French Battleship Jean Bart (1911)

Along with her three sisters Courbet, France, and Paris, Jean Bart was a Courbet-class dreadnought battleship built for the French Navy. Laid down on 15 November 1910 and launched on 22 September 1911, she was commissioned into the navy on 19 November 1913.

During the First World War, Jean Bart participated in the sinking of the Austro-Hungarian protected cruiser Zenta on 16 August 1914. In December that year, she was torpedoes by an Austro-Hungarian submarine and required three months of repairs. The remainder of the war was spent with the Otranto barrage, blockading the Austro-Hungarian fleet in the Adriatic Sea.

Although Jean Bart received two partial modernisations in the 1920s by the early 1930s her condition had deteriorated too much for a further refit. She was therefore disarmed and hulked as an accommodation ship. On 1 January 1937 she was renamed Ocean, freeing the name for the Richelieu class battleship Jean Bart under construction.

On 27 November 1942, she was captured intact when the Germans occupied Southern France. Ocean was not scuttled as was the rest of the French fleet, as she was providing accommodation to navy cadets. The ship was then used for testing shaped charges by the Germans, before she was sunk by Allied air attack in 1944. Post-war she was raised and scrapped.