mi away. On 11 October 1911, an accidental fire aboard Justice threatened to destroy the ship in a way similar to the explosion that destroyed her sister ship Liberté the month before. The fire was believed to have been started by a short circuit in the electrical system near the forward magazines. The fire nearly reached the ammunition in the magazines when the ship's commander ordered the magazines to be flooded, averting a catastrophic explosion. This occurred just days after the battleship Suffren had to flood her magazines to put out another accidental fire. Later that year, the ship was featured in the film A Day on the French battleship "Justice".

At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Justice was assigned to the 1st Division of the 2nd Squadron in the Mediterranean, along with Démocratie. The French fleet was initially used to cover the movement of French troops—the XIX Corps—from Algeria to metropolitan France. As a result, the fleet was far out of position to catch the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben. For the majority of the war, the French used their main fleet to keep the Austro-Hungarian fleet bottled up in the Adriatic Sea. In 1914 she participated in the Battle of Antivari, where the battle line caught the Austro-Hungarian cruiser SMS Zenta by surprise and sank her. The French battleships then bombarded Austrian fortifications at Cattaro in an attempt to draw out the Austro-Hungarian fleet, which refused to take the bait.

The French operations in the area were hampered by a lack of a suitable base close to the mouth of the Adriatic; the British had given the French free access to Malta, but it was hundreds of miles away. The Austrians also possessed several submarines, one of which torpedoed the dreadnought Jean Bart in December 1914. The threat from underwater weapons greatly limited French naval activities in the Adriatic. As the war progressed, the French eventually settled on the Greek island of Corfu as their primary naval base in the area. Later in the war, Justice was sent to Mudros along with her sister ships.

In 1919, after the end of the war, Justice participated in the French naval intervention in the Russian Civil War in the Black Sea, and was based in Sevastopol. On 19 April, a mutiny gripped the French fleet, starting on the battleship France, the squadron flagship. At one point during the mutiny, the crew of Justice briefly flew the red flag, though they remained relatively calm. The situation worsened after a group of Greek soldiers fired into a crowd of demonstrators ashore; one French sailor was killed and another five were injured. Justice's crew was enraged, and began discussing opening fire on the Greek battleship Kilkis, moored nearby. Justice's captain ordered his ship's guns disabled by removing their breech blocks to prevent an attack. The situation was eventually defused by returning the French squadron back to France, one of the mutineers' primary demands. Ultimately, Justice was stricken from the naval register in 1922 and sold for scrap.